Blues Books For Beginners

The first volume on your blues bookshelf should be Blues For Dummies. Written by musicians for the rest of us, the author's credentials are strong: Lonnie Brooks is a legendary blues guitarist, his son Wayne is a musician and songwriter, and Cub Koda is a musician, record collector and a contributing editor for the All Music Guide to the Blues. Blues For Dummies provides the reader with a solid background in the blues, including an overview of blues history, artist profiles, recommended albums, and even how to make a blues record. Oh yeah, to get you started, the book also includes a CD compiled by the authors that includes a bunch of great tunes from folks like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter and others.

Robert Santelli is a veteran freelance writer and the author of several music-related books, and is the Director of Education at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The Best of the Blues lists the "101 essential albums" of the blues genre, with each entry including a lengthy album review, information on the musicians that played on the album, a picture of the front cover, and each album's tracklist. Enormously entertaining and informative, The Best of the Blues provides any fan of the music with a shopping list of CDs to help create your personal library of the blues. Also worth mentioning: Santelli's The Big Book of the Blues, which offers biographical information on virtually every blues musician of note.

A companion book to the acclaimed series produced by Scorsese for PBS, this lush collection of articles, reviews, interviews and observations on the blues is illustrated by dozens of rare and obscure color and B&W photos. Like the Scorsese docu-drama, the book is divided into seven sections (one for each of the films that made up the TV series), and features the writing of some of the best music journalists and biographers in the world. Weighing in at an impressive two pounds and 288 pages, the book is beautifully-crafted, and attractively priced in both hardback and paperback editions. Out-of-print, but the book is easy and inexpensive to find from online retailers.

More than a mere scholarly study of the Delta blues, music journalist Robert Palmer (not to be confused with the British musician) traveled to the Mississippi Delta to get a feel for, and stories from, the people that lived and created the blues. Deep Blues is a fascinating read for new and old blues fans alike, Palmer telling the story of the blues through the lives of artists like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker and others. The book spawned a documentary film, but the primary importance of Deep Blues is Palmer's ability to put the blues in context of modern society, creating an aura of interest and excitement in the music for the newcomer.

Part of the All Music Guide book series, this volume on the blues is indispensible for any music lover that is serious about the blues. This hefty, heavy 700+ page tome features biographical profiles of over 1,000 blues artists along with brief reviews of almost 9,000 blues albums. Throw in historical essays on blues history and the evolution of styles, "top" lists offering the best artists and albums of various blues styles, and writing by some of the biggest names in music journalism, and you have the essential reference book for the entirety of the blues genre.