Mississippi Books

Lena Grove travels, on foot and with the aid of strangers, through the South in search of the father of her unborn child. Her journey introduces the reader to a variety of characters, including the child's father, a man who falls in love with Lena, and a biracial man named Christmas. Like Lena, all of these characters have stories to tell, and Faulkner interweaves a number of back stories and histories in the body of this book. One of his more accessable texts, Light in August is easy to get in to and builds up gradually to its complexities and confusing narrative traits. The result is a readable text that still manages to capture the character depth and human study that Faulkner does so well. While I prefer his more difficult/complex work, I definitely enjoyed this text and I highly recommend it.

For the first couple chapters, this book doesn't didn't feel like Faulkner. I was surprised by just how approachable and linear the text was. By the last few chapters, Faulkner is intertwining disparate narratives and times and using more streams of consciousnesses. The book definitely becomes more complex as it progresses. This gradual build up in style and complexity allows the reader to adapt to Faulkner's writing style and techniques, making the end of the book more rewarding because the reader has a better grasp of how to understand and interpret it. I highly recommend this text for readers new to Faulkner, and I think high schools would do well to use it in place to As I Lay Dying in schools.

That said, I enjoyed both As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury more than this book. Because both books delve immediately into the complex end of Faulkner's writing style, they reach their full potential from the onset rather than building in to it. Characters have more stories, more thoughts, more key events; information is tightly packed, emotional, and raw, less filtered through the writer's lens. I don't feel like I found as much depth or character interest in Light in August, with the possible exception of Christmas, whose life story receives the most attention and time. I have no doubt that this was a good book: characters are real and descriptions detailed, almost physical; Faulkner attacks his greater issues of humanity, personal history, and fault and action from multiple angles both narrative and character-based. The book is compelling, both depressing and uplifting and certainly enlightening. Nonetheless, I believe that Faulkner sacrificed some depth by limiting the writing style at the beginning of the book.

I do recommend this book, as well as any other book by Faulkner. He is an extraordinary author and conveys fascination with and insights on humanity: what makes a man, what insights him to action, and when, despite all justification, man is still at fault. This book is a good start for those new to Faulkner. While it may be disappointing, in terms of style and depth, to those that have already read him, Light in August nonetheless contains one of Faulkner's most complex and compelling character and is a rewarding read

Lena came from Alabama. She traveled to Mississippi looking for Lucas Burch. Beside Lena Grove, Gail Hightower, Joe Christmas, and Joe Brown are characters in the story. Hightower's wife had jumped or fallen from a hotel window and had died. He had been the Presbyterian Minister. Even the Ku Klux Klan had not managed to persuade Hightower to leave Jefferson.

Hightower and Byron Burch commence to discuss a fire at Mrs. Burden's house. Christmas and Brown lived in a structure in the back. Mrs. Burden had started praying over Joe Christmas. It was not her fault she had gotten too old.

Joe Christmas went from an orphanage to the home of the McEacherns, a Presbyterian couple. As a teenager he started to see a waitress in town. McEachern watched Joe. He ordered the waitress away. Joe went to Chicago, to Detroit. Finally, age 33, he was on a Mississippi country road in the vicinity of the Burden house. During the first four or five months of his stay in a cabin on her property, Joe and Mrs. Burden would stand and talk like strangers. Later she told him she was pregnant. Now he had a partner in the whiskey business--Brown.

After the fire and Joanna Burden's death, the people searched for Christmas. Brown was placed in jail for safe-keeping. Christmas ran off to Mottstown. He becomes obsessed with getting food. Joe Christmas is killed. He is sent across the square with a deputy and unidentified men take him.

Gavin Stevens is the district attorney, a Harvard graduate. Stevens tells the authorities that Christmas will plead guilty and take a life sentence. His death follows. Lena's baby is born around the time Joe Christmas dies. The mother of the baby had started her journey in Alabama and three months later she is in Tennesee.

None of the reviews of this edition have mentioned Dick Hill's performance. I've listened to many audio versions of fiction, and this is in a class by itself (approached only by Donal Donnely's version of "Portrait of the Artist"). For once the performer has character (and is a character) in himself, and also brings each character alive brilliantly. For some reason, other readers are one or the other: surprisingly many readers are good at character voices but their own "narrator" voices are as dull as your high school principal reading the new lunchroom policy. The well-known Frank Muller does the whole thing quite well but at a kind of TV level of acting. Some readers are just bad all around. Dick Hill's version drew me in right away and made me believe it. It's a work of art in its own right like a great theater performance.

This is the first Faulkner book I have read, and I enjoyed it. The whole book takes place in the course of a week or so, in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi (there are two Jeffersons in MS, one near where the story seems to take place, but I suspect Faulkner's Jefferson is highly fictionalized). The main character is Joe Christmas, who we don't meet until some way into the book. Other main characters include Lena, a pregnant woman looking for the father of her baby; Joe Brown, a co-worker of Christmas' at the mill; Byron, their supervisor; and Hightower, a disgraced minister and friend to Byron. All their lives interwine in a way that moves the story along, and delightfully. I live near where the story took place, and I think Faulkner has captured the flavor of the people and place pretty well. It was very realistic and I can imagine people behaving exactly like the characters in the book.

What is out of the ordinary about this book is how it is told. Much of it is told via flashback, or of two characters discussing events that the reader doesn't directly observe in the reading. Faulkner experiments freely with narrative style, sometimes brilliantly, but sometimes it's confusing. I sometimes had trouble following who was talking, or where they were, etc. I was let down by the ending (the climax of the story is told to us by two people we hadn't met up that point - "Did you hear what happened uptown?"). But if you follow Faulkner's lead and enjoy the ride, you are in for a treat. I'm sure this is a book I will get more out of the more I study it. I'm sure I missed a lot.

A great read and I recommend it.

Out of all the Faulkner novels I've had the pleasure to read, Light In August has to be the one of my favorites and is easily the simplistic of his novels to read. It's a love story but not in a traditional sense and yet after you read it you'll fall in love with the characters.

If you think you're getting "Driving Miss Daisy", you're mistaken. I thought I was going to read about a Southern Jew inviting his goyish friend over, and the friend would call matzo balls "them big old balls that Jews toss in the soup" or matzos "them big old Jew-crackers" and I was sadly mistaken. This book has no humor.
This book isn't funny, interesting, educational, or even worth reading. I didn't learn anything new about the Jews of the Delta. All I learned was that Edward Cohen was a typical Jewish baby-boomer growing up in Mississippi, blissfullly ignorant of the lives/habits of his fellow Dixies, white or black.
The only interesting thing is where the NAACP comes to town, and demands that stores hire more black employees, or face boycotts. The Cohen store (and others) suffer because of this, and eventualy all the stores go out of business. It shows you the dark side of the Civil Rights Movement.
Some of the greatest literature/film/drama come from the South. But this is no "Southern Gothic" like John Grisham or "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." It's not a Southers comedy like "Steel Magnolias" of "Fried Green Tomatoes." There's nothign original or plot-driven about this book. It's just plain dull.

You can't tell a Southern story that's "dull."

A wonderful tale that had me captivated from the first page. Whether you're Jewish, southern or just an appreciative reader... the descriptive flow of this tale is unparalleled.

Cohen writes an excellent tale that weaves the stories of his immigrant grandparents into the time of his owning "bringing up" and struggle with his ethnicity, spiritual and regional. The characters are interesting and personal. The descriptions of the region and of the family scenes create clear mental pictures.

This is a book that I intend to add to my own collection.

Interesting insights abound in this wonderful book about growing up Jewish in Mississippi during the 50's and 60's. Mr.Cohen introduces us to his family, friends and surroundings in a way that kept me from putting the book down. I read it in two sittings on a rainy weekend in Rhode Island and I felt like I was on vacation in Mississippi.

Exploring the consequences of straddling two cultures, "The Peddler's Grandson" proves that being Jewish in the deep South is a lot more than playing Dixie with a klezmer band. Accurately subtitled "Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi," Edward Cohen's enjoyable and instructive memoir recounts the author's childhood in post World-War II Mississippi and explores the dynamics of being a dual outsider: A Jew in the Bible Belt and a southern Jew in a cosmopolitan Jewish university. Written with perceptive sociological insight and engaging self-deprecatory humor, this memoir sheds light on the profound issue of marginality. As Edward Cohen grows up, he leaves the safe cocoon of his protective Jewish home and discovers the strangely alluring and frightening Christian South.

The grandson of an intinerant peddler, Cohen explains both the coherence of a Jewish life and the centripetal influences the dominant culture exerts on that identity. Once in the public school system, Cohen feels a need to reinvent himself, from invisible Jew to iconoclastic rebel. Yet, with each recreation, Cohen feels less complete, even more dissatisfied. Where he yearns for a fusion of his dual Southern/Jewish identities, he experiences alienation and distancing from both. Culminating with four experimental years at Miami University, his story both extols and berates the divisive nature of his existence.

At its best, "The Peddler's Grandson" serves as a model for every immigrant seeking authentic identity in his/her new land. At once desperately seeking inclusion but discovering that the price of admission is cultural abdication, Cohen warns about the notion that one can gain identity by erasing one's past. "From the first day my Jewish self was suddenly full-immersion baptized into that southern world, I wanted to reconcile what couldn't be joined." We watch, with admiration, as Cohen reaches an adult acceptance of who and what he is. "I've learned the difference between discovering who I am and inventing it. Invention for me meant erasure, and whether it was my southern or my Jewish half that I hoped to lose, each time I tried, I got smaller."

"The Peddler's Grandson" is not pedantic in the least. Delightful family history and marvelous anecdotes pepper this memoir. Cohen's battles with the dyspeptic Rabbi Nussbaum over issues ranging from the existential meaning of life to the Edward's refusal as a child to eat a hard-boiled egg at Passover ring with Jewish humor. With characteristic grace, however, is Cohen's admission that he admires his adversary as a civil rights' leader. The author does not have to mention that Nussbaum's home was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan; yet in so doing, Cohen reminds us of his own profound ambivalence over racism during the late 1950s and early 1960s. One senses that the adult Cohen has not forgiven himself for his acquiescent silence during that crucial decade; indeed, his compassionate recounting of the African-Ameicans who worked in his family's clothes store indicate a sensitivity that began during that formative period.

Cohen writes with an assurance he lacked as a child. His memoir is warm, comforting, and, in parts, genuinely inspiring. The author's adult confidence derives, however, from that childhood, both Southern and Jewish. His adult confidence in his roots and his place in both worlds blossoms from a family which, although profoundly assimilated, nevertheless recognized its marginality. His Jewish identity, compromised by an alien culture which celebrated physicality instead of intellectualism, emerges secure; his Southern roots, nurtured by three generations of life in Jackson, Mississippi and tarnished by national denigration of the very name of his state, endure. Thus, Edward Cohen, child of a Jewish peddler who settled in a locale far beyond the reaches of Northern urban Jewish influence, represents the best of the Ameican expeience; his cultural dialectic results in the best of all possibilities -- a genuine multiculturalism.

Edward Cohen has written an autobiography whose candor, extraordinary insights, and universality allow the reader to delve deeply into questions and issues that demarcate each of our lives to one extent or another. With events of his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood depicted with the sensorial, emotional, and socio/political specificity of a first-rate novel, Mr. Cohen has accomplished a remarkable feat, both as an individual and a writer: He has escaped the solipsism that can easily extinguish a seemingly narrowly prescribed life. His vivid imagination has allowed him to take us on a journey into a world and time filled with intolerance and social upheaval which he, with painstaking honesty, intertwines with self-revelations regarding his own role within this/his/our eternally imperfect world. Like a good bildungsroman, Peddler's Grandson succeeds in enticing the reader to care deeply for the protagonist, whose pratfalls we laugh at, whose loving renderings of people and places we love as our own, and whose ultimate discovery of his road to liberating self-acceptance fills us with hope. A work of great depth and breadth, Peddler's Grandson is an extraordinary tour de force.

This is one of the good celeb bios. When you're through, you feel you know something about Blondell. When I was young, Joan Blondell was a houseohold word. Everybody knew who she was, even though she wasn't as big a star as Davis, Crawford et. al. Yet she was a touchstone of sorts -- she's a regular Joan Blondell, or she's the Joan Blondell type. Those were quips I remember hearing. It was always a treat to see her in a movie or on TV, and she had a way of cropping up where you least expected to see her. And when she did, everybody knew who she was and everybody loved her. There wasn't a phony bone in her body and that came across in everything she did and said. I remember reading an interview with her in the Sunday New York Times back when she was doing the Moon Marigolds (or whatever it was), the part she didn't like. But she handled it like a pro and in the article, the writer stated that Joan Blondell was one of the few celebrities she had ever interviewed who was not a disappointment in real life. That says it all, really. For all of her misfortunes, she never lost track of who she was, and it never made her bitter or self-pitying. In this day of nonsense publicity and mud-slinging and back-biting, it is refreshing to read about someone who handled fame as well as Joan Blondell. This book gives you the details and let's you see the woman she was.

A long-overdue treatment of a wonderful star, lovingly rendered and meticulously researched. It's about time this lady gets the attention she so richly deserves.

The book gives a chronological guide to Joan Blondell's career and life. However, the amount of perusal of her private life is limited, perhaps inevitably so. There are some intimations and allusions about Joan's thoughts and opinions but not many. Did her third husband, Michael Todd, take much of her money? It is only alluded to that it was the case. Why did her first husband cruelly insist on serial abortions while he had children with other women? Why did her marriage to Powell end while her love for him didn't? There is a chapter heading quote from Joan concerning the hardships of an acting career, but no further elaboration. On the other side of the coin, working for Warner Bros. in the 1930's was no day at the beach, and this is adequately detailed. Perhaps, any deep examination of personal issues cannot be expected in any biography.

And that was my major issue with this autobiography. What we get is a fairly straight-forward recitation of events, which is fine, but it reads as very bland. If you want facts, you'll get them, if you want some interesting quotes you'll get them, but this isn't an enjoyable read. If you want that, seek out Center Door Fancy which positively bubbles, much like Joan herself did.

I found the omission of practically everything about the documented friendship that Cagney and Blondell shared to be frustrating and somewhat evasive, as it's been said elsewhere that Joan was in love with James, but that said love may or may not have been returned as Cagney was a faithful husband. Being an ardent fan of them in films together, I was hoping this book might shed some light on the topic but it does not. Ah well!

Matthew Kennedy does an excellent job in bringing to life this lovely, but now largely unsung, Hollywood star. He writes, not uncritically, but also with great affection, of her career and her life, with all its ups and downs. His research is impeccable and he makes the reader wish that he or she had had the chance to meet and know Miss Blondell.

i put off reading this book for many years, despite my love of early american recorded music, especially blues, because i just can't stand alan lomax.

not that we musicians, musicologists, music-lovers, etc., don't owe him a great debt for documenting music that otherwise would have been lost. we certainly do. but i've been reading about lomax for a long time and he just doesn't seem like he was a pleasant person. he didn't always treat the people he recorded with the greatest amount of dignity; it's known that moe asch, founder of folkways records, was very peeved that lomax pressured lead belly to perform in prison clothes. it's also known that lomax was very selective as to whom he promoted, depending upon how much crap that person was willing to take from him. for example, he put lead belly out there as much as he could because lead belly was grateful to him, while he never even mentions recording the great blind willie mctell (who, in my opinion as a veteran musician, was worlds above lead belly in skill and as a performer/arranger) because mctell was insulted at the paltry sum lomax gave him after the recordings were finished. (mctell had been under the impression that he was recording for a professional record man, and i highly doubt that lomax tried to correct that impression.)

so, when i finally broke down and read this, pretty much all my fears about lomax as a writer came true. i cringed a lot while reading this. for one thing, in my opinion, his constant elegies to the black man hide a latent racism. i mean, he just seems so PROUD of himself that he was a southerner who "got on" with black people. the stereotypes abound, and sometimes he seems to take delight in reflecting them on himself. you'd think that in the '90s he would have thought better of constantly depicting himself eating watermelon and guzzling moonshine, but he doesn't. now, i have nothing against watermelon or moonshine per se, but the way he describes it reminds me of al jolsen at his worst. also, once again as a musician with very eclectic tastes, i am irritated with his constant ax-grinding against modern music. and to lomax, it seems modern music is anything newer than field hollers, spirituals, and charley patton. not only does he denounce white rockers' highjacking of the blues--definitely with justification--but he even devalues early jazz and commercial 78s in general. now, i'm a huge collector of "folk" music: if yazoo, folkways, county, document, jsp, or revenant put it out, i probably have it. i usually find his musical opinions to be narrow, stuffy, and just plain wrong. for example, he casually refers to listening his way through the whole victor and paramount catalogs, and pronounces them repetitive and artificial. well, i've listened to quite a few field recordings of blues, spirituals, and worksongs and i find them VERY repetitive and, when lomax starts asking leading questions, the atmosphere becomes artificial at times as well. in fact, sometimes it's clear to me that the rural artists are just plain putting one over on lomax and he's eating up every bit of it, and moe asch once attested to this as well. i don't devalue the field recordings for this, because, as lomax himself attests to, early rural music was lyrically and musically repetitive in general due the artists' limitations. what made each piece unique was the artist himself, and that shines through as much in the commercial recordings of blind lemon, papa charlie, the hokum boys, etc., as it does in the field recordings of son house, lead belly, young muddy waters, etc. it just seems that lomax is biased against commercial rural music because he doesn't get some abstract feeling from it that he gets from his own field recordings, which is understandable, as he was usually the one who made them. he certainly doesn't give any more technical reason for this. it's his prerogative of course, and i probably wouldn't even blame him for it if he wasn't so condescending.

so why four stars? well, for one thing, this book CAN be charming in a picaresque way, when lomax is not being saccharine or embarrassingly stereotypical. but the main reason is that, underneath all the crap, there are gold mines of historical narrative and anecdotes, and that's always worth the price for me.

The Lomaxes had a major impact in producing the perceptions of folk music and traditions in this country which are dominant. They were pioneers in the collection and publication (for their own profit copyrighting folks songs that their informants taught them in their own names)of folk music. They also had a lot to do with the promotion of urban intellectuals who claimed to play folk music like Pete Seeger and players of various levels of contact with folk tradition who became involved with them like Leadbelly and Woodie Guthrie.

They were not angels. They were deeply flawed. They tended to find what they wanted to find, and produce what they were looking for. Folklorists I know who have met people the Lomaxes interviewed have reported that the Lomaxes were rude and forceful and sometimes insulting to people they interviewed. For example, they often claimed that as representatives of the government in Washington [They worked for the folklore program of the Library of Congress] people were legally bound to open their doors to them.

The legends and the attitudes produced in this book are comfortable and entertaining, particularly to people who know little but the common sterotypes about Black people, the blues, and the times depicted. However, this book has a lot of untruth in it. The real situation in the time and places depicted can only be understood if we have access to another text, one by Black sociologists and folklorists from Mississippi and Tennessee whose work Lomax hijacked, suppressed, and lost.

The truth and the untruth of this book--still valuable despite Lomax's confusions, fictions, and weaknesses--can only be understood by reading __Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering The Fisk University-Library Of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942__ by John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, Samuel C., Jr. Adams. The editors, blues scholars Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, found the original papers of the two trips to Mississippi that Lomax bases this book on (although fictively he combines them into one trip in the __Land Where the Blues Began__). It is interesting that these papers were "lost" for decades, though they were found by Gordon and Nemerov in the Library of Congress which supposedly lost them and among Lomax's papers after his death.

Gordon and Nemerov point out in their introduction the degree to which Lomax simply took credit for work that Work--the most outstanding African American folklorist of the 20th Century who was also a leading composer and expert of Black religious music and a director of Fisk's Jubilee singers--and the graduate assistants Jones and Adams provided did. They also point out that it was Lomax's pressure and the opportunity to use the portable recording machines Lomax had that led them to set up what was supposed to be a joint study, but was hijacked by Lomax and taken away from the directions the Black scholars wanted.

This book of Lomax's supposed story was published at a time that he claimed the African American scholar's work was lost. Moreover, as my reader review of Lost Delta Found reports, the difference in emphasis from what African American researchers who looked at the communities from the inside is significant.

No doubt, readers whose connection with the blues is superficial will find Lomax's book simply a welcoming bit of the same old stuff. Yet, such readers are in part disabled because their knowledge of the blues is based on the type of fiction, stereotypes, and unrepresentative selection Lomax shows in this book, and is now recognized to have been Alan Lomax's practice throughout his entire career.

Aside from these issues, this book is problematical especially from the point of view of an African American who studies and plays the blues not from outside, but inside the Black nationality.

Lomax keeps trying to to write about how he wants to know what it feels like to be a Black person or compares petty indignities he faced and attempts to say "ahhah, now I know what it is like to be Black." This is something he could never in the slightest degree be able to do.

Of course the logical conclusion is for Lomax to realize that this work should be done by Black folklorists who know how it feels to be a Black person in the South, not by Alan Lomax. Yet, he essentially worked to divert the focus of the project from the topics that African American scholars who knew what it was like to feel black. This book essentially hides the work of Black scholars involved in what was supposed to be a joint project.

Their conclusions were quite different. They had already spent much time in the Delta working on a previous study of Youth in the Delta. The Fisk scholars also had a deep knowledge of the Mississippi Delta since Fisk College supervised and assisted African American school teachers throughout the Delta. Where Lomax sees the blues and the delta issuing from old ways, the Fisk scholars reported on how the Delta had attracted a new, younger, more dynamic population that the rest of the Black Belt South. Where Lomax sees compliance and fear in the face of segregation, the Fisk scholars found a growing militance among the youth.

Lomax's story is an artificially put together fiction manufactured out of his memories, notes, and perhaps wishful thinking 50 years after the fact. It centers on Alan Lomax and not on the people of Mississippi. He combines incidents that took place on a longer trip in 1941 with incidents that occured on a shorter one in 1942. People known to John Work and his team for years are recreated as people that Lomax discovers just walking down the street in Memphis or Clarksdale.

The other thing I get from Lomax is how alien this book reads to me as a Black person. Lomax's approach is that he is always explaining Black culture and Black people to white people, so that reading this book from within the culture, I feel a bit excluded.

While he tries to show the connections between the Delta culture and Africanism, his view of Africa is too general to deal with a large continent. Africa has a lot of countries and different cultures. Africanism can't simply be generalized. To be useful different cultures can be identified or at least discussed. One could say that Lomax's approach might be excused in the 1940s when he made these trips, but this book was written in the 1990s. For example, in _Deep Blues by Bob Palmer_, Palmer speculates that an important factor differentiating musical traditions in the Mississippi Delta from the the Southeast is that much of the Delta's Black population descended from Bantus and not West Africans, something Lomax is unaware of.

Lomax also discounts the point of view of his colleagues from Fisk by claiming educated African Americans don't appreciate the importance of the folk culture that he, Alan Lomax, understands. Of course, this did not prevent Lomax from more or less forcing Work to surrender much of his own recordings to the Library of Congress with little attribution.

Lomax really does not inform the reader that John Work--whom he terms a "composer"--had done extensive research as part of this study and for years before this trip with some of the individuals. As an outsider, Lomax constantly got in the way of collection and did not understand nuances and his team understood. Nemerov and Gordon note that in the interview with Muddy Waters that has been published on the CD of their trip to Stovall Planation, Lomax's cuts off Work who has begun a sensitive and knowing conversation about Muddy's music with comments shut things down.

In fact, Lomax used the open door with white Mississipians that the Library of Congress provided and their posession of a precious portable recording machine to force Work to donate transcripts and recordings from his own work to the Library of Congress. Nor does he mention the special graduate seminar on the material from the research that Work and Charles S. Johnson organized at Fisk between the 1941 and 1942 journeys, a seminar that brought Black and white folklorists and sociologists from all over the country and promised to launch a new day of African American research into Black folklore, had that and so many things not been disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.

In fact, Lomax doesn't give an image of himself as a serious, detached scholar, trying to build up data for general scholarly discussion and knowledge. He sounds like the kind of paternalist southern white boy who "knows Black folks," wishes he could be "Black on Saturday night" and who is always looking for moonshine and where Black folks are juking. Of course, this may appeal to many white pseudo blues fans who are basically in the same category.

Work, Jones, and Adams are more concerned with impact on folklore that the real social and economic and cultural changes going on in the Delta had.

To be sure there is a lot of valuable and wonderful information in here. A lot of it is taken from interviews and other work done by the Fisk team and blended in to place it in the fictional sequence Lomax creates in his book to place himself at the center of things. There are some good folkways described, and good contexts for a number of the songs that have previously appeared in other Lomax productions without much backgrounds.

After four decades reading Lomax, I was surprised at some very good prose, although he gets too purple to be accurate. He also tends to quickly leap to comparisons of Black Mississipians and the their culture to the most stereotypical and paternalist images of Africans, images few Africans would find acceptable.

If you are interested in Blues, African American folklore, etc, this is a book to be read, but not without reading the Nemerov and Gordon edition of the Fisk studies. Serious blues studies like Kubrik's _Africa and the Blues_ or any of the work of David Evans are also good.

It is unfortunate that the discourse about Blues falls so strongly in the hands of people who are not Black and see writing about blues largely a discourse between white people where black people are not subjects of their own stories, but objects for interpretation or enjoyment by white people who are assumed the only audience.

This too shall pass.

A critical first step in your Blues education. An excellent read, but may contain more information than the casual Blues fan wants to know. What I would call a "serious" blues text. Along with a detailed search for the source of the blues, there are fascinating portions that illuminate racial divides and prejudices. Check out Lomax's adventures in Memphis, told in first person, for a disturbing portrait of "cracker law enforcement"...seems almost unbelievable...almost.

Land Where The Blues Began is an especially timely read now when the levees have once again broken on the Mississippi river, since a significant part of the book deals with the experiences and perceptions of the levee workers. Lomax also talks about how blues, re-named "rhythm and blues" became the America's national music. The book is a personal memoir, illustrated with transcripts of recorded interviews, not a scholarly tract.

That Alan Lomax didn't acknowledge colleagues, specifically composer John Work is an unscrupulous Swift-Boat-like smear that has lately been perpetrated to hype a recent edition of Coahoma study material.

In LWTBB Lomax wrote: "I have many people to thank for contributions on fieldwork data -- Samuel Adams, John Work, and mainly Lewis Jones, who collaborated on the whole Coahoma County Survey. The Library of Congress Folk Song Archive of which I was then in charge, furnished recording instruments and other equipment, and the records of the songs are now in the Archive. John Faulk and, especially, Elizabeth Harold contributed important interview material. . . [and so on for the rest of the page.] " p. 481

And on p. 496: Much of the sociological material in this chapter was gathered by Lewis Jones and his Fisk University associates, and summed up by him in two unpublished monographs, "The Mississippi Delta" and "An Ecology of Counties," edited by Lewis Jones in the 1940s. These sources, as well as conversations with Jones, are cited and paraphrased here."

There are eighteen references (most highly complementary) to Lewis Jones in Lomax's index, some for entries of multiple pages. The book has numerous complementary references the works of other scholars, as well.

It is lucky that Lomax preserved Work's field recordings in the Library of Congress (don't know if others survived independently) and kept a copy Work's and Jones's unpublished manuscript "stuffed" in a file in his open-to-the public archives, because the material that Work kept at home was lost after his death.

"Stuffed" in the files of the LOC are letters from Work in the 1940s requesting Botkin to send him copies of his Coahoma essay because he has lost them, and a reply from Botkin that he had done so "along with a couple of mimeographed copies."

In 1958 Work wrote the Library again, asking permission to publish his Coahoma material and the Library wrote back saying go ahead, if it was all right with Fisk. More correspondence about the Coahoma study can be viewed on the LOC website.

The copy of Work's essay found in Alan Lomax's archive (not his private papers) was a mimeographed one that the Fisk Librarian said probably went out on interlibrary loan.

According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, John Work III was indeed a prolific composer of classical music, mostly of choral but also instrumental. He composed 70 arrangements of folk material in which rich textures and use of dynamics added interest to the repetition of the stanza form. His large-scale choral works were not based on folk music. They are strictly diatonic. Work's cantata "The Singers" (text by Longfellow) won a national composers' prize in 1946. Work was also an acknowledged authority on black folk music and published several books on the topic. In the 1950s, he toured Europe conducting the Fisk Jubilee chorus.

As a classical music composer and educator in a school with a mission to "uplift" its pupils, Work had strict standards of what constituted "good" and "bad" folk performance. He prized through-composed dynamic variation, "correct" diatonic intonation (no expressive shifts of half or quarter tones), and felt that songs should always end on the tonic -- all essentially bel canto rather than folk criteria.

Lomax himself tells us that he decided to bypass conventional musical notation altogether and instead spent years developing descriptive parameters he called Cantometrics.

Alan Lomax's contributions to American music are enormous. His field recordings and archives are the foundation of the American Songbook. But he's a terrible writer, and this book is practically unreadable. There are some great interviews with Delta singers and musicians, but they're embedded in page after page of Lomax's lousy prose. If you really want to know about this music, skip the book and buy the CD, which is a phenomenal collection of blues, gospel & work songs Lomax recorded in the South in the 1930s and 40s. The music says it all much more authentically and eloquently than Lomax's words can possibly convey. God bless him, but he should have stuck to the tape recorder and thrown his typewriter away.

Escaping The Delta should be one of the first books a blues novice reads as it helps fill out the outline of the music, the role of the delta and the music of Robert Johnson who did escape the delta only to be drawn back to die in its mystery and danger. There was a lot more to say about Robert Johnson and the delta at the time this book was written: very little original oral history research has been done in recent years (with the exception of the recent Howlin' Wolf book), very little extensive research into European blues magazines (the only first person interviews of the classic blues musicians -- few were done in America) has been done because full collections are hard to find (if they exist), and the author failed to interview the only people alive who really knew Robert Johnson (Honeyboy Edwards,Robert Lockwood Jr., and Robert Townsend for example). Thus little new light is shed on Johnson's life, even where he is actually buried (in Little Zion church on the Money Mississippi road outside of Greenwood) and why he is there and not thrown into the river as most bluesmen would have been. With all respect to Mr. Ward who has written an excellent book, I did all of that research in the process of researching the lives of Alex "Rice" Miller (Sonny Boy Williamson II) and Robert Lockwood Jr.. I did have the opportunity to communicate with Ward about his Josh White book (Sonny Boy Williamson II played on his last album). There is more to say on the history of the blues and the delta as well as Robert Johnson.

i was disappointed to find out that the book's only "new" evidence is some sales data of delta blues music and a few first hand accounts that once in a while these blues musicians played a tune that was not blues.

In addition his long description about music sales and the development of the blues, Wald uses these first hand accounts to prove his points, while at the same time he ignores stories that don't fit into his argument-which may makes his claims specious to say the least.

lets say Mr. Wald and I may not have have the same fundamentals views about the blues. I contacted Mr. Wald to mention important aspects which I believe he may have carelessly overlooked. To Mr. Wald's credit he took great time and care to explain to me (an amateur blues reader) what his points were and why they are important to blues history. These were facts that I may be missed when reading his book. so i must say this worth may be worth looking at .

Elijah Wald's book is outstanding in the sense that he not only gives an insight to the music, but also the the personalities of second-generation bluesmen, with a strong emphasis on Robert Johnson. Mr. Wald has speculated somewhat on what has not been recorded, but much of this is corroborated in one way or the other, mostly based on interviews. The opinions and memories conveyed might have been warped, twisted or recolletions embellished, nevertheless, I strongly believe that this shall stand the test of time and stay as one of the alternatives to the romantic and platonically idealized view of the "bluesman".

I did not read the book as an academic work, but as an in-depth story of Robert Johnson, his predecessors and successors. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Mr. Wald's approach was objective and far from the forced devotion that some hardcore fans of delta blues have shown. As art creates its heroes after they have lived, the concept of the delta bluesman is stereotypically formed in the minds of most people. This is especially emphasized in liner notes, booklets in box sets, and even in some books. Yes, they might have been hard-drinking, womanizing, dangerous people who have shown the delicate side to their personalities in their music and lyrics, but the fact that first and foremost they were entertainers of high calibre is frequently overlooked.

Robert Johnson has only one recorded solo, his lyrics do not have consistency, but John Hammond has selected Johnson for the famed concerts in 1938. The music had already changed by the time the British Blues Explosion took place, but the neo-bluesmen had to find some heroes to identify themselves with. Bluesmen who had died young, hoboed from town to town, drank and smoked excessively and played around with women fitted perfectly with their conception of life, which evolved into sex, drugs and rock'n roll.

I believe that Mr Wald's book is invaluable for uncovering this mystique about the bluesmen, and helping us blues lovers in accepting these people as "people" first.

This was a great book and a must-have in any music biography library. It's more than a music biography though. Many of us in this day and age have a mythical idea of who Robert Johnson was, we've all heard the story of how he learned to play guitar by selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads and other such lore, but this book cuts through all that and gets down to the real brass tacks: Robert Johnson was anything but popular in his time, when bands like the Mississippi Sheiks were much more popular.

The historical information in the book is fascinating, it strips away all of our romantic notions about juke joints and mythological bluesmen and shows the real Delta of the early part of this century: gritty, unbelievably impoverished and depressed, dangerous and frightening. Truly the land that begat the blues.

This book is truly excellent.

This volume is a book about something. But its not about Robert Johnson, its not about escaping the Delta, and its hardly about the blues. It is more a rambling chronology of popular music, and the ways in which Blues is nested into that overall context. It is as much or more about musicians other than blues musicians. And when it focuses on "blues musicians", it goes to great and repeated lengths to demonstrate they were not really "Blues" musicians at all. We understand them to be such today, the author labors, because Blues sold. In fact, the author repeats, the "Blues" musicians we have come to revere liked to play, and did play, other kinds of music as much or more than blues, including ragtime, tin pan alley, fife and drum and spirituals. See? They weren't really blues players at all. They were versatile musicians forced into this genre by the music business, many of them preferring to play something other than blues. Huh.

Further, the author posits that latter day (white?) blues musicians are not really playing the blues either. They are acting "as if", affecting musical styles and inflections that are not their own. Sort of make believe blues performing. Imitating the blues musicians of yore, and not authentically expressing themselves in their own right. Despite Fred McDowell's and John Lee Hooker's assertion that "the Blues is a feeling", the author would apparently have us believe that it was only THEIR feeling, not one available to others.

Suffice it to say, the author and I do not share a fundamental view of what the Blues is. Would I buy, read, or reccommend this book. No, no and no. It isn't what it says it is. And what it is is superficial in its depth of understanding of Blues expression, and how and where that happens.

Very few novels capture the ambivalent relations in the Deep South of the 60s. The old divide between the poor rural dwellers and "city folk" remained an abyss. Blacks and whites were redefining their relationships in ways that only seem uncomplicated in hindsight. The gulf between generations was a new phenomenon in the South, and traditional reliance on the judgment of elders was dissolving at an astounding rate as sons noticed appalling gaps in the moral worldview of their fathers . Then there remained that old ghost: the sense that, no matter what your politics or background, the South simply did not belong to the rest of the world. In Magic Time, Doug Marlette (who recently passed away in a tragic acident) perfectly captures the mood, and moodiness, of the South during the Freedon Summer, without sentimentality or excuses. His story line is strong and plausible, his craftsmanship as a writer is excellent and unobtrusive, and his imagination (to borrow from Wallace Stevens) makes this moment acutest at its vanishing.

This is my second book of his, and I highly recommend this book. This book as the Bridge did, envelopes you into the character's life and his writing is so realistic and visual... I hope he had some manuscripts hidden away since I just heard of his untimely death. His two books are easily in the best I have ever read category....

This was a really great learning experience. I was raised in a area where black people did not reside. I had never even seen a black person. We had no feeling one way or the other. Everyone I knew were really poor, but clean (more or less). We had food, not what we would rather have had probaly, but grew up healthy and able to care for ourselves.

It was shocking to realize how some of us could be treated so differently. I still do not understand why things were the way they were.

I can see part of it was because the Northern part of the country came to the south and tried to change everything and grab every thing they could. Face it, that would make anyone resentful.

This was one of the best books that I have read in a very long time. Not only was it well written and interesting, but the subject is very important for us as a generation comes into adulthood that knew nothing of the civil rights movement. This book should be required reading for all high school and college students! The book does a great job of explaining the time without being preachy, and even the main character is allowed to come into his own understanding in his own time.
Wonderful book!

Torn between revisiting the significance of the poignant history relived in Magic Time, complimenting the skill where fictional characters are truly brought to life, and describing the book's qualification as a page turner, I was still at a loss to share how much this book stayed with me, long after I closed the back cover. After searching fruitlessly for the right words to describe this wonderful second novel, I realized there was no way I could be more eloquent than Henry Louis Gates, Jr., when he wrote, "In Magic Time, Doug Marlette does with words what we are used to seeing him do so masterfully with pictures: he sets us down firmly in a sharply drawn time and place and tells us a great story. Magic Time proves that The Bridge was no fluke: Marlette is a great writer of Southern fiction, and he understands that region as it was in the turbulent days of the Civil Rights Movement, and as it has reshaped itself since."

Well, Jacky isn't your usual heroine. You know that right from the start of Bloody Jack. And, now she's taken to swindling swindlers, card sharping and pushing the limit of even her wide bounds on propriety. All I have to say is, "Thank heavens!" Anyone sick of simpering, sweet, self-deluded heroines need not dip into the tales of Mary "Jacky" Faber. But, those girls who have longed for a heroine who gets into some sticky situations and manages through brains and cunning and good friends, to save herself and others along the way, this is your kind of series. Mississippi Jack also gives us a look into the trials of her mostly betrothed, Jaimy. He may be an officer of the British navy, but he sometimes slips morally lower than Jacky and yet she's the one always apologizing. All in all, it's a very, very good read. Let's hope L.A. Meyer has more up his clever sleeves!

Jacky's adventures continue to get better and better. Never a dull moment when the notorious Bloody Jack is around. From stealing a river boat to ending up in the arms of another dashing military man to tar and feathers, it amazing the girl ends up in one piece at the end of the day. Jacky also manages to add to her on going repertoire of names, whether it's from mates, Indians, or lovers. Don't miss this exciting tale into the further trouble makings of Bloody Jack!

Truly this is a great read that should appeal to girls as well as boys, teens to seniors. Lovers of historical fiction will note that the perils Jacky faces were quite real to the time period; violence brought about by greed, streets paved more by treachery then gold. This time especially Meyer's has outdone himself with characters that make us cringe or perhaps laugh out loud each time they walk, or stagger, across the page. They are all there, the river men and women of the time, all races, all walks of life, all brought to us through the eyes of a teenage girl who has had to live by her wits, dreaming her dreams, while facing each day with courage and determination.

My daughter loves this series and was delighted with this recent book. It is long, but she had it read in a matter of days - couldn't put it down! Great to have a book with a girl as a pirate!

I discovered the "Bloody Jack" series through my female students, who were lining up to get a hold of them - not something I usually see as a high school English teacher. I read the series (mostly backwards) at the suggestion of the students, and loved them! "Mississippi Jack" is the last book in the series (so far) and relates Jacky Faber's adventures as a showboat captain on the Mississippi. The novel is adventuresome, fun, and honest - told from Jacky's point of view. This series is very enjoyable, easy to read (for pre-teen/teens/adults like me), and are hard to put down. I highly recommend them, especially as they've taken my students by storm.

COmpared to her recent contemporaries, her older books are hardly recognizable as Robards.. that being said, this book is great. You will get sucked in and she actually pulls of a somewhat difficult plot line very well.

I have to disagree with previous reviews. The ending of this book did nothing to resolve the intense conflict between Jesse and Clive - it's like she just gave in and gave up. At one point I almost threw this one across the room when Jesse comes to the conclusion that Clive is many negative things - but NOT a killer - when he HAD killed another man within the prologue of the book! This book had a lot of potential - but, the ending was so contrived it was insulting. Stick to other much better books by Robards. This one left me disgusted.

I like many other reviewers have been a Karen Robards fan for a long time and I too have to state that this book is one of her better ones!! The hero and heroine are very likeable and fun. This is one of those historical romances set in the south that has you reading it way into the wee hours of the morning!!

This book is about a young lady who cannot help but fall in love with the sexy man that lands on her doorstep ~ on her widowed stepmother's arm, of course.

This book is a page-turner b/c it has it all; scandal, shame, romance, adultery, murder, etc. The romance aspect of this novel was sweet b/c Jessie and Stuart had developed a relationship before they fell for one another.

I'm only giving it three stars b/c Jessie's character seemed to lose her innocence and sweetness after she recognized her feelings for Stuart. Another reason I'm giving it 3 stars is b/c it was hard to believe Stuart was really in love with her.

Although I enjoyed the book, it is not the best work by Karen Robards, nor is it one of the best romance novels ever written. And it is definately NOT the "longest sex scene in history"! Whoever wrote that review has never read Elizabeth Lowell's earlier works where many of the sex scenes were much longer and much more graphic. There is nothing particularly special nor memorable about the plot or the characters. Morning Star is simply a fun read to pass the time.

The writer seems new to her craft. She is very weak on plot development. I will purchase others in the series to see if the books improve; however, if the books continue in this vein, I can't recommend them. I like the beginnings of the main character but feel that her haunting by an ex-slave is ridiculous. The ghost is shallow and is bizarrely obsessed with Sarah Booth getting pregnant.

I decided to try this series based on the reviews of other readers and am glad I did. I too thought this might turn out to be another attempt at the zany humor so many try, but few accomplish (Janet Evanovich and Nancy Bartholomew being the few exceptions). The conversations between Jitty and Sarah Booth are funny at times, but what I like the most is being able to not only feel Sarah Booth's love for her home, which goes deeper than just a place to live, but also that there probably really is a Zinnia with people just like that. I read someone comparing Sarah Booth to Sharon McCone and, I agree -- a softer cousin maybe. The second in the series is just as good and I'm looking forward to reading the 3rd.

The book has so much literary merit, that it could be placed among the novels. However, the excellent mystery plot also wins it a place among the mysteries.

Haines creates characters who are memorable and vivid and places them in the Mississippi Delta town of Zinnia (I'm kind of reminded of the movie "In the Heat of the Night"). Sarah Booth is living in the ancestral home -- she is an orphan and an only child, the last of the Delaneys -- but is about to lose it, because she is destitute despite her social credentials. Her only company at Dahlia House - the antebellum house -- is the ghost of a slave, who appears in a variety of outfits and "encourages" Sarah to get to work reproducing.

In an attempt to earn some money, Sarah takes on the task of trying to get to the truth of a scandal from 20 years ago in which first a leading citizen and then the leading citizen's wife die in some very questionable accidents. THe two young offspring are whispered to have something to do with it, and Sarah's client wants to find out if Hamilton the Fifth is as bad as rumors have it. Hamilton the Fifth is a romantic interest worthy of Evanovich -- and did I mention the book is often funny?

Sarah is stirring up some dangerous memories and some deaths start to follow.

I really loved this book and can hardly wait to read the next in this series and discover what happens to Sarah.

I liked this book, but I don't feel like I have to absolutely get something else from Ms. Haines.

This book is strong on characterization, setting and weak on plot. I liked Sarah, I adored Jitty. "Them Bones" is well-written, provides a unique atmosphere and represents a strange cross between social commentary and a mystery. The social commentary part is the more interesting of the two. What Daddy's girls are brought up to be, the struggle between individuality and tradition in the suffocating grip of fixed gender roles, and the sordid details of people's lives coming to light from under the glamorous, glossy surface of society living are far more interesting than the unlikely criminals we are treated to in this novel.

I'm hooked. Until 2 weeks ago, I'd never read Ms Haines. Now I'm a devoted fan. Her mysteries are simply delicious reading. As someone who's lived in and around the area, I find her characterizations dead-on accurate, and her locale descriptions evocative enough to lure me back. Whoever thought I'd miss kudzu? Sarah Booth Delaney is a pure delight, and someone I'd love to sit down and have a glass of Jack with... I hope this series never ends! It'd be like losing a good friend.

I really wanted to read this book. It was well-reviewed by Ann Ross and I like small-town books. (I'm a small town girl, what can I say?) It is, however, an excellent example of what can happen if a great idea isn't properly nurtured.
The premise is promising, but it never quite comes through. There are quirky characters aplenty, but they're too quirky, too over the top. Dalby also tried to weave in romance and does a poor job with it. Both are underdeveloped and crassly handled. The man lacks subtlety, that's all I can say.
Beyond that, I just didn't care about the book. I didn't care whether the characters married, whether the store closed, or why Mr. Choppy lost his finger. I just wanted out of the book.
That being said, I had a hard time rating the book. I mean, how do you rate a book that was so blah you don't even care enough to give it an F?
It gets D- for Very Dull.

The book was in great condition and it arrive in a timely manner. I would order from this seller again.

Waltzing at the Piggly Wiggly

This is a great book to read on a cold day, curled up on the sofa. Its quirky small town characters are believable, and the love and loyalty they demonstrate restores your faith in America. It's light-hearted, funny, moving, and very entertaining.

I enjoyed this book very much, and I shared it with my mother-in-law, who said it reminded her of growing up in rural Mississippi. Very enjoyable read!

I never thought that this book would end. Being a totally character driven book filled with the requisite quirky Southern personalities, you are introduced to Laurie Lepanto and her group of widowed ladies who call themselves the Nitwitts, Laurie's dashing dancing man Powell, the lovelorn Mr. Choppy and various other personalities of Second Creek, Mississippi. In an effort to keep open the local Piggly Wiggly, that is being edged out of town by the new Mega Mart, Laurie and her Nitwitts decide to offer a waltz with Powell down the isles of the Piggly Wiggly while the box boys gather up their orders. Little does anybody know, but this is one can of worms that Mr. Choppy didn't know would change his life forever.