Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

This was an interesting read though a bit too scholarly at times. I am a fan of Mr. Gussows work and while I enjoyed this book I don't know if it will be everyone's cup of tea. If you have an interest in the subject matter I do recommend this to you as there is nothing else out there quite like it.

Adam Gussow has written an absorbing and innovative study of American "blues texts" over the past century, demonstrating that this genre permeates several media, from music and fiction to autobiography and journalism, and that a pervasive theme in the blues, even its prime initiative, is a response to the wave of race murders and lynchings that occurred in the Southern states after 1890. "Spectacle lynchings," widely-publicized acts of mob vigilance, gave rise to a rhetoric of retribution in the blues, understandably directed toward white oppressors, but also more tragically toward black bodies and souls. The complex burden of the blues, Gussow argues, is to perform rites of exorcism that re-enact violence without the comfort of catharsis or transubtantiation, the usual consequences of tragedy. His chapters successively explore the subjects of lynchings, dismemberment, murder, riot, and knifings, each time through a central author or text, set amidst a rich array of ancillary texts and voices. The chapters are models of rigorous historical research and intelligently modulated critical discussion. This book is an accurate and eloquently argued work of cultural imagination. It raises deeply troubling questions about race and art in America, and it will endure for a long while as a very distinguished publication.