Book Descriptions
for Blues Journey by Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
Walter Dean Myers’s picture book poem illustrates the connection between blues music, poetry, and the real-life events that inspire them. Each page includes a powerful collage-style drawing in dark, bluesy hues and four lines of poetry in the familiar call-and-response style found in the blues. The themes are typical of traditional blues music, including the horrors and joys experienced by African Americans in the United States. The glossary explains the symbolism of a handful of recurring images commonly used in countless songs. The book finishes with of timeline of major events in the history of blues. Winner, CCBC Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Discussion (Ages 9–14)
CCBC Choices 2004 . © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2004. Used with permission.
From the Publisher
The opening verse of this latest father/son collaboration probes the very essence of a form--and a feeling; it asks the question that anyone who has sought solace in music can relate to. The pair's first composition wandered through a Harlem collage, depicting "a call, a song, the mood indigo, a language of darkness." This new duet is the blues: verbally and visually, it explores the idiom while exemplifying it. A call and response accompanies each painting. As the journey progresses, the lyrics and art look at loss through the lenses of slavery, poverty, lynching, love spurned, fear of dying and of living. An author's note provides a lucid description of the history, elements, and importance of the blues.
Publisher description retrieved from Google Books.