Chasing the Blues: A Traveler's Guide to America's Music

Chasing the Blues explores the roots of the blues—-the music birthed in the Mississippi Delta by African Americans who fashioned a new form of musical expression grounded in their shared experience of brutal oppression. They used the power of music to survive that oppression, creating a simple-in-structure, emotionally complex form that transformed and upended culture and became the bedrock of popular song.

Tracing the music back to its geographical and cultural origins in the Delta is key ...