"A fresh new perspective that will be a true revolution to readers and will open new lines of discussion on . . . the importance of the city of New Orleans for generations to come." —Dr. Michael White, jazz clarinetist, composer, and Keller Endowed Chair at Xavier University of LA

An untold authentic counter-narrative blues history and the first written by an African American blues artist

All prior histories on the blues have alleged it originated on plantations in the Mississippi Delta. Not true, says author Chris Thomas King. In The Blues, King present facts to disprove such myths.

This book is the first to argue the blues began as a cosmopolitan art form, not a rural one.

As early as 1900, the sound of the blues was ubiquitous in New Orleans. The Mississippi Delta, meanwhile, was an unpopulated sportsman’s paradise—the frontier was still in the process of being cleared and drained for cultivation. 

Expecting these findings to be controversial in some circles, King has buttressed his conclusions with primary sources and years of extensive research, including a sojourn to West Africa and interviews with surviving folklorists and blues researchers from the 1960s folk-rediscovery epoch. 

New Orleans, King states, was the only place in the Deep South where the sacred and profane could party together without fear of persecution, creating the blues.