![The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White](/assets/95fa322e/9781496817518-356674-510x590.jpg "The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White")
The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White
![The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White](/assets/5474edee/9781496817518-356674-600x800.jpg "The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White")
The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White
Recalling the Blues
Booker “Bukka” White (1905–1977) was one of the most important blues musicians of the twentieth century. The twelve songs he recorded in Chicago in 1940 are considered to be among the finest in country blues. In The Life and Music of Booker “Bukka” White: Recalling the Blues, David W. Johnson traces the trajectory of White’s life from his early years in Chickasaw and Grenada Counties, Mississippi, through his imprisonment in the notorious Mississippi State Penal Farm in the late 1930s, to making a new life for himself in Memphis, Tennessee.
For years only a name on old 78 records—and believed by some to be dead—White was “rediscovered” by John Fahey and ED Denson in the summer of 1963. He went on to have a productive second career, playing venues and festivals throughout the United States and in Canada, and touring Europe and Great Britain with the American Folk Blues Festival. In 1975, he was invited to Bremen, Germany, for a solo concert that was released as his final album.
In July 1976, the author interviewed White shortly before his discharge from a Massachusetts hospital where he was recovering from a stroke. After spending eight days in the intensive care unit and three weeks in rehabilitation, White was ready to talk about his life. Recalling stories of “slavery time,” White told the author, “. . . some of the [formerly enslaved] guys were wise enough to hold that in their head where they could tell a young pants, where it would go down in history, you know. Just like you doing that now—something happen to you, somebody else will carry that on.”
The product of years of research, The Life and Music of Booker “Bukka” White is the first full-length biography of this remarkable country blues performer. Interviewing those who knew White, including his second cousin B. B. King, Johnson has written a detailed and sometimes surprising account of how a young Black man born in the first decade of the twentieth century—the grandson of a slave—found a way to rise above his circumstances and maintain a decades-long career as a musician.
Mr. Johnson not only offers a chronology of Bukka’s life; his writing captures the soul of my grandfather. The career. The families who wished they’d known him better. His sadness that industry insiders at times made more than he did from his work. And ultimately, his lonely passing in Memphis. I applaud David W. Johnson for this powerful work.
The Life and Music of Booker ‘Bukka’ White: Recalling the Blues is the long-awaited, definitive biography of Bukka White, whose life and music are essential to understanding American blues and folk music through the eyes of a Black artist.
It’s good to see that a full-length biography has finally been written about this seminal Mississippi blues artist. It’s thorough, well researched, and engagingly written, and covers White’s previously obscure early years as well as bringing new light to several aspects of his ‘rediscovery’ period.
David W. Johnson combed countless public records to reconcile stories told by and about White with the facts of his early life and career. Johnson is particularly good on the second phase of White’s career—1963 to 1976—when Bukka was involved with the mostly white world of folk festivals, clubs, college performances, group concerts, agents, and blues enthusiasts. Johnson’s book is a biography of a man and an analysis of a time.
David W. Johnson is author of Lonesome Melodies: The Lives and Music of the Stanley Brothers, published by University Press of Mississippi.
