📚 The Blues

The twelve bars under so much else: Delta to electric Chicago, and the musicians who wrote the form.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject blues (music) in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	In search of the blues	Marybeth Hamilton	2007	13
	Early Downhome Blues	Jeff Todd Titon	1977	11
	Right on	Michael Haralambos	1974	10
	The blues lyric formula	Michael Taft	2006	10
	Blues Harmonica For Dummies	Winslow Yerxa	2012	10
	Stomping the blues	Albert Murray	1976	9
	Blues fell this morning	Oliver, Paul	1960	8
	Honkers and shouters	Arnold Shaw	1978	8
	Rhythm oil	Stanley Booth	1991	8
	The land where the blues began	Alan Lomax	1993	8
	Martin Scorsese presents the blues	Holly George-Warren	2003	8
	Blues, funk, rhythm and blues, soul, hip hop, and rap	Eddie S. Meadows	2010	8
	Creating jazz counterpoint	Vic Hobson	2014	8
	The story of the blues	Oliver, Paul	1969	7
	The Blues	Tony Russell	1997	7
	Complete Electric Bass Method	David Overthrow	2000	7
	How Britain Got the Blues	Roberta Freund Schwartz	2007	7
	Feel like going home	Peter Guralnick	1971	6
	The Devil's music	Giles Oakley	1976	6
	Blues You Can Use	John Ganapes	1995	6
	Blues records, January 1943 to December 1966	Mike Leadbitter	1968	5
	Blues guitar inside & out	Richard Daniels	1981	5
	Blues	Bob Brunning	1986	5
	All music guide to the blues : the experts' guide to the best blues recordings	Michael Erlewine	1996	5
	Earl Hooker, Blues Master	Sebastian Danchin	2001	5
	Live from the Mississippi Delta	Panny Flautt Mayfield	2017	5
	The country blues	Samuel Barclay Charters	1959	4
	The spirituals and the blues	James H. Cone	1972	4
	Blues & the poetic spirit	Paul Garon	1975	4
	Rhythm & blues	David B. Goren	1979	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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