Fans of the blues can take their love one step further by collecting books on the subject. From beautiful coffee table picture books to long-reading books, there’s something for every blues lover.
To start at the very roots of the blues, “Slave Songs of the United States” published in 1867 by William Francis Allen is the foundation for a serious blues collector—but incredibly rare. Other works on African American song like “Negro Workaday Songs” were also published in the 1920s from small university presses. Moving into the mid to late 20th century there are several titles which can still be found in first edition, but perhaps even more importantly, they are still in print in paperback: 
“The Country Blues” by Samuel B. Charters (1959) documents country bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson; “Blues People” by Amiri Baraka (1963) written under the name Leroi Jones was the first modern blues book written by an African American; and “Blues from the Delta” written by Mississippian William Ferris (1978) includes full documentation of a Clarksdale House Party with Wallace “Pine Top” Johnson.
Music scholars and field workers have been documenting the blues for many years but recently some exceptional books have been released based on this research. William Ferris published “Give My Poor Heart Ease” (2009) which documents the blues in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s and ’70s, and George Mitchell released “Mississippi Hill Country Blues 1967” (2013) with a showing and signing at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Another gem is Birney Imes’ “Juke Joint” (1990) which was released in a signed limited edition in slipcase with a Foreword by Richard Ford. The variety of blues covered in modern scholarship today is admirable, from “Southern Soul Blues” by David Whiteis (2014), which includes chapters on Ms. Jody and our own Bobby Rush, to a new classic from the late and great American collector of folk music Alan Lomax—“The Southern Journey of Alan Lomax,” (2012) with newly published photos and an essay by Tom Piazza.
Blues books are not the easiest type of book to collect because they do not have a wide readership and publishers print in small batches. Not only is it hard to get a first edition, if you wait too long, the book may already be out of print. If your blues collection is filled with first editions all the better, but just having these wonderful books in any form is a treasure for your home library.
Originally published in the Clarion-Ledger
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