Robert Gordon is the author of Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, among other books. He directed the PBS documentary Muddy Waters Can't Be Satisfied and was writer on the Memphis episode of Martin Scorsese's The Blues series. Bruce Nemerov is the audio specialist for the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, where he supervises the audio restoration laboratory and recorded media collections.
This may well be the greatest unpublished goldmine of early research into the music of black Mississippians, and its appearance is a boon not only to music scholars but to anyone interested in Southern life in a period of intense change and musical expression. --Sing Out! Gordon and Nemerov have rescued from oblivion an important study of black life in rural Mississippi. . . . Work's 160 song transcriptions of 1941-1942 field recordings form the 100-page centerpiece of this book, and equally illuminating are insightful essays by the Fisk trio on plantation folklore and traditions, already fading at that time as urban influences permeated the Mississippi Delta. --Publishers Weekly . . . these original documents . . . paint a compellingly accurate portrait of the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s. . . . Work, Jones, and Adams are finally getting their due at a time when Mississippi seems consumed with righting its past wrongs . . . --Mojo (5-star review) [R]estores credit for the definitive Delta-blues research to the men who conducted it. --PASTE Magazine . . . splendid and significant . . . Work was instrumental in uncovering and giving the work of bluesmen Muddy Waters, Son House, Son Sims, and Willie Brown to the world; every library that owns [Alan Lomax's book The Land Where the Blues Began] should own this one, too. An essential purchase for music collections . . . --Library Journal (starred review)