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...