The continuing adventures of Verity, a teenage country girl, as she travels through an America transformed by nanotechnology. This trip is in a boat on the Mississippi and the boat is attacked by pirates.

Although many bluesmen began leaving the Magnolia State in the early twentieth century to pursue fortune and fame up north, many others stayed home. These musicians remained rooted to the traditions of their land, which came to define a distinctive playing style unique to Mississippi. They didn't simply play the blues, they lived it. Travel through the hallowed juke joints and cotton fields with author Roger Stolle as he recounts the history of Mississippi blues and the musicians who have kept it alive. Some of these bluesmen remain to carry on this proud legacy, while others have passed on, but Hidden History of Mississippi Blues ensures none will be forgotten.

The photographic record of unprecedented musical discovery and the geniuses of Mississippi's Hill Country blues

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, folklorist William Ferris toured his home state of Mississippi, documenting the voices of African Americans as they spoke about and performed the diverse musical traditions that form the authentic roots of the blues. Now, Give My Poor Heart Ease puts front and center a searing selection of the artistically and emotionally rich voices from this invaluable documentary record. Illustrated with Ferris's photographs of the musicians and their communities and including a CD of original music, the book features more than twenty interviews relating frank, dramatic, and engaging narratives about black life and blues music in the heart of the American South. Here are the stories of artists who have long memories and speak eloquently about their lives, blues musicians who represent a wide range of musical traditions--from one-strand instruments, bottle-blowing, and banjo to spirituals, hymns, and prison work chants. Celebrities such as B. B. King and Willie Dixon, along with performers known best in their neighborhoods, express the full range of human and artistic experience--joyful and gritty, raw and painful. In an autobiographical introduction, Ferris reflects on how he fell in love with the vibrant musical culture that was all around him but was considered off limits to a white Mississippian during a troubled era. This magnificent volume illuminates blues music, the broader African American experience, and indeed the history and culture of America itself.

“The essential history of this distinctly American genre.”—Atlanta Journal-Constitution In this “expertly researched, elegantly written, dispassionate yet thoughtful history” (Gary Giddins), award-winning author Ted Gioia gives us “the rare combination of a tome that is both deeply informative and enjoyable to read” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). From the field hollers of nineteenth-century plantations to Muddy Waters and B.B. King, Delta Blues delves into the uneasy mix of race and money at the point where traditional music became commercial and bluesmen found new audiences of thousands. Combining extensive fieldwork, archival research, interviews with living musicians, and first-person accounts with “his own calm, argument-closing incantations to draw a line through a century of Delta blues” (New York Times), this engrossing narrative is flavored with insightful and vivid musical descriptions that ensure “an understanding of not only the musicians, but the music itself” (Boston Sunday Globe). Rooted in the thick-as-tar Delta soil, Delta Blues is already “a contemporary classic in its field” (Jazz Review).

"Deep Blues" offers a concise, authoritative account of the music's Afircan beginnings, its early evolution, and its transformation from a backcountry good-time music into today's modern blues and rock and roll.