Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a rollicking memoir of the legendary folklorist's journey into blues country.


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).