The blues The authentic narrative of my music and culture

Musician and actor King theorizes about the birth of the blues and recounts his illustrious career. In the first half of the book, the Black, Louisiana-born author contends that Creole people in 1890s New Orleans created blues music. Ignoring reports of other Southern blues musicians around 1900 and downplaying the cultural and class rift between French-speaking, educated Creole craftsmen and lower-class Black Americans in New Orleans, King identifies Jelly Roll Morton as the likely father of the blues and names cornetists Buddy Bolden and King Oliver and guitarists Lead Belly and Lonnie Johnson as blues trailblazers. King also demonstrates how racist folklorists and collectors misleadingly conflated blues with illiterate, rural Black guitarists. The second half of his book is more compelling; King chronicles his first gigs at the juke joint owned by his father (the blues musician Tabby Thomas), where racist white patrons often demanded that King play songs by white artists who had become the face of the blues. He also details his innovative blues/hip-hop album 21st Century Blues…from da 'Hood (1994), his portrayal of acoustic blues legend Tommy Johnson in the blockbuster film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and his work on the 2004 Ray Charles biopic. VERDICT Though he needlessly rambles through New Orleans history to mistakenly cast Creole people as the sole originators of the blues, King expertly illustrates how racist misconceptions and white appropriation of the blues shaped and sometimes stymied his career.--David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

A contemporary blues artist offers a provocative recasting of the standard narratives. Grammy Award--winning musician King argues that nearly everything you know about the blues is wrong: The music does not trace its origins to Africa, did not develop from slave songs, and did not then move to the cities and the North. On the contrary, writes the author, the blues has been sophisticated city music from the start, with New Orleans as its cradle. King was born into this blues narrative in 1962. His father owned a legendary bayou juke joint, and he had his son playing guitar with him by the time he was 7. As the music spread from the city through the South via recordings and radio, it morphed from full-band arrangements to the more affordable and accessible solo acoustic guitar. White carpetbaggers and the "Blues Mafia" have ever since prized the rawer sounds of the blues as more authentic, reinforcing a racial bias of primitivism. As a Black blues artist who initially earned favor from these White gatekeepers--and then experienced resistance in his attempts to fuse the blues and hip-hop--King has a legitimate ax to grind, and he grinds it sharply. Much of the material about the music's development concerns what others call jazz, which the author dismisses as a White term, along with Dixieland and bebop. Since blues-based rock had its boom in the 1960s, the racial dynamic has become even more twisted. The blues audience has continued to trend White, and many popular artists are White as well even as Black culture moved past the blues as anachronism. King received a career boost as a period-piece bluesman in O, Brother Where Art Thou? while on his own recordings, he notably advances the form with his hip-hop fusion. "My influence was everywhere," he writes, suggesting he has inspired everyone from Kanye West, to Timbaland, to the White Stripes. A passionate narrative that will attract attention, debate, and ruffled feathers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.