Pfff on those scholars who attribute the blues strictly to tragedy...there are no blues to be had reading these books.

I have had my head in pleasure reading books for the last couple of weeks, especially since classes in my last semester of library school (!) have yet to begin so all it is now is working and reading and crafting.The other day I picked up two reads I've been dying to check out for quite some time--James Weldon Johnson's classic novel, "The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man", which was one of the first novels to feature an African-American main character. Johnson published the novel anonymously in 1912, but it failed to gain recognition until its re-release in 1927 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance when many were exploring racial ambiguity and the like. Johnson's book is filled with ragtime music, cigar factories, gambling elites in New York, and the constant weaving of life in white society and black society by the book's lead character, whose skin is "light enough" to pass in both sectors. Now considered one of the great classics alongside the works of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, Weldon Johnson wasn't just a novelist--he was a poet, composer, journalist, educator, and even diplomat.Similarly, as any of you know who read my music blog, I am an obsessive devotee of all things American blues music, and so it seemed necessary, since I've read many another book on this genre already, to finally pick up a biography of Robert Johnson, the ultimate pioneer of blues music who was left unrecognized by most of his black peers during his heyday. "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues" by Elijah Wald, examines the music, the newspapers, other archival material, and even interviews a whole slew of musicians to discover why Johnson was largely ignored by core black audiences in the 1930s only to eventually be considered the most formidable blues man...ever. It's a generous read, separating all the junk from the worth, without feeling excessively heady or filled with notes, and something I highly recommend if you enjoy music or American history.File Under: What are you reading?