Synopses & Reviews
Blues, blues, blues, blues, what you mean to me? Blues, blues, blues, blues, what you mean to me? Are you my pain and misery, or my sweet, sweet company? Renowned author Walter Dean Myers celebrates the African experience in America with a soulful, affecting blues poem that details the long journey from the Middle Passage to life today. Accompanied by Christopher Myers's bold and powerful paintings, Blues Journey creates its own resonant music. Includes a time line, blues glossary, and author's note.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
The blues aren't all sad. There's joy in the blues as well as heartbreak. Love discovered. Love lost. Love just around the corner. In this beautiful tribute to the poetry and art of the blues, renowned author Walter Dean Myers collaborates with his son, award-winning illustrator Christopher Myers, in a true masterpiece of picture book creation filled with struggle, grief, hope, joy, and love.
Each original blues-style verse on a page calls out a response from the artist in striking tones of brown, black, white, and blue. Together, father and son weave an enchanting story of the creation of the blues through the experiences of African Americans from the end of slavery through the beginning of the civil rights movement.
This book is for older children who love music and their parents who will appreciate the layered sophistication of the striking artwork and interplay between art andt text.
Includes an author's note explaining the birth and development of the blues, a timeline of blues milestones, and an explanatory glossary of terms in the blues. Together this content deepens the appreciation for the blues as a truly original art form.
A Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor book.