Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a rollicking memoir of the legendary folklorist's journey into blues country. In an exciting new collaboration, The New Press, Rounder Records, and the Alan Lomax Archive present an unprecedented opportunity to explore the history of the blues. The Land Where the Blues Began is Lomax's ''singingly well-written cornbread-and-moonshine odyssey'' (Kirkus Reviews) across America's musical heartland. Through candid conversations with bluesmen and vivid, firsthand accounts of the landscape where their music was born, Lomax's ''discerning reconstructions...give life to a domain most of us can never know...one that summons us with an oddly familiar sensation of reverence and dread'' (The New York Times Book Review).