Volume 41, Number 14 · August 11, 1994
The Genius of Blues
By Luc Sante
Nothing But the Blues: The Music and the Musicians
edited by Lawrence Cohn
Abbeville Press, 432 pp., $45.00
The Land Where the Blues Began
by Alan Lomax
Pantheon, 539 pp., $15.00 (paper)
King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton
by Stephen Calt, by Gayle Wardlow
Rock Chapel Press, 341 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Searching for Robert Johnson
by Peter Guralnick
Dutton, 83 pp., $15.00
Love in Vain:A Vision of Robert Johnson
by Alan Greenberg
Da Capo, 252 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The blues, a form of music that seems as ancient as the emotions it conveys, is actually less than a hundred years old. Sometime in the mists of the late 1890s, somewhere in the South, some unknown singer (or singers) first settled on the now-familiar three-line verse, with its AAB rhyme scheme and its line length of five stressed syllables, e.g.:
Review, 7736 words
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