Deep Blues

The story of American music is laid out in a fascinating series of stories by musicologist and former New York Times music critic Robert Palmer. Palmer used interviews with Muddy Waters and many other bluesmen to explain how this music traveled from Africa to the American South and then up to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities.

It is an in-depth look at the stories and myths of the South and the people who made their escape from the brutal cotton fields and racial segregation of the times. This book is a must for anyone wanting to know the beginnings… show more.

This masterful work helped me put context around music and musicians I already loved by fusing scholarly study and excellent biographical portraits of blues musicians, enlivened by vivid writing and a deep empathy for his subject matter. This is my own goal in everything I write, and this book has remained a touchstone throughout my career.

I went out of my way to hire Bob Palmer when I was Guitar World's managing editor, and getting to work with him remains a career highlight. I am not alone in my ardor for this book; it’s no coincidence that it appears on… show more.

The blues grabbed me somewhere between getting my first guitar and Dad’s scratchy copy of B.B. King’s Live at Cook County Jail.

I simply had to learn more about this wonderful, mysterious music! Deep Blues delivered and it’s remained important to me since first encountering it at the local library. Palmer placed the blues of Muddy Waters in context for me. I learned blues was “a continuation of deep and tenacious African traditions and a creative response to a brutal, desperate situation.”

Tracing the music’s roots in African griot culture, Palmer documents its wider, international cultural connotations in the 20th… show more.

This book has nothing to do with guitar playing or music in any technical sense, but it has everything to do with why we play and listen to blues. The cradle of blues was in the early 20th-century Mississippi Delta, where a collection of brilliant African-American musicians developed a distinctive style. They took it north, notably to Chicago, plugged in, and created the template for electric guitar-driven popular music that went on to sweep the world. 

Deep Blues is the story of how this transition took place. Palmer is a gifted writer who brings the personalities and the social environment… show more.

I had dipped dutifully into plenty of worthwhile books by Paul Oliver and Sam Charters, but it was only on picking this up in 1982 that I realised reading about music could be as rewarding as listening to it. Palmer was a musician who had played with Elvin Jones, and a journalist for both Rolling Stone and the New York Times. He was born in Arkansas. So when he went in search of the story of the blues in the South and in Chicago, he understood what he was hearing, understood what people were telling him, understood how all the… show more.