Blues, Musical Instruments - Strings - General, Music Biography

A Blues Life

Name: A Blues Life
Author: Henry Townsend
ISBN: 9780252025266

by Henry Townsend

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Overview

This oral history recounts Townsend's early days as a shoeshiner fronting for a bootlegging operation, his passion for the guitar, and his collaborations and friendships with many of the musicians and entrepreneurs who shaped the blues scene in St. Louis. Through Townsend's easy reminiscences, the guitarist Lonnie Johnson, the pianists Walter Davis and Roosevelt Sykes, and the promoter Jessie Johnson come vividly to life, along with scores of other individuals both remembered and forgotten who left their mark on a key musical genre.. "Touching on important social aspects of St. Louis life, from racism and police harassment to honky-tonk speakeasies, A Blues Life offers a personal and often moving commentary on music and culture in the city. Townsend recounts that in the 1920s, St. Louis's Booker Washington Theatre brought in famous acts like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Peg Leg Bates, but very few local blues artists ever appeared there. While middle-class blacks regarded jazz as on the border of respectability, the blues were far over the line, and especially the raw, "gut bucket style blues" that Townsend says set St. Louis blues apart from the styles developing in Chicago, Kansas City, and Mississippi.

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Editorials

Blues Access

Townsend is the only living musician to have recorded in every decade since 1920 and has been an inegral part of the St. Louis blues scene for seventy years. In this enchanting oral history, this nationally acclaimed performer tells his story. A great read.

Blues Revue

Guitarist Henry Townsend is the last living link to pre-World War II St. Louis blues. While not as well-known as Chicago or Kansas City, St. Louis developed a vital blues scene featuring the likes of Peetie Wheatstraw, Roosevelt Sykes, Walter Davis, Big Joe Williams and a host of touring musicians who played the city's Booker Washington Theatre.Townsend pulls no punches in his account. Your life is the life you live, he said. What you live is how it should be written. If it hurts, it's too late anyway. Whatever you done, it's too late to try and fix it or patch it. If you lived it you lived it, making it pretty don't help a bit.