On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom is by Dennis McNally. This book explores African-American music in historical context with the deeper roots of mainstream American culture and music. When the first post-Civil War generation of black Americans came of age, they introduced three musical forms that still dominate popular music today—ragtime, blues, and jazz. Ragtime, which placed accents on beats that were normally unaccented, became the cutting edge with popular dances. The blues combined this syncopation with improvisation to create jazz. Louis Armstrong matured the jazz sound and inspired young white musicians to begin playing it themselves. These young white artists soon became the masters of big band swing. The next generation of African-American musicians introduced bop and rhythm and blues. Once again these forms of music attracted white followers, especially the young rock and rollers. As the theoretical separation of American music by race disappeared, artists like Bob Dylan used this biracial fusion to achieve great success.
Russell Long: A Life in Politics is a biography by Michael S. Martin. Russell Long was born into Louisiana’s most influential political family in 1918. He managed to extend the political power of the Long family and he attained heights of power that even his father, Huey, did not know. Because he was the son of Huey Long, Russell was preordained to be a part of a political legacy that dominated Louisiana from the late 1920s through the 1980s. It was his father’s assassination that solidified his choice for a political career. In 1948, Russell followed his father and his mother to a seat in the United States Senate, where he eventually became majority whip and chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Russell Long’s life is placed in context with the southern and national politics of twentieth century Louisiana. He managed to survive the Longite/Anti-Longite period of politics by transcending the squabbles of the two factions. His politics seemed to straddle New Deal liberalism and southern conservatism. When he retired in 1987, Long saw the demise of the New Deal consensus and the rise of a new style of conservatism.
Blues All Day Long: the Jimmy Rogers Story is by Wayne Everett Goins. As a member of the legendary Muddy Waters’s 1940s-1950s band, Jimmy Rogers created a blues guitar style that made him one of the most admired sidemen of all time. Rogers later had a significant if cursed career as a singer and solo artist for Chess Records—releasing the classic singles “That’s All Right” and “Walking By Myself.” The author waded through seventy-five hours of interviews with Rogers’s family, collaborators, and peers to get an idea of how this man spent his life in the blues. Starting with Rogers’ time recording classics at Chess Records to playing Chicago clubs, Goins relays the renaissance he experienced late in life that included new music, induction into the Blues Hall of Fame, and eminent tours with Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. As one of the blues’ most prominent figures, Rogers’s life fills a void in twentieth century musical history.
The House That Sugarcane Built: The Louisiana Burguieres is by Donna McGee Onebane. This book tells the story of Jules M. Burguieres, Sr. and five generations of Louisianans who, following the Civil War, created a sugar empire that survives to this day. In 1831, twenty-seven-year-old Parisian Eugene D. Burguieres landed at the port of New Orleans. The author traces the family from seventeenth-century France, to nineteenth-century New Orleans and rural south Louisiana, and, finally, into the twenty-first century. Within the narrative of the Burguieres clan as a whole, the author tells the story of J.M. Burguieres and how his company played a key role in the expansion of the sugar industry in Louisiana, Florida, and Cuba. The French Burguieres knew the value of the land and all of the bountiful resources it provided. This knowledge was brought to the fertile soils of the Louisiana bayous and wetlands. These grounds provided them with sugarcane above its surface, and salt, oil, and gas beneath. The family’s ongoing pursuit of land expanded their holding to include vast swaths of the Florida Everglades as well as cattle ranches on the frontier of west Texas. Finally, the author relays the complex dynamics and tensions that are a certainty in a family-owned business. In their 135 years of business the J.M. Burguieres Company has depended on each generation safeguarding and nourishing their legacy through victories and failures.
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Evangeline Cessna is a history librarian at the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library.