The Land Where the Blues Began

by Alan Lomax

In 1942 Alan Lomax set off for the Mississippi Delta in the American Deep South as the head of a four-person team, to make field recordings of Black American folk music for the Library of Congress. This book recounts their travels, recording impromptu sessions and interviews, and it describes the hostility that Lomax and his assistants (an Argentinian and two Black Americans) suffered from small-town white hierarchy. Lomax met many of the greats of blues music. He describes the sessions he spent with a barefoot young Muddy Waters out on the plantation, making the first-ever recordings of the man he met again years later driving a large Cadillac. He describes his meeting with Little Robert Johnson's mother shortly after the singer's death by poisoning, and he quotes word for word the life history of Big Bill Broonzy, describing the appalling injustices inflicted on him and his fellow Blacks. In this account, Lomax paints a picture of life in the Deep South of the 1940s, and the making of the blues.