Books like The World Don't Owe Me Nothing — picked by fans

I love this book for many reasons, but to start, I love that the title is a poetic metaphor, I love that the story is almost a hundred years old but still speaks to the rebellious spirit alive within young readers, and I love that the book is loosely based on Zora’s real life and the real place of Eatonville, Florida.

I love that readers get to experience the past and can envision their own future while reading this book. I laughed, cried, and found pieces of myself within the quotes snitched to this story. 

Wald is a contrarian’s contrarian; this revisionist study--lucid, sensible, self-assured--demolishes not just the soul-selling-at-the-crossroads mythology embraced by fans of Robert Johnson, but a series of romantic misconceptions about blues music in general and Mississippi blues in particular.

He reminds us, for example, that classic blueswomen like Ma Raney and Bessie Smith were the first stars of the blues; that Johnson was, by contrast, virtually unknown on a national level during his own lifetime; and that Johnson, celebrated by his mythologizers as a devil-haunted innovator, was actually a savvy, record-copying consolidator of a broad range of contemporary blues styles.

He was also a “polka hound” and human jukebox, according to Wald, a jack-of-all-trades who played Gene Autry songs and other pop tunes for the pleasure of his audiences, black and white.

I remember reading Wilson’s play for the first time as a grad student, not long after I’d been a street musician in Harlem working with a brilliant, irascible old bluesman from Mississippi, and thinking “I know these guys.”

Wilson, the greatest American blues playwright (and one of the greatest American dramatists period), has an uncanny ear for the jibing, jiving, wisdom-declaiming back-and-forth that fills the conversational space between four southern-born musicians who find themselves in a Chicago recording studio one day in 1927, getting ready to back up their boss, Ma Rainey.

Toledo, elder and griot, the keeper of ancestral wisdom, butts heads with Levee, the hotheaded young innovator who bears, and brandishes, deep wounds inflicted by white southern violence. The play’s denouement is hurtful, shattering, unforgettable.  

A precise, thoughtful, and unromantic blues scholar, Barry Lee Pearson was also a friend of, and occasional booking agent for, DC-area acoustic blues legends like John Jackson and Cephas & Wiggins.

Jook Right On, which I was delighted to blurb and use in my own teaching, offers a series of compact autobiographical testimonies—“blues stories”—on a wide range of topics from a wide range of blues people. 

“Wordsmiths by trade,” Pearson writes in his brilliantly incisive introduction, “these storytellers bring to their tales qualities also found in blues musical performance and philosophical perspectives characteristic of the blues tradition such as improvisation, ironic humor, ambivalence, and a life-affirming sense of hope in the face of adversity.”

Constitutionally immune to cliches, Pearson brings you closer to the blues musician’s perspective than any writer I know.  

The story of American music is laid out in a fascinating series of stories by musicologist and former New York Times music critic Robert Palmer. Palmer used interviews with Muddy Waters and many other bluesmen to explain how this music traveled from Africa to the American South and then up to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities.

It is an in-depth look at the stories and myths of the South and the people who made their escape from the brutal cotton fields and racial segregation of the times. This book is a must for anyone wanting to know the beginnings and significance of American music.

I was struck by the beautiful writing in this novel and the way the author, a woman, convincingly depicts male friendship. Augustus Lee Rivers, a black farmer in Arkansas, is happiest when playing his guitar; he has dreams of making it big in Chicago. David Duncan, an enthusiastic fan of Hummin’ Gusty’s music, comes from a wealthy white family. What can happen to a black man’s dreams in rural Arkansas in the 1950s? Trust me, you’ll keep reading to find out. 

This originally came out in 1973 as Chicago Breakdown, and has probably never been out of print. Rowe is an English blues historian and record collector, and his obsessive fascination with the musicians, labels, and clubs that created the blues in Chicago’s golden years drips off every page, from Lester Melrose’s Bluebird label through to the Chess Records giants – Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin Wolf and “the last of the great blues poets”, Sonny Boy Williamson. Much of Rowe’s work has no doubt been superseded by the veritable industry of blues research that has sprung up in the years since publication, but Chicago Blues was a major milestone, and remains the indispensable key to an understanding of the city’s music scene.

A series of profiles of the author’s musical heroes, along with erudite essays on blues, rock’n’roll, and Chess Records, this is an essential primer. You cannot understand the place of the blues in modern culture without also understanding Little Richard, Elvis Presley, the relationships between white label bosses and their black artists, and the ever-present, inescapable fact of musical cross-pollenation. Chess had Muddy Waters on its roster, and Howlin Wolf, but also Chuck Berry, Ramsey Lewis, and The Moonglows. Guralnick’s writing is elegant, informed, and self-aware, and from Skip James to Jerry Lee Lewis, in the 50 years since its publication, the reputations of his book’s iconic subjects have rocketed in value.

It began as a master’s thesis in the early Sixties, when the blues was still (just) alive and evolving, and still celebrated by its traditional black audiences. By the time the book was published in 1966, however, white fans had ‘discovered’ the music, and everything was changing. Pounding, repetitive tunes of the kind written by Willie Dixon at Chess and popularised by English R&B bands, became the canon. The blues, with a new rock audience unaware of its rich variety and deep hinterland, was reduced to a single rather tedious idea. It didn’t have to be like this. It’s not the fault of those white R&B bands, but if they had been less fixated on Chicago and opened themselves up to influences from Detroit, say, and Memphis, we might now be living in a different musical world. Keil provides a glimpse of it.

Howard was a top Los Angeles session guitarist (one of the fabled Wrecking Crew), jazz stylist, and brilliant visionary who combined his skills to create the Guitar Institute of Technology, an innovative, intensive program that trained thousands of professionals and transformed guitar education.

The Guitar Compendium is the result of Howard’s decades of research into learning theory and information flow applied to the guitar. It’s not a standard guitar method (and not designed for raw beginners), but rather a collection of practical, thought-provoking solutions to the universal challenges of learning and playing the instrument, from developing technique to breaking through creative roadblocks. If you’re an aspiring, curious, and perhaps frustrated guitarist, The Praxis System is a unique source of wisdom and inspiration from one of the greatest.