Vincenzo Martorella
Il Blues

A journey to the origins of the blues, to understand the social, cultural, and human context in which the devil's music developed until it took the form we know today.

A journey whose purpose is to dispel the mists that envelop the early cries of the blues, to understand where, how, when, and why, without leaving room for legends, as suggestive as you want but still legends.

A journey that begins in Africa, where the first seeds of what would become the blues are found, before the slave trade to the southern plantations, reaching fulfillment in the 1930s, with that watershed moment that answers to the name of Robert Johnson, when the roots had firmly taken hold in the muddy soil of the Delta. It is not the blues of Muddy Waters, B.B. King, or Buddy Guy, but of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and other great singers of the urban blues of the 1920s, when blues and jazz still went hand in hand, of Skip James, Son House, Charley Patton and the greats of the Delta, but also of the countless anonymous laborers of the plantations, those who had all the reasons in the world to sing of their "blue devils."

Martorella has the merit of being able to write an essay that is pleasantly readable, navigating the disputes involving the many self-proclaimed inventors of the blues, rigorous historical reconstructions, countless portraits of more or less significant artists, and interesting technical analyses on the development of the blues' harmonic, metric, and lyrical structure.

A book that deals, we might say, with the prehistory of modern music, attributing to the blues the status of "classical" music, given the enormous influence that the twelve-bar structure has had on twentieth-century music, and it does so with a passion and expertise that make it a delightful read for all enthusiasts of this fascinating musical genre.