Fans pick 100 books like The Praxis System Guitar Compendium

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 and significance of American music.

When I started playing rock guitar in the ‘60s I had no idea that it was built on the innovations of African-American blues and Gospel artists. Sound of the City traces how those innovations evolved into the dominant strains of ‘50s rock & roll, including artists like Bill Haley, New Orleans dance music, Memphis rockabilly, Chicago R&B, and vocal (“doo-wop”) groups. 

Gillette creates an extraordinarily detailed and very readable account of the music and musicians as well as a booming, often corrupt, and highly segregated music industry within a turbulent American social landscape. If you want to learn about American music in all its variety, this book is a must. Like Deep Blues, read it within reach of a music streaming service.

Completing a trifecta with Deep Blues and Sound of the City, Honkers and Shouters is a definitive examination of the evolution of rural blues into urban rhythm-and-blues, the “big beat” that made African-American-based popular music into one of America’s greatest, and most lucrative, cultural exports. 

Shaw, a former music executive, focuses on how the music found its way from the artists to the ears and wallets of the consumers. It was a tough, exploitative business that provided a way for entrepreneurs excluded from more traditional careers by race or ethnicity to find their fortune, if often at the expense of the artists themselves. The rough saga of lives in the music business makes us appreciate the magical results even more. Listen while you read.

Who’s your daddy? If you play electric guitar, the answer is “T-Bone Walker.” If your response to that name is “Who?” then it’s time to meet your musical ancestor. Over a period of just two decades, T-Bone, along with the “Three Kings” (BB, Albert, and Freddie), Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and others created and developed the fundamental techniques and styles of electric guitar that underpin blues and rock to this day.

Obrecht is one of the best writers on the subject, compiling biographies, historical research, interviews, and conversations into a fascinating and very readable history of the musicians, the music, and the instrument.

When I started playing guitar, all I wanted to do was play the blues. Why a working-class Scottish boy would be so entranced by music so culturally and geographically remote is curious even to me but this book gave me a way in, a key to unlock the skills required to emulate the sounds of the blues greats I loved to hear. As an autodidact, clear explanations, technical advice, and background information were essential to my development and I still use this book with students to this day. 

We’re probably in a golden age of guitar making. The internet has made information on how to make guitars, once rare indeed, free to anyone who wants to learn. New builders need to see what the very top luthiers (makers of stringed instruments) are building. This book is full of beautiful pictures – more pictures than words – that show the highest levels of design and construction. When I want to dream about how my next guitar might look, I go here.

I was struck by the beautiful writing in this novel and the way the author, a woman, convincingly depicts male friendship. Augustus Lee Rivers, a black farmer in Arkansas, is happiest when playing his guitar; he has dreams of making it big in Chicago. David Duncan, an enthusiastic fan of Hummin’ Gusty’s music, comes from a wealthy white family. What can happen to a black man’s dreams in rural Arkansas in the 1950s? Trust me, you’ll keep reading to find out. 

I came across this book when I decided to focus my graduate study on the history of jazz and was reading everything I could find. It’s a short book, full of incredible vintage photographs, and it taught me so much about what swing is, how music and dance are joined at the hip. How it’s all rooted in the blues. And about the link between the “Saturday Night Function” of celebrating life with music and dance, followed a few hours later by the “Sunday Morning Function,” singing and celebrating God and community in church. The two are not all that far apart. Along with Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray was probably the first author to write about jazz with a real sense of lyricism and poetry. In this book, the writing itself carries the energy and exuberance of jazz.

I like it when writers take risks. Baldwin’s writing is frequently poetic, and while he was one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished essay writers, a successful novelist, and playwright, he is not remembered as a poet.

Jimmy’s Blues, published in 1983, a collection of nineteen poems, intrigues me. Why, I wonder, did the writer turn to poetry towards the end of his life? Was he aware of his impending death, which might explain why many of the poems were preoccupied with time? I am ambivalent about some of the poems on the page, but there are recordings of Baldwin reading his verse on the wonderful album A Lover’s Question, produced by the Belgian jazz singer David Linx.

Listening to Baldwin read from his poem, “Inventory/on being 52,” gives me chills. It’s spellbinding and is a reminder of how important Baldwin’s delivery is when it comes to his poems. 

This book was actually written before Baraka’s turn to Marxism, but as a social history of African American music, it is more than exemplary of a style of writing that takes the relationship of cultural form to its conditions seriously.

How Baraka moves between the music and the social conditions of Black musicians changed what I thought engaged musical analysis could be.