Blues Journey

by Walter Dean Myers Narrated by Richard Allen

Overview

The opening line of this call and response style verse asks the question that forms the thread throughout - Blues, what you mean to me?

In a magnificent collaboration of words, art, and song, a timeline of the blues is presented in a soulful reading and dramatic musical accompaniment that offers a compelling evocation of the blues experience.

A Live Oak Media audio production.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

A powerful union of text and image transmutes itself into a work of art-and it explains what the blues is, besides. Walter Dean Myers takes fragments of blues songs and creates an arc of poetry with them. His son, Christopher, using only brown paper, blue ink, and white paint, creates a visual counterpoint to the words that sometimes reflects them and other times goes to a different but related place. In his one-page introduction, the elder Myers describes the blues as coming from the encounter between the five-tone scale and the call-and-response singing of African music, and the American idiom. This volume comes as close as you can in print to reproducing the feeling of the blues, even as Chris Raschka did for Bird in Charlie Parker Played Be Bop (1992), and does it in a way that small children can grasp. "Hollered to my woman, / she was across the way" shows a boy and his grandmother hovering over an open book; "Misery loves company, / blues can live alone" shows two boys sitting on a curb, one turns from the other. "If you see a dollar, tell it my full name" faces a portrait of a young man against a wrought iron fence. He holds his shoe up to his face and looks steadily through the hole in its sole to gaze at the viewer. Myers fils wields his limited palette in extraordinary ways: figures are blue and blue-black and brown, they have a sculptural presence against dark or light backgrounds, and their postures respond strongly to the words. "Blues, what you mean to me? / Are you my pain and misery, / or my sweet, sweet company?" Children will see both replies in the pictures and in the sweet dark rhythm of the words. (introduction, time line, glossary) (Picture book. 6-11)

From the Publisher

★ "A powerful union of text and image transmutes itself into a work of art-and it explains what the blues is, besides. Walter Dean Myers takes fragments of blues songs and creates an arc of poetry with them. His son, Christopher, using only brown paper, blue ink, and white paint, creates a visual counterpoint to the words that sometimes reflects them and other times goes to a different but related place." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

★ "In this collection of original poems, Myers's blues extend themselves to themes of racism, loneliness, slavery, and just plain hard luck. Christopher Myers's illustrations are impressively composed and imaginatively varied in design. You'll have to make up the tunes, but Myers père et fils are so deeply immersed in the rhythms and idioms of the blues that the music will seem to come right out of you in response." —The Horn Book, Starred Review


"The blues' deceptively simple rhyme scheme tracks the deeper feelings of lives that have been bruised. In this picture book for older readers, Myers offers blues-inspired verse that touches on the black-and-blue moments of individual lives. His son Christopher's images, which illustrate the call-and-response text, alternate between high spirited and haunting." —Booklist

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178437148
Publisher:	Live Oak Media
Publication date:	01/01/2005
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	8 - 11 Years

Read an Excerpt

Blues--what you mean to me?
Are you my pain and misery,
or my sweet, sweet company?

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