William Palmer

When the Levee Breaks

I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy

By

University of Chicago Press 308pp £18 order from our bookshop

Blues music emerged at the start of the twentieth century from the most disadvantaged people in the poorest part of the United States, the Deep South. The lives of the uneducated men and women from the black working class who were its singers went largely unrecorded. Only a few achieved fame and much of the writing about them is riddled with speculation and romantic invention. I Feel So Good is the first full biography of one of these major figures.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    • 'Ho was no Soviet or Chinese puppet. He was a nationalist first and foremost. Had the Americans just realised this.… ,
    Follow Us