Keil's classic account of blues and its artists is both a guide to the development of the music and a powerful study of the blues as an expressive form in and for African American life. This updated edition explores the place of the blues in artistic, social, political, and commercial life since the 1960s. "An achievement of the first magnitude...He opens our eyes and introduces a world of amazingly complex musical happening."--Robert Farris Thompson, Ethnomusicology