
Cash
Cash tells it in his own voice: picking cotton in Dyess, Arkansas, the brother a saw killed at fifteen, the amphetamine decades, and the night he crawled into Nickajack Cave to die.

Cash tells it in his own voice: picking cotton in Dyess, Arkansas, the brother a saw killed at fifteen, the amphetamine decades, and the night he crawled into Nickajack Cave to die.

No history of hip hop is better. Chang begins with landlords burning the Bronx, arrives at Kool Herc's turntables, and reads Public Enemy and the Los Angeles riots as one generation's politics.

Palmer traces the blues from Mississippi Delta plantations through Memphis to Chicago's South Side, and he hears exactly what Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters were doing on the strings.

Baraka wrote the first full-length history of blues and jazz by a Black American, hearing in the move from work song to blues to bebop the record of what happened to a people.