Blues Lyric Poetry

This computer-generated anthology serves as a companion to Taft's Blues Lyric Poetry: a Concordance and gives the user the complete poetic context for every word, phrase or line in which he is interested. He also provides a selection of blues lyrics which have never appeared in print before or are scattered. Taft has transcribed over 2,000 blues lyrics from recordings made between 1920 and 1942 and includes over 350 singers such as Josh White, Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey. The anthology includes both country and urban, male and female, "downhome" and vaudeville singers. The songs are arranged according to singer and under each singer, according to dates of recording and sequences in the recording sessions. Information given includes singer, title, place, date and record numbers. The final section is a line-concordance index to the titles of the songs. ISBN 0-8240-9235-X (alk. paper) : $75.00 (For use only in the library).

This book is the first rigourous and detailed exploration of exactly how blues singers used formulas to create songs, and it more than amply fills the gap in the the study of the blues, where the structure and content of the lyrics have been less fully explored than the musical form. Focusing on the songs recorded by African-American singers for pre-World War Two commercial recording companies, this is an excellent structural analysis of the formulaic composistion of blues lyrics. This book gives a step-by-step description of the rules implicit in this formulaic structure and inspires new discussion of lyric structures. A wide array of readers will find this insightful and informative: from students of African-American music, cultural studies, history and linguistics, to Blues fans fascinated by exactly how the lyrics of this influential music style are written.

"A signal event in the history of the music." — Ted Gioia. A noted blues historian and folklorist explores blues lyrics as poetry, quoting lyrics at length to reveal their depth of feeling and incorporation of complex literary forms.

A magnificent anthology of blues poems/songs by some of Canada's best poets; on the accompanying CD, the poems are masterfully interpreted by Canadian west coast blues artists. Writing contributors include Ken Babstock, bill bissett, George Elliott Clarke, Lynn Coady, Lorna Crozier, Barry Dempster, Patrick Friesen, Mark Jarman, Ryan Knighton, Robert Kroetsch, Patrick Lane, Dennis Lee, David W. McFadden, Don McKay, P.K. Page, Karen Solie, Sharon Thesen, and Fred Wah. A publication of Smoking Lung Press.

Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology–the first devoted exclusively to blues poems–a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power. The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to “Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and “Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics–poems in their own right–from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters. The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

These poems are brilliant and dangerous. The opening poem, "Invisible Woman, Dancing," is the best protest poem of the decade. The speaker attends a party full of casual, good-intentioned racists and ableists. The ending of the poem is explosive. Constance Merritt shows incredible range - erotic poems to a wayward lover; blues lyrics so rhythmic I can nearly hear the guitar; and devotional poems that offer "this, you know, is love, is all, the end." Blind Girl Grunt is a major work by a major poet. -Jillian Weise Merritt's latest collection is a back in bend-bend in love, bend in prayer, and bend in anger. A Blues infiltrates these lines and stanzas, ready to sing and stay (as any devoted lover) through the long haul. And the haul here is a woman, her myriad contents, in medias res. -CM Burroughs Beyond their shared-and dazzling-immunity to taboos, the poems in Constance Merritt's fourth book are very different from each other. Different in form, from stern villanelles to get-drunk-on-them blues poems to wandering narratives. And they are different in their tones, with ruthless self-awareness next to sexy lullaby next to persuasive rage at being "unmoored and vanishing" beyond "the flag of whiteness." Even within single poems, tone is protean. "The Less Than Greater Than Blues" is goofily playful and also as blunt as blunt gets about the roots of the suffering we cause each other. The penultimate poem "Advent" shifts between a longing that intends to wreck and a longing that intends to redeem. In fact the book as a whole shifts between these longings. As do we. Merritt implicates us gently but without hesitation, wrapping us into the "brilliant skin, the ruinous eyes, / the body poised in transit" that opens the collection and that judges and blesses, throughout it. Blind Girl Grunt is supple, and rigorous, and so surprising. It is vital. -Taije Silverman