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Originally Posted by ann ashtray
Just finished rereading "Room Full of Mirrors". A fantastic, well researched, biography on Jimi Hendrix. Written by Charles Cross...would recommend it to anyone that might take even a slight interest in the subject matter.
Currently, (again...) rereading "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson + the Invention of the Blues". Another personal favorite. While covering much info. on Mr. Johnson, the book is not so much a biography as an attempt at tearing the mythology in early blues apart, and making the best possible sense of things (one of these "myths" in the minds of many uneducated blues fans is that Robert Johnson had some hand in inventing the blues...and all that rubbish about the blues being little more than early African American misery expressed through stringed instruments). Again, I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject matter.
"Scholars love to praise the 'pure' blues artists or the ones, like Robert Johnson, who died young + represent tragedy. It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy." - B.B. King
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That's a great book. It's very much the antithesis to Greil Marcus' account which really is
pure mystification. But I think Wood misunderstands that mystification around Robert Johnson. He did have an enormous hand in inventing the blues, not as a musical form so much as lending it a mystique. People like Marcus knew that the person they were writing about wasn't the 'real' Robert Johnson but in writing about him how they did they provided the blues with an aura that has been almost as influential as the music itself. There'd still have been The Rolling Stones had the myth surrounding Robert Johnson not been created, but I suspect they'd have never written 'Sympathy for the Devil' without it.