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Title details for I Don't Like the Blues by B. Brian Foster - Available

I Don't Like the Blues

Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life

by B. Brian Foster
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How do you love and not like the same thing at the same time? This was the riddle that met Mississippi writer B. Brian Foster when he returned to his home state to learn about Black culture and found himself hearing about the blues. One moment, Black Mississippians would say they knew and appreciated the blues. The next, they would say they didn’t like it. For five years, Foster listened and asked: “How?” “Why not?” “Will it ever change?” This is the story of the answers to his questions.
In this illuminating work, Foster takes us where not many blues writers and scholars have gone: into the homes, memories, speculative visions, and lifeworlds of Black folks in contemporary Mississippi to hear what they have to say about the blues and all that has come about since their forebears first sang them. In so doing, Foster urges us to think differently about race, place, and community development and models a different way of hearing the sounds of Black life, a method that he calls listening for the backbeat.

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  • Release date

    October 8, 2020

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

      • ISBN: 9781469660448

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781469660448

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781469660448
      • File size: 3680 KB
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    • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      September 1, 2020

      Foster (sociology, Southern studies, Univ. of Mississippi) examines the present-day, small-town rural South through a case study of Clarksdale, MS (pop. 17,725 in 2013), where blues icons Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker lived. He describes the recent attempts by Mississippi politicians to foster economic development in Clarksdale through blues clubs and festivals, which attract mostly white tourists. Interviewing nearly 250 residents between 2014 and 2019, the author found little interest in blues music among African Americans, who consider it the outdated sounds of the cotton fields that they would rather not revisit. Indeed, most African American residents, now 80 percent of the Clarksdale population, feel they have experienced the blues, which they define as racist-induced poverty and struggles that have led to a shared history and collective identity in the increasingly economically impoverished town. VERDICT Foster's thoughtful and well-researched look at race and the blues via an exploration of a distressed and declining Southern rural town will be useful to music and sociology academics.--David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

      Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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  • English

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