Beale Black & Blue: Life and Music on Black America's Main Street

by Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall

Book Overview

W. C. Handy, Furry Lewis, Booker White, Lillie May Glover, Roosevelt Sykes, Arthur Crudup, B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Muddy Waters -- these and other musicians, singers, and songwriters, including the young Elvis Presley, eventually went to Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, to learn, improve, and practice their art. "To Handy and untold other blacks, Beale became as much a symbol of escape from black despair as Harriet Tubman's underground...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807118869
• ISBN13: 9780807118863
• Release Date: September 1993
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A good little book

Anyone interested in the history of the Blues will find this book a treasure. The richest part of the book is the series of interviews they did with bluesmen like Big Joe Williams, BB King, Bobby Blue Bland, Sam Chatmon, John Estes, and Furry Lewis. They give a good picture of how these men came to the Blues, how they struggled to survive, and how they saw both the days when the blues was current and their rediscovery by folk-music developed blues audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. There is much here about the political relationships between Memphis politicians and the Black community during the Jim Crow era as well as much about the play of different social forces in the Black community. This is a useful book.