Description
Book SynopsisFor thirty years, Margo Cooper has been documenting the lives of blues musicians, their families and homes, neighbourhoods, festivals, and gigs. Deep Inside the Blues collects thirty-four of Margo Cooper's interviews with blues artists, illustrated with over 160 of her photographs.
Trade ReviewPRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR: "The urgent need to preserve a cornerstone of American culture led folklorists like John Lomax to travel the country documenting early blues recordings and writers like Amiri Baraka to publish
Blues People: Negro Music in White America. Although Margo Cooper did not know it when she began more than twenty years ago, she has followed that tradition and produced a documentary project that archives the oral and visual histories of blues musicians, their families, and communities in northern Mississippi and the Delta." - ayemi shakur,
New York TimesPRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR: "Cooper's images remind us that the blues is as much attitude or way of life as art form. . . . She sees herself as an advocate for the music, a celebrant, but not an apologist. Clearly, her photographs are a labor of love." - Mark Feeney,
Boston Globe"
Deep Inside the Blues avoids the culture-wide tendency to romanticize and elegize its subjects as ‘the last surviving bluesmen’ or view them solely as conduits for the pain of racial oppression. Instead, Cooper’s interviews offer a nuanced celebration of the musicians she has come to know—indomitable individuals, storytellers and healers both, who have etched themselves into the world’s imagination." - Adam Gussow, author of
Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music"
Deep Inside the Blues is truly historic. It is a stunning tribute to the musicians and to Cooper for her vision and persistence in gathering their photographs and oral histories." - William R. Ferris, author of
I AM A MAN: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970
