Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (LSU Press Paperback Original) Review

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Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (LSU Press Paperback Original) ReviewBlue Smoke is such an entertaining read that it would be easy to overlook the scholarship behind it. In using Broonzy's career to tell a larger story about African American lives Roger House refrains from padding the book with information designed to show off his research. Instead he writes as economically as Broonzy sang. I love everything about Blue Smoke. The layout is lovely, the photographs well chosen, the discography a welcome addition and the content as enjoyable as it was informative. Starting with Broonzy's parents and interspersing details about African American life into the Broonzy family story, House shines a light on economic opportunities, the migration, racism in blues music and (of course) music as a method of detailing social conditions. Using Broonzy's recordings to tell the story of so many could easily have come off as contrived or forced, but Roger House makes it seem the most logical and straightforward way to address the subject. Working with Broonzy's dual careers (the white expectation for blues music required it's own type of minstrel show while the black audiences appreciated Broonzy's more contemporary work) the author combines all into something greater than I expected. While Blue Smoke does address the story of lives in America under Jim Crow, it is also an excellent biography of the artist. I gained a greater appreciation for Broonzy's work in Europe as well as becoming familiar with work I'd overlooked in his discography. A great book and one I absolutely recommend.Blue Smoke: The Recorded Journey of Big Bill Broonzy (LSU Press Paperback Original) OverviewA contemporary of blues greats Blind Blake, Tampa Red, and Papa Charlie Jackson, Chicago blues artist William "Big Bill" Broonzy influenced an array of postwar musicians, including Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim, and J. B. Lenoir. In Blue Smoke, Roger House tells the extraordinary story of "Big Bill," a working-class bluesman whose circumstances offer a window into the dramatic social transformations faced by African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. One in a family of twenty-one children and reared by sharecropper parents in Mississippi, Broonzy seemed destined to stay on the land. He moved to Arkansas to work as a sharecropper, preacher, and fiddle player, but the army drafted him during World War I. After his service abroad, Broonzy, like thousands of other black soldiers, returned to the racism and bleak economic prospects of the Jim Crow South and chose to move North to seek new opportunities. After learning to play the guitar, he performed at neighborhood parties in Chicago and in 1927 attracted the attention of Paramount Records, which released his first single, "House Rent Stomp," backed by "Big Bill's Blues." Over the following decades, Broonzy toured the United States and Europe. He released dozens of records but was never quite successful enough to give up working as a manual laborer. Many of his songs reflect this experience as a blue-collar worker, articulating the struggles, determination, and optimism of the urban black working class. Before his death in 1958, Broonzy finally achieved crossover success as a key player in the folk revival movement led by Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax, and as a blues ambassador to British musicians such as Lonnie Donegan and Eric Clapton. Weaving Broonzy's recordings, writings, and interviews into a compelling narrative of his life, Blue Smoke offers a comprehensive portrait of an artist recognized today as one of the most prolific and influential working-class blues musicians of the era.

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Earl Hooker, Blues Master (American Made Music) Review

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Earl Hooker, Blues Master (American Made Music) ReviewEarl Hooker was one of the most influential guitarists that ever lived; not just in the blues, but in many different musical styles. His mastery of slide guitar and the wah-wah pedal (many times combining BOTH, thus creating a truly hair-raising sound) are legendary. But sadly, Earl Hooker is all but obscure now, owing to his early death (he died in 1970 at age 39 from tuberculosis), his uneven recording career (he only made 3 "true" albums; he recorded many obscure 45 rpm sides and guest appearances), and even his famous name association (he is half-cousin to the late boogie king John Lee Hooker) didn't seem to help him achieve real stardom; one he so greatly deserved!
As all of the previous reviewers have pointed out, this is an extensively researched book, chock-full of interviews with many of the legends Hooker played with in his seemingly short career (Pinetop Perkins, Big Moose Walker, A.C. Reed, B.B. King), each one giving detailed accounts of Hooker's somewhat eccentric behavior, his lifelong battle with TB, but most of all and importantly, his undeniable guitar prowess. Unfortunately, by the time Hooker began to get noticed for his amazing natural talent and hard work, TB overtook him, causing his untimely death.
This is an excellent book, both for true Earl Hooker fans, and new ones alike. He had so much more to give the world of music, and had he lived, he most certainly would've attained the same success and legendary status as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy and Albert King, just to name a few. Essential reading!Earl Hooker, Blues Master (American Made Music) OverviewThe life and early death of a South Side guitar genius, the greatest unheralded Chicago blues-maker
Jimi Hendrix called Earl Hooker "the master of the wah-wah pedal." Buddy Guy slept with one of Hooker's slides beneath his pillow hoping to tap some of the elder bluesman's power. And B. B. King has said repeatedly that, for his money, Hooker was the best guitar player he ever met.
Tragically, Earl Hooker died of tuberculosis in 1970 when he was on the verge of international success just as the Blues Revival of the late sixties and early seventies was reaching full volume.
Second cousin to now-famous bluesman John Lee Hooker, Earl Hooker was born in Mississippi in 1929, and reared in black South Side Chicago where his parents settled in 1930. From the late 1940s on, he was recognized as the most creative electric blues guitarist of his generation. He was a "musician's musician," defining the art of blues slide guitar and playing in sessions and shows with blues greats Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, and B. B. King.
A favorite of black club and neighborhood bar audiences in the Midwest, and a seasoned entertainer in the rural states of the Deep South, Hooker spent over twenty-five years of his short existence burning up U.S. highways, making brilliant appearances wherever he played.
Until the last year of his life, Hooker had only a few singles on obscure labels to show for all the hard work. The situation changed in his last few months when his following expanded dramatically. Droves of young whites were seeking American blues tunes and causing a blues album boom. When he died, his star's rise was extinguished. Known primarily as a guitarist rather than a vocalist, Hooker did not leave a songbook for his biographer to mine. Only his peers remained to praise his talent and pass on his legend.
"Earl Hooker's life may tell us a lot about the blues," biographer Sebastian Danchin says, "but it also tells us a great deal about his milieu. This book documents the culture of the ghetto through the example of a central character, someone who is to be regarded as a catalyst of the characteristic traits of his community."
Like the tales of so many other unheralded talents among bluesmen, Earl Hooker, Blues Master, Hooker's life story, has all the elements of a great blues song -- late nights, long roads, poverty, trouble, and a soul-felt pining for what could have been.
Sebastian Danchin is a freelance writer and record producer. He also creates programs for France's leading radio network, Radio-France, and is the blues editor for France's leading jazz magazine, Jazzman. His previous books, among others, include Les Dieux du Blues (Paris: Editions Atlas, 1995) and Blues Boy: The Life and Music of B. B. King (University Press of Mississippi, 1998).

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Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records Review

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Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records ReviewThis is the riveting story of Chess Records, the home of Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, Etta James and other legendary blues artists. It the story of triumph. The story of a record label that took a genuine American art form, the blues, from the back porches and dusty streets and into the American mainstream. It is the amazing story of two Jewish brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, who came into the USA as immigrants in 1928 and proceeded to build a record company that would influence the face of music for the next 72 years and beyond.
Cohodas does an admirable job in piecing together all of the events which lead the Chess brothers from Poland to the shores of America, and into Chicago, where they began their new life working in their father's junkyard. The Chess brothers would later operate a liquor store deep in the heart of the windy city's black community, where they were exposed to rough and tumble blues via a juke box in the store. The brothers went on to open the Macomba Lounge on Chicago's South Side, which would become a favorite after-hours spot for music lovers and red hot blues musicians.

It wasn't long before the brothers focused their acute business senses on the recording industry. Leonard hooked up with a fledgling record company called Aristocrat, and soon he met up and coming guitar player from Mississippi named McKinley Morganfield, who would come to be known the world over by his nickname, Muddy Waters.
The Chess brothers bought out Aristocrat in 1949, and changed the name to Chess Records. The company produced successful recordings by The Moonglows, Ramsey Lewis and even early rock and rollers like Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. Later, the label would release LP's by comedians as diverse as Moms Mabley and Bob Hope.
This is the story of two brothers who were driven to succeed. Two men who never played a musical instrument, and knew absolutely nothing about the music industry or the blues, but possessed an innate inner drive and a real ability to make money.
For any fan of the blues, or anyone wishing to gain some real background on the very roots of the rock and roll family tree, Spinning Blues into Gold is a must read. Nadine Cohodas (who also authored The Band Played Dixie: Race and Liberal Conscience at Ole Miss and Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change has turned in an excellent history of a legendary record label, and a musical reference book of considerable magnitude.
-Michael B. Smith, gritz.netSpinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records Overview

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