Books Celebrating Traditional Music and Culture

Journeyman’s Road
Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York Adam Gussow

“Adam Gussow has lived the Blues life. By some miracle he has also lived to write about it. Whether his subject is a novel by Faulkner or the romance of buying an amp, his prose is as dynamic as a guitar solo by Stevie Ray Vaughan.” —Krin Gabbard, author of Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture
“Adam not only knows the blues…he feels it. Read this book and you will too.”
—Shemekia Copeland Harmonica lessons from Adam Gussow on YouTube
Listen to music by Adam Gussow and Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee
View Adam Gussow’s book tour and scheduled performances
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Grassroots Music in the Upper Cumberland
Edited by William Lynwood Montell
“This book is, in a sense, a folk history of the music cultures of this area, and one full of rich detail and cultural surprises.” —Charles K. Wolfe

In this new book, various authors cover a variety of musical styles: English ballads, gospel, bluegrass, modern country, and even rock ’n’ roll—all find their unique expression in the musical mosaic of the Upper Cumberland. Read more

Fiddlin’ Charlie Bowman
An East Tennessee Old-Time Music Pioneer and His Musical Family
Bob L. Cox
With an Afterword by Archie Green

This new book tells-for the first time-the story of Charlie Bowman, a musician from East Tennessee, who was a major influence on the distinctive fiddle style definitive of country music of the 1920s and 1930s.
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Jook Right On
Blues Stories and Blues Storytellers
Barry Lee Pearson

“Jook Right On could possibly produce the same kind of blues revival 2000s that Charter’s work did almost fifty years earlier.” —Bruce Conforth, Journal of Folklore Research “Pearson has collected a gold mine of compelling tales, organized them with convincing logic, and introduced them with the kind of penetrating insight and professional modesty that any blues scholar might do well to emulate.”
—Adam Gussow, author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition and Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York

Podcasts- Listen to interviews from Jook Right On
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Other UT Press titles on music tradition and culture

African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia: A Study of Folk Traditions