Blues Book of the Year —Living Blues Association of Recorded Sound Collections Awards for Excellence Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, Gospel, Soul, or R&B–Certificate of Merit (2018) 2023 Blues Hall of Fame Inductee - Classic of Blues Literature category With this volume, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff complete their groundbreaking trilogy on the development of African American popular music. Fortified by decades of research, the authors bring to life the performers, entrepreneurs, critics, venues, and institutions that were most crucial to the emergence of the blues in black southern vaudeville theaters; the shadowy prehistory and early development of the blues is illuminated, detailed, and given substance. At the end of the nineteenth century, vaudeville began to replace minstrelsy as America’s favorite form of stage entertainment. Segregation necessitated the creation of discrete African American vaudeville theaters. When these venues first gained popularity, ragtime coon songs were the standard fare. Insular black southern theaters provided a safe haven, where coon songs underwent rehabilitation and blues songs suitable for the professional stage were formulated. The process was energized by dynamic interaction between the performers and their racially-exclusive audience. The first blues star of black vaudeville was Butler “String Beans” May, a blackface comedian from Montgomery, Alabama. Before his bizarre, senseless death in 1917, String Beans was recognized as the “blues master piano player of the world.” His musical legacy, elusive and previously unacknowledged, is preserved in the repertoire of country blues singer-guitarists and pianists of the race recording era. While male blues singers remained tethered to the role of blackface comedian, female “coon shouters” acquired a more dignified aura in the emergent persona of the “blues queen.” Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and most of their contemporaries came through this portal; while others, such as forgotten blues heroine Ora Criswell and her protégé Trixie Smith, ingeniously reconfigured the blackface mask for their own subversive purposes. In 1921 black vaudeville activity was effectively nationalized by the Theater Owners Booking Association (T.O.B.A.). In collaboration with the emergent race record industry, T.O.B.A. theaters featured touring companies headed by blues queens with records to sell. By this time the blues had moved beyond the confines of entertainment for an exclusively black audience. Small-time black vaudeville became something it had never been before—a gateway to big-time white vaudeville circuits, burlesque wheels, and fancy metropolitan cabarets. While the 1920s was the most glamorous and remunerative period of vaudeville blues, the prior decade was arguably even more creative, having witnessed the emergence, popularization, and early development of the original blues on the African American vaudeville stage.

Gilda Harris (Gillie) is an incorrigible young African American woman living in rural Georgia during mid 1920's and early 30's struggling to find meaning in her life after the death of her mother. Soon Gilda's intuitive nature eventually leads her and her friends Julia Freeman and James Fisher (Po Fisher) on a timeline into a world filled with loyalty, love and deception. This world opens up the historical events of its time as it brings some very cunning, charismatic, and even dangerous characters to life. These events unveil personal experiences of social and racial degradation of the South as well as the successful business of Speak Easy's and infamous Brothels along the southern Gulf of the United States. Never in a million years did Gilda think that her lifelong passion for the Jazz and Blues would catapult her and her friends into the dangerous and corrupt underworld of bootleggers and mobsters. However her experiences soon bring Gilda to the realization that it is the people that she loves and love her in return that really brings happiness and meaning to her life.

Ever since her father died, quirky Gilda Joyce has been working hard to sharpen her psychic skills. She's determined to communicate with spirits from the Other Side and become a crack investigator of spooky, twisted mysteries. After wrangling an invitation to visit relatives in San Francisco, Gilda discovers that her dreary, tight-lipped uncle and his strange, delicate daughter need her help to uncover the terrible family secret that has a tortured ghost stalking their home. From poignant to hair-raising and hilarious, this is a behind-the-scenes, tell-all account of the very first case in the illustrious career of Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator.

Fresh from the Second City troupe in Toronto, Gilda Radner created such memorable characters as Emily Litella and Roseanne Roseannadanna as a member of the original cast of Saturday Night Live. The wife of Gene Wilder, Gilda was plagued by persistent health problems and two miscarriages, and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1986. Brave, funny, and painfully honest, the twentieth-anniversary edition of It's Always Something is the story of Gilda's journey while living with cancer and her determination to continue laughing. "Cancer," she said, "is about the most unfunny thing in the world." But Gilda's gutsy and unique sense of humor never left her as she describes two years of cancer treatment -- surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation treatment, as well as the high and low points of her own career. Told as only Gilda could tell it, and newly revised to include a resource guide for those living with cancer, It's Always Something is the inspiring story of a courageous, funny woman determined to enjoy life no matter the circumstances.

The blues was born in the Mississippi Delta, and since that fateful night in 1903 when W. C. Handy heard the mournful sound of a pocketknife sliding over the strings of an acoustic guitar and the plaintive song of a long-forgotten musician in the hot night of Tutwiler, Mississippi, the blues has been on a journey around the world. From the cotton fields and juke joints of the Delta, up Highway 61 to Memphis's Beale Street, St. Louis, the Southside of Chicago, England, and points beyond, the blues is America's unique form of music. Blues is incisive in its honesty, elemental in its rhythm, and powerful in its almost visceral sensation. Nearly every style of popular music has its roots in the blues. Muddy Waters said it best: "The blues had a baby, and they called it rock and roll." Memphis has become the heart of the blues world, with a re-born Beale Street acting as its spiritual center. People come from the world over to experience its beat, savor its emotion, and feel its power. In the end . . . "it ain't nothin' but the blues."

Once celebrated as the Main Street of Negro America," Beale Street has a long and vibrant history. In the early 20th century, the 15-block neighborhood supported a collection of hotels, pool halls, saloons, banks, barber shops, pharmacies, dry goods stores, theaters, gambling dens, jewelers, fraternal clubs, churches, entertainment agencies, beauty salons, pawn shops, blues halls, and juke joints. Above the street-level storefronts were offices of African American business and professional men: dentists, doctors, undertakers, photographers, teachers, realtors, and insurance brokers. By mid-century, following the social strife and urban renewal projects of the 1960s and 1970s, little remained of the original neighborhood. Those buildings spared by the bulldozers were boarded up and falling down. In the nick of time, in the 1980s, the city realized the area's potential as a tourist attraction. New bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues opened along the remaining three-block strip, providing a mecca for those seeking to recapture the magic of Beale Street."