Blues People
1963 · 244 pages
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.
★ 6.4
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Deep Blues
1981 · 310 pages
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.
★ 6.1
Can't Stop Won't Stop
2005 · 546 pages
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.
★ 4.7
Cash
The Autobiography
1997 · 320 pages
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.
★ 4.6