Book DescriptionMusicians and music scholars rightly focus on the sounds of the blues and the colorful life stories of blues performers Equally important and, until now, inadequately studied are blues lyrics and the lyrics of other types of African American popular music The collection of international contributors to this volume seeks to explore огцфп this aspect of the blues Essayists in Nobody Knows Where the Blues Comes From delve deep into the lyrics of a broad array of songs and establish the significance of African American popular song as a neglected form of oral history "High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood," by David Evans, is the definitive study of songs about one of the greatest natural disasters in the history of the United States In "Death by Fire: African American Popular Music on the Natchez Rhythm Club Fire," Luigi Monge analyzes a continuum of songs about another, this time exclusively, African American tragedy "Lookin for theBully: an Enquiry into a Song and its Story," by Paul Oliver traces the origins and the many avatars of the Bully song In "That Dry Creek Eaton Clan: a North Mississippi Murder Ballad of the 1930s," Tom Freeland and Chris Smith study a little-known ballad recorded in 1939 by John Lomax from a black convict at Parchman prison farm "Coolidges Blues: African American Blues from the Roaring Twenties" is Guido van Rijns survey of blues that contrasted with the general buoyancy of that decade Robert Springers "On the Electronic Trail of Blues Formulas" presents a number of conclusions about the spread of patterns in blues narratives and storylines and regional riffs on these repetitions In "West Indies Blues," John Cowley turns his attention to the corpus of West Indian songs produced on the American mainland from the 1920s to the 1950s Finally, in "Ethel Waters: Long, Lean, Lanky Mama," Randall Cherry reappraises the early career of this often maligned blues and vaudeville singer.  С помощью2005 г 303 стр ISBN 1578067979.