Daddy Played The Blues

*Notable Social Studies Trade Books Selection for Young People 2018* “I was six years old the day we left the farm in Mississippi,” remembers Cassie in this richly textured picture book. “Between the boll weevils, the floods, and the landlord, there was no way a family could scratch out a living there anymore.” Packing themselves into an old jalopy—with Daddy, Uncle Vern, and Mama in the front seat and Cassie and her two brothers in the back—they joined the Great Migration from the impoverished Deep South to Chicago, where there was work to be had in the stockyards. Across the kids’ laps lay Daddy’s prized possession, a six-string guitar. Daddy worked hard to put food on the table, but what he really loved was playing the blues. This evocative tale of the African-American odyssey in search of a better life is also a homage to the uniquely American music that developed from African music and American spirituals, work songs, and folk ballads. In the book’s backmatter, Garland relates how he first heard and fell in love with blues music, beginning a lifelong fandom. Portraits and thumbnail biographies of great blues musicians and landmark songs complete this tribute to the great American music and the yearnings that produced it. Fountas & Pinnell Level S

Daddy Longlegs will have kids singing along with his bluesy song as they read this hip picture book! He’s one cool cat who scats, an eight-legged drummer keeping the beat. He moves and grooves and gets funky across the floor. And one thing’s for sure: no one’s better at getting mellow on a saxophone, and bringing rhythm and soul into every child’s home. Mike Ornstein’s catchy rhyming text is irresistibly musical, and Lisa Kopelke’s witty art features plenty of fun details and an urban, bohemian flair; her sunglasses-wearing title character seems to come straight out of the Beat generation. A glossary of blues terms, a list of instruments played by the characters, and a page of facts about daddy longlegs and blues music provides extra entertaining info.

Juke joint--two words often used, often abused. They convey an inherent promise of something real, edgy, from another time. All juke joints are blues clubs, but not all blues clubs are jukes. Here, artist recollections and insights delve below the murky surface to tell the tales, canonize the characters and explain the special brand of blues bottled in these quasi-legal establishments. Author Roger Stolle works from the inside to educate and entertain with a mix of history, anecdote and discovery. It's a wild ride.

Journalist Hugh Merrill takes us on a sweeping road trip in search of the distinctly American music known as the blues. Tracing blues culture from its beginning in rural Mississippi up through the Delta to Chicago and beyond, Merrill visits with legendary musicians such as Son Thomas, Koko Taylor, Son Seals, Valerie Wellington and Magic Slim. In fascinating interviews, Merrill uncovers wonderful stories about Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox and Ma Rainey. The trip dips into New Orleans as Merrill explores how the blues exploded in clubs and cribs, influencing dixieland, jazz and zydeco. A trip out west presents a lovely tour of the cocktail lounges of Oakland and Los Angeles and the guardians of the blues who live there. The Blues Route is an engrossing narrative, a book that celebrates not only the music but the continuing search for sympathy, understanding and affinity that the blues embodies.

Texas Blues allows artists to speak in their own words, revealing the dynamics of blues, from its beginnings in cotton fields and shotgun shacks to its migration across boundaries of age and race to seize the musical imagination of the entire world. Fully illustrated with 495 dramatic, high-quality color and black-and-white photographs—many never before published—Texas Blues provides comprehensive and authoritative documentation of a musical tradition that has changed contemporary music. Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author Alan Govenar here builds on his previous groundbreaking work documenting these musicians and their style with the stories of 110 of the most influential artists and their times. From Blind Lemon Jefferson and Aaron “T-Bone” Walker of Dallas, to Delbert McClinton in Fort Worth, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins in East Texas, Baldemar (Freddie Fender) Huerta in South Texas, and Stevie Ray Vaughan in Austin, Texas Blues shows the who, what, where, and how of blues in the Lone Star State.

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.

When Emily, a sensitive synesthete from Claremore, Oklahoma, witnesses a heart-wrenching act of domestic violence that orphans her and her older sister, Emily is haunted by the loss of her kindred spirit. She turns to music for comfort, and keeps secret the fact that she has the ability to see other people’s auras and sense their true natures. For Emily, a kaleidoscope of color lofts above everyone she meets. She is instinctively drawn to rare, nurturing Purples like her mother and avoids the cruel Grays like her father, the Monster. Without her mother’s guidance, Emily must learn to trust her instincts and draw her boundaries on her own as she navigates through a newly found career in the music business.