The best books about the Blues set in Mississippi, Chicago, Florida, and beyond

I’ve been assigning The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing in Southern Studies classes at Ole Miss for the past twenty years; the incarcerated students in my blues lit class at Parchman said this was their favorite book. 

Honeyboy, born in 1915, grew up in the bad old Mississippi Delta, back when cottonfield sharecropping, lynching, and prison farms were the givens. The blues were his way out. He learned his trade, rambled widely, took his pleasures where he found them.

“I had three ways of making it,” he writes. “Women, my guitar, and the dice.” He knew all the great bluesmen, and gigged with most of them: Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Little Walter. An unforgettable Delta blues autobiography.

Wald is a contrarian’s contrarian; this revisionist study--lucid, sensible, self-assured--demolishes not just the soul-selling-at-the-crossroads mythology embraced by fans of Robert Johnson, but a series of romantic misconceptions about blues music in general and Mississippi blues in particular.

He reminds us, for example, that classic blueswomen like Ma Raney and Bessie Smith were the first stars of the blues; that Johnson was, by contrast, virtually unknown on a national level during his own lifetime; and that Johnson, celebrated by his mythologizers as a devil-haunted innovator, was actually a savvy, record-copying consolidator of a broad range of contemporary blues styles.

He was also a “polka hound” and human jukebox, according to Wald, a jack-of-all-trades who played Gene Autry songs and other pop tunes for the pleasure of his audiences, black and white.

I remember reading Wilson’s play for the first time as a grad student, not long after I’d been a street musician in Harlem working with a brilliant, irascible old bluesman from Mississippi, and thinking “I know these guys.”

Wilson, the greatest American blues playwright (and one of the greatest American dramatists period), has an uncanny ear for the jibing, jiving, wisdom-declaiming back-and-forth that fills the conversational space between four southern-born musicians who find themselves in a Chicago recording studio one day in 1927, getting ready to back up their boss, Ma Rainey.

Toledo, elder and griot, the keeper of ancestral wisdom, butts heads with Levee, the hotheaded young innovator who bears, and brandishes, deep wounds inflicted by white southern violence. The play’s denouement is hurtful, shattering, unforgettable.  

The first American writer to describe southern juke joints from the inside (in Mules and Men), Hurston took everything she’d learned about 1920s blues culture in Polk County, Florida, and spun it into a tale of self-empowering female adventurism. 

Spunky black heroine Janie Starks works her way through a couple of dud husbands before falling for the loveable but maddeningly unpredictable bluesman Tea Cake, who is a decade younger.

He “stings” her thrillingly, like Memphis Minnie’s lover in “Bumble Bee Blues” (“You stung me this morning...I been restless all day long”), and teaches her to fish and shoot, but he also slaps her around.

Is he a feminist heartthrob or feminist nightmare? Janie—one tough blueswoman, it turns out—finally solves the problem, rifle in hand.

A precise, thoughtful, and unromantic blues scholar, Barry Lee Pearson was also a friend of, and occasional booking agent for, DC-area acoustic blues legends like John Jackson and Cephas & Wiggins.

Jook Right On, which I was delighted to blurb and use in my own teaching, offers a series of compact autobiographical testimonies—“blues stories”—on a wide range of topics from a wide range of blues people. 

“Wordsmiths by trade,” Pearson writes in his brilliantly incisive introduction, “these storytellers bring to their tales qualities also found in blues musical performance and philosophical perspectives characteristic of the blues tradition such as improvisation, ironic humor, ambivalence, and a life-affirming sense of hope in the face of adversity.”

Constitutionally immune to cliches, Pearson brings you closer to the blues musician’s perspective than any writer I know.