to its page at Amazon.com.
 | The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life and Times of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards by David Honeyboy Edwards. (Hardcover about $17) I read this book slowly, relishing every page. When I read the part about how Honeyboy's family stole the white folks' hogs in order to eat, I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair. Not about them stealing the hogs. How they stole the hogs. |
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Future historians will bless both Honeyboy Edwards for telling this story and the team of Janis Martinson and Robert Frank for writing it down. Mark my words: it will become a classic. Its value, at least to me, lies in the picture it paints of the everyday life of Delta black folks in the 40s and 50s and of how and why they interacted with the white culture, the culture with power. Honeyboy pulls no punches in this book. He made no effort to glamorize his life, acknowledging the bad along with the good. He knew his own warts and did not mind showing them. I took this book with me on an 8-day excursion to Holmes County Mississippi. One night in a juke joint in Goodman, a fine black fellow named Charlie Morris, the juke joint's owner, regaled me with Honeyboy-like tales of a white man named Tillman Branch. Charlie called him "the baddest white man in Mississippi." The very next morning I was drinking coffee at my campsite and very much enjoying reading Honeyboy's chapter on black/white sexual relations and titled "Daddy, you can be my lemon squeezer!" There on page 122 and to my amazement I read:
In the photo on the right, you see Rufus Sample, 43, of Goodman. The camera points south. Rufus is standing in the ruins of Tillman Branch's "whiskey store," actually named The Long Branch. In the right background you can see Highway 51. Rufus owns the Goodman Package Store, located directly across the highway at 6853 Highway 51. It stands on the spot where Tillman Branch parked the house trailer that provided a home for his favorite black mistress and several other black mistresses. You can't blame Honeyboy for believing that Tillman Branch was married to his favorite black mistress. They cohorted and cohabitated openly. Tillman Branch, however, was married to a white woman–who, by the way, could not stand her husband's cross-cultural extramarital affair. She twice kidnaped the black woman and sent her to Detroit. Tillman Branch twice found her and returned her to the house trailer in Goodman. Heck of a story, huh? It just goes to show that one good story leads to another one. Honeyboy's book is full of them. Read it!
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 Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood Of 1927 And How It Changed America by John M. Barry (With bibliography, chapter notes and index.)(Paperback about $12) (Hardback about $19) John Barry deserves the Pulitzer for this near-masterpiece. From the first line it reads like a mystery novel, a thriller. Although you know the outcome–that damned levee is gonna break–you'll find yourself lost in the story. And it's not just a story of greed and pompous engineers and rain. It's also the story of the people who did the work. You'll learn about black men forced to work by white men with guns. You'll visualize black men stacked like living sandbags on top of an over-flowing levee. You'll learn why Huey Long and lots of rural Louisianians hated New Orleans. You'll learn why the levee boards on both sides of the river lined the levees with armed guards and why those guards shot many people in small boats–they even shot at Herbert Hoover. I could go on and on, but you get the drift. This book is awesome. Barry does occasionally drag down the tale with boring details, especially in the Herbert Hoover section, but just skip over that part paragraph by paragraph until the tale catches you again. Steven Speilberg, you need to read this book. Imagine you're a black sharecropper living in a shotgun house. One morning you notice a sudden stillness outside, no sounds of birds, insects or animals. Nothing but a low hum, like the gentle rumble of a far-away train. You step out onto your porch. Imagine your horror when you see, from across a vast cotton field, a ten-feet-tall wall of water racing toward you.
"This is one of the best books on the evolution of modern music that I've ever read." That's a reader comment from this book's page at Amazon.com. 'Nuf said. Except that it's also full of what I call "juke joint stories."
Written by a friend of Stevie Ray's and with an introduction by B.B. King. This well-written book is a must for both Stevie Ray fans and music scholars. Got one of those on your Christmas list?
From Delta poverty to the King of the Blues, the entire story is here, and it's here in the King's own words.
 The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax. (Paperback about $13) (Hardback about $18)
The second of two books every blues fan should own. Read The Most Southern Place On Earth and then read The Land Where the Blues Began.For one thing, after reading Cobb's book you'll understand the mind-set of the white folks Alan Lomax encountered on his way to visit the black folks. You won't like that mind-set, but you'll better understand it. Cobb's book gives us a sweeping, overall picture of the Delta while Lomax's book gives us a focused look at one Delta cultural component--black bluespeople during a time of great cultural conflict and musical evolution.
You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads by James P. Spradley.
Originally published almost thirty years ago, this book is in its fourth or fifth printing. If you enjoyed my paper on homelessness, you'll enjoy this book. When I first read it, it was like a revelation to me. I wanted to become a cultural anthropologist, but I had little interest in over-studied Native Americans and, suffering from a heart condition, couldn't spend my time in South American or African jungles. Anthropologist James Spradley, I soon realized, spent his time on skid row studying the culture of homeless alcoholics. I looked around myself and found cultures worthy of study everywhere I looked. This book should be required reading in the Criminal Justice Department of every college in America. Before he or she pins on a badge for the first time, every rookie policeperson in America should pass a quiz on this book. Y'all, back in the late 60s when James Spradley gathered the data which became this book, it is almost unbelievable how much money the city of Seattle wasted taking harmless-to-no-one-but-themselves drunks through the city's criminal justice system. Here's my point: Nothing has changed but the drug of choice. It's straight cultural uniformitarianism: The cultural processes that happened in the late 60s are still happening in the late 90s. Quick class, where did the term skid row originate?
(Paperback about $13) This book is a must-read for cultural anthropologists, especially those dealing with Native-Americans. In my opinion, it should be a must-read for anyone dealing with Native-Americans. Written by a Lakota Sioux, it is a no-holds-barred look at white/Indian relations. Read the reviews at Amazon.com for a look at how some genteel readers reacted to Deloria's tell-it-like-it-is style. Originally published in 1969, Custer Died is still in print. That says a lot about its value.
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Deep Blues
Stevie Ray: Soul to Soul
Blues All Around Me : The Autobiography of B.B. King 