The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White

Recalling the Blues

David W. Johnson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781496853455
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Finalist for the 2025 Award for Excellence for Best Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop, Funk, or Soul Music from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections

Booker "Bukka" White (1905–1977) was one of the most important blues musicians of the twentieth century. The twelve songs he recorded in Chicago in 1940 are considered to be among the finest in country blues. In The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White: Recalling the Blues, David W. Johnson traces the trajectory of White's life from his early years in Chickasaw and Grenada Counties, Mississippi, through his imprisonment in the notorious Mississippi State Penal Farm in the late 1930s, to making a new life for himself in Memphis, Tennessee.

For years only a name on old 78 records—and believed by some to be dead—White was "rediscovered" by John Fahey and ED Denson in the summer of 1963. He went on to have a productive second career, playing venues and festivals throughout the United States and in Canada, and touring Europe and Great Britain with the American Folk Blues Festival. In 1975, he was invited to Bremen, Germany, for a solo concert that was released as his final album.

In July 1976, the author interviewed White shortly before his discharge from a Massachusetts hospital where he was recovering from a stroke. After spending eight days in the intensive care unit and three weeks in rehabilitation, White was ready to talk about his life. Recalling stories of "slavery time," White told the author, ". . . some of the [formerly enslaved] guys were wise enough to hold that in their head where they could tell a young pants, where it would go down in history, you know. Just like you doing that now—something happen to you, somebody else will carry that on."

The product of years of research, The Life and Music of Booker "Bukka" White is the first full-length biography of this remarkable country blues performer. Interviewing those who knew White, including his second cousin B. B. King, Johnson has written a detailed and sometimes surprising account of how a young Black man born in the first decade of the twentieth century—the grandson of a slave—found a way to rise above his circumstances and maintain a decades-long career as a musician.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Chapter One: Mississippi 1910
• Chapter Two: Early Years
• Chapter Three: A Boy in Grenada
• Chapter Four: Between Two Worlds
• Chapter Five: The St. Louis Story
• Chapter Six: Trying to Settle
• Chapter Seven: Memphis 1930
• Chapter Eight: Restless and Roaming
• Chapter Nine: A Winding Road
• Chapter Ten: On Parchman Farm
• Chapter Eleven: Booker in Memphis
• Chapter Twelve: Cousin Riley
• Chapter Thirteen: Chicago 1940
• Chapter Fourteen: Mister Melrose
• Chapter Fifteen: Times of Transition
• Chapter Sixteen: Authentic Blues
• Chapter Seventeen: 1963’s Not 1962
• Chapter Eighteen: Boston 1964
• Chapter Nineteen: Sky Songs
• Chapter Twenty: Uncertain Prospects
• Chapter Twenty-One: River City Venues
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Folk Festivals
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Blues Bus
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Booker and Furry
• Chapter Twenty-Five: Coast to Coast
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Transatlantic
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Bremen 1975
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Changes
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Home to Leola
• Chapter Thirty: Booker’s Legacy
• Appendix: Booker White’s Extraordinary Guitar Playing
• Notes
• Discography
• Videography
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author