Blind Singer Joe's Blues

by Robert Love Taylor

Hannah Ruth Bayless has a she can sing. A woman of her time and place - early twentieth-century Appalachia - she has many other conflicting claims, chief of which are a handsome but unknowable husband and a blind son. Her story unfolds at a time when radio and the recording industry were discovering a rich source of music in the southern mountains. The music itself, the old ballads and fiddle tunes played for generations, was, like Hannah Ruth, her fiddling partner Pink Miracle, and eventually her son Singer Joe, shaped and reshaped, influenced by the growing exposure to rural and urban blues, ragtime, jazz, gospel, popular, and even classical music. The musicians themselves are constantly shaped by their relation not only to their music but to other people. Living in a dazzling and sometimes frightening present, they are chased by a shimmering and seductive past.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2006