Steven C Tracy - Going To Cincinnatii: A History of the Blues in the Queen City (Great Cincinnati Bicentennial)

When one thinks of locales famous for the blues, Chicago, the Mississippi Delta, and maybe Texas come to mind. Cincinnati, while not possessing the distinctive sounds that make the aforementioned locations so immediately identifiable with a particular style, nonetheless has a history of individual performers and record labels that makes it a notable city for blues scholars. The river and the railroad brought many rural African American musicians to the city as far back as the early 1920s. Mass popularity did not arrive until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris recorded their own brand of music for King Records--a sound that became known as rhythm and blues. King would later usher in soul music with the likes of Hank Ballard and Little Willie John. An interesting look at a little-known blues mecca; recommended where there is interest.

Steven Tracy is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has authored, edited, co-edited, or provided introductions for thirty books, provided over seventy contributions to book publications edited by others, written over fifty CD liner notes, and taught, lectured, and presented papers in the US, Canada, England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, and China. A singer-harmonica player, he has opened for B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Canned Heat, and others, and recorded with blues groups and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. His Writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2011. Touched by the Blues: Futuristic Jungleism, Ragmentation, and the Bluing of American Literature is at press under consideration. He is currently on the Fulbright Senior Specialist roster and will lecture and teach as a Fulbright Senior Specialist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and has been chosen for the ChuTian Scholar Award, the most prestigious scholar award in Hubei Province, China.