A Blues Life (Music in American Life)

"This oral history recounts Townsend's early days as a shoeshiner fronting for a bootlegging operation, his passion for the guitar, and his collaborations and friendships with many of the musicians and entrepreneurs who shaped the blues scene in St. Louis. Through Townsend's easy reminiscences, the guitarist Lonnie Johnson, the pianists Walter Davis and Roosevelt Sykes, and the promoter Jessie Johnson come vividly to life, along with scores of other individuals both remembered and forgotten who left their mark on a key musical genre."--BOOK JACKET. "Touching on important social aspects of St. Louis life, from racism and police harassment to honky-tonk speakeasies, A Blues Life offers a personal and often moving commentary on music and culture in the city. Townsend recounts that in the 1920s, St. Louis's Booker Washington Theatre brought in famous acts like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Peg Leg Bates, but very few local blues artists ever appeared there. While middle-class blacks regarded jazz as on the border of respectability, the blues were far over the line, and especially the raw, "gut bucket style blues" that Townsend says set St. Louis blues apart from the styles developing in Chicago, Kansas City, and Mississippi."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.