Pete Prown - The Ultimate Book of Blues Guitar
The Ultimate Book of Blues Guitar (Quatro Publishing Group, 2025)
Blues scholarship has taken a curious and much needed, 70-year route to where we are today. “Academic” interest in the blues music of the American south began proper with the publication of Samuel Charters' The Country Blues (Reinhart, 1959) and Paul Oliver's The Blues Fell This Morning: The Meaning of The Blues (Cassell, 1960). Amateur record collectors of pre-World War II jazz and blues (on 10-inch, 78 RPM shellac recordings) compounded this interest, with many of these collectors writing about the music they sought so diligently.
In 1961, John Hammond. Sr. appeared just as the American Folk Music Revival was in full swing, convincing Columbia Records to release Robert Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers. Going nowhere when released, the recording ignited the fevered imaginations of British musicians like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards, who declared Johnson the tabula rasa from which all blues emerged. The story turned out to be more complex, as an accretion of more rigorous investigation into the history of the blues came available.
From the beginning, the myth surrounding Robert Johnson and the blues formed from these early and inaccurate sources, eventually establishing itself as the written record of the genre. Following Charters and Oliver, each enthusiastic and well-meaning record collector/writers, published their books, perpetuating many fictions and inaccuracies, until the myth became accepted as fact.
Does that sound familiar?
As a result, a certain Romantic shadow obscured the blues from the historical truth, conveniently making the blues that more attractive, mysterious, and, most of all, a marketable commodity. After 50 years of compounding inaccuracies about the genre (e.g. Robert Palmer's Deep Blues: A Musical And Cultural History Of The Mississippi Delta (Viking, 1982)), the blues received a long overdue critical reevaluation, revealing a story no less interesting than that originally reported, just more factual, scholastic, and rigorously researched.
This recent critical scholarship includes: Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch's Robert Johnson: Lost And Found (University of Illinois, 2003); Patricia Schroeder's Robert Johnson: Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (University of Illinois, 2004); Elijah Wald's Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson And The Invention Of The Blues (Amistad Press, 2004); Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues (Basic Books, 2010); Amanda Petrusich's Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt For The World's Rarest 78 Rpm Records (Scribner, 2014); Steve Cushing's Pioneers Of The Blues Revival (University of Illinois Press, 2014); Abbott and Sheroff's The Original Blues: The Emergence Of The Blues In African American Vaudeville (University Press of Mississippi, 2017); Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's Up Jumped The Devil: The Real Life Of Robert Johnson and Annye C. Anderson’s, step-sister of Robert Johnson, and author Preston Lauderbach’s (The Chitlin’ Circuit And The Road To Rock ‘N’ Roll (Norton, 2012)) Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson (Hachette Books, 2020). These books built on and corrected the previous blues scholarship, while clarifying much of the myth and superstition marring the official record.
For an introduction to the blues, that is a lot of reading.
For those readers wanting a brief but contemporary overview of the subject, The Ultimate Book of Blues Guitar. This is not an exhaustive history. It is a thorough presentation narrowed down by considering blues guitarists and their axes of choice, as well as their place in blues history. Author Pete Prown hits all the high points between Charlie Patton and pre-war 78 rpm releases and Selwyn Birchwood and the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge.
The book proceeds chronologically from “Unplugged: Acoustic Blues.” This first section highlights Eddie “Son” House, Piedmont Blues, Robert Johnson, and “Key Players” thus establishing the paradigm of presentation used throughout the volumn. While Son House is an inspired choice to begin this journey, by the numbers this should have been Charlie Patton based on number of recordings made alone. He is mentioned in the “Key Players” section. House does serve as a direct conduit to Robert Johnson, what author Pete Prome is aiming at. There is a geographic and stylistic divergence presented between the “Delta Blues” and “Piedmont Blues,” the former being a product of the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta with its gutteral blues methods and all points east, with its ragtime inflections.
Prown makes his way through this often unruly history through Chicago and early electric blues to rock & roll, the British Invasion, the apex of the blues revival from the late 1950s through the 1970s addressing the Allman Brothers, Eric Clapton, and Johnny Winter. Everything proceeds as expected until Promemusters the courage to present musicians around the edge of the blues: the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, and Little Feat, all tacitly associated with the blues.
Prome saves his best for last where he highlights the blues post Stevie Ray Vaughn. This book excels in presenting the artists of the last 20 years like Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes, Gary Clark Jr., Samantha Fish, Chistone “ Kingfish” Ingram. Prome takes full advantage of his “Key Players” section to mention every major blues artist with few if any omissions. There are some, but none that should sully this wonderful introduction of America’s music. This is a great place for the initiated and uninitiated to begin the fruitful journey through the development of all post war musical styles.