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Blue Shots

by Erik Lindahl

Photographs: Erik Lindahl

Text: L-P Anderson, Nils Hanson, Tommy Löfgren

Publisher: Journal

146 pages

Pictures: black and white illustrations throughout

Year: 2008

ISBN: 978-91-976966-4-7

Comments: First edition, 1,500 copies; Softcover

Everybody wants to know where the blues came from. But no one ever will know where they came from, not really. We can see through a glass darkly the spectral spirits, unnamed and unknown, that informed the blues; and we can hear the faint, indistinct echoes from hidden sources, the strains of the music that came before the first recordings.
Wouldn't it have been grand if a Mathew Brady had taken to photographing black musicians of the post-bellum South rather than, or at least in addition to, battlefield corpses. Working on a dig in the Mississippi Delta near the Stovall plantation in 1901, archaeologists heard a haunting, sad music like nothing they had ever heard. It was the blues, which had been drifting through the farms and the plantations — Stovall's and Dockery's and others — and the dirt-road towns of the Delta for many years, undocumented either in sound or in image. We can hear elusive, shadowy resonances of those days in recordings made in the late 1920's by men such as Charlie Patton, and in photographs from then and later we can see what remained to be seen and sensed in the faded landscape and landmarks of what once had been.
Where the blues came from is a mystery that no amount of information can solve, for ultimately the sounds and sights of that mystery are those of our imagining. But in this beautiful book, Erik Lindahl shows us where the blues live today.

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