"sounds So Good to Me": The Bluesman's Story

by Barry Lee Pearson

Book Overview

The roots of much American music lie in the intensely personal art form of the blues. What bluesmen from W.C. Handy to B.B. King have told us about their lives has shaped America's perception of the blues. These life stories provide central insights into blues music and stand as a fascinating form of narrative in their own right.

Barry Lee Pearson has conducted dozens of field interviews and collected over a hundred published autobiographies...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812211715
• ISBN13: 9780812211719
• Release Date: May 1984
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Blues Bios

Barry Lee Pearson conducted numerous interviews with blues musicians when writing this book. The book has interesting information about both the relatively well known as well as fairly obscure musicians to provide a good background on typical biographies of blues players. The stories are fascinating, and Pearson presents the texts in the raconteurs' own words as much as possible. The stories show typical themes and characteristic patterns in the players' lives, thereby providing useful ways for understanding the historical and social contexts for the music. The book provides a great base for learning about the blues, and its value as a historical document will only increase over time as we lose more of the blues musicians' whose lives are sympathetically represented in this work. The gaps in this type of research are increasingly being filled by more biographies of women in the blues and more famous players, but this book is remains an important resource for thinking about music in relation to life history.

Like a time machine

The author captures frames of blues history by eliciting streams of consciousness from the likes of Honeyboy Edwards, guys who were old the day they were born and whose stories read like the Dead Sea scrolls. This book offers a precious opportunity to glimpse the genesis of legend.