[From Stephen Calt, Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).]
Many young blues fans of the 1960s identified themselves researchers and specialists. Stephen Calt was and is the real thing — a scholar. He’s written the three best books on blues that I know: Barrelhouse Words, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues, and King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (the last with Gayle Dean Wardlow). Barrelhouse Words is endlessly enjoyable browsing.
[If the Rapture takes place tomorrow, this post will look especially well-timed. Hasty departures indeed. Rapture or no, I plan to be here on Monday.]
June 11, 2011: I just learned that Stephen Calt died in October 2010.
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