Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey

"The blues are the roots; everything else is the fruits."
--Willie Dixon

Beginning with a journey from Africa to the Mississippi Delta, The Blues shows how the great American music grew from field hollers, work songs and church choirs; then to the juke joints, house parties and recording studios of Memphis and Chicago; the embrace of blues music by white musicians, beginning with Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley, the Stones, the Beatles -- an embrace that would place the blues squarely at the heart of mainstream music; and ends with the emotional embrace of this African-American music by musicians all over the world. This book, as with the series it accompanies, honors the music, preserves its legacy, and promotes its future.

The book will work equally well for general readers as for devotees of the series. Its structure runs parallel to the series, yet is also a self-contained history so that it can be read independently. Most exciting, it incorporates brief essays (most commissioned exclusively for this book), personal essays expounding in personal ways on how the blues has touched the lives of a wide range of literary and musical luminaries.