A powerful union of text and image transmutes itself into a work of art—and it explains what the blues is, besides. Walter Dean Myers takes fragments of blues songs and creates an arc of poetry with them. His son, Christopher, using only brown paper, blue ink, and white paint, creates a visual counterpoint to the words that sometimes reflects them and other times goes to a different but related place. In his one-page introduction, the elder Myers describes the blues as coming from the encounter between the five-tone scale and the call-and-response singing of African music, and the American idiom. This volume comes as close as you can in print to reproducing the feeling of the blues, even as Chris Raschka did for Bird in Charlie Parker Played Be Bop (1992), and does it in a way that small children can grasp. "Hollered to my woman, / she was across the way" shows a boy and his grandmother hovering over an open book; "Misery loves company, / blues can live alone" shows two boys sitting on a curb, one turns from the other. "If you see a dollar, tell it my full name" faces a portrait of a young man against a wrought iron fence. He holds his shoe up to his face and looks steadily through the hole in its sole to gaze at the viewer. Myers fils wields his limited palette in extraordinary ways: figures are blue and blue-black and brown, they have a sculptural presence against dark or light backgrounds, and their postures respond strongly to the words. "Blues, what you mean to me? / Are you my pain and misery, / or my sweet, sweet company?" Children will see both replies in the pictures and in the sweet dark rhythm of the words. (introduction, time line, glossary) (Picture book. 6-11)

Gr 4 Up-"Blues- what you mean to me?/-Are you my pain and misery,/or my sweet, sweet company?" The opening verse of this latest father/son collaboration probes the very essence of a form-and a feeling; it asks the question that anyone who has sought solace in music can relate to. The pair's first composition wandered through a Harlem collage (Scholastic, 1997), depicting "-a call, a song- the mood indigo- a language of darkness-." This new duet is the blues: verbally and visually, it explores the idiom while exemplifying it. A call and response accompanies each painting. The poetry is given a variety of voices by the ever-changing cast and settings: three figures in a horse-drawn cart on a lonely road; two children sitting on a curb-one crying, the other comforting; workers in a chain gang; a brother and sister sharing a bed, head to toe. The tightly controlled, yet endlessly surprising palette consists of blue (ink), white (paint), and brown (paper bags). Many of the bodies and backgrounds are literally blue, with white highlights. This chilling effect is tempered by the warm texture of the brown bags. As the journey progresses, the lyrics and art look at loss through the lenses of slavery, poverty, lynching, love spurned, fear of dying-and of living. An author's note provides a lucid description of the history, elements, and importance of the blues. Symbolism is explored in a glossary. Artist and author push the idiom-and the picture book-to new dimensions. Their song will slide through readers' ears and settle into their souls.-Wendy Lukehart, Washington DC Public Library Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

In this collection of original poems, Myers's blues extend themselves to themes of racism, loneliness, slavery, and just plain hard luck. Christopher Myers's illustrations are impressively composed and imaginatively varied in design. You'll have to make up the tunes, but Myers père et fils are so deeply immersed in the rhythms and idioms of the blues that the music will seem to come right out of you in response. Glos.

The blues' deceptively simple rhyme scheme tracks the deeper feelings of lives that have been bruised. In this picture book for older readers, Myers offers blues-inspired verse that touches on the black-and-blue moments of individual lives. His son Christopher's images, which illustrate the call-and-response text, alternate between high spirited and haunting. Myers begins with a very necessary introduction to the history of the blues that includes an explanation of the rhyme scheme. Still, the level of sophistication necessary for kids to get into the book is considerable: Strange fruit hanging, high in the big oak tree / Strange fruit hanging high in the big oak tree / You can see what it did to Willie, / and you see what it did to me. Myers' original verse is unsettling if young people know the reference from the Billie Holiday song, but unclear if they don't (strange fruit is defined in the glossary). The accompanying illustration, though it's one of the less inspired ones, helps clarify things--a boy walks in a crowd carrying a sign saying, yesterday a man was lynched. But there's no cohesion between the spreads, and the next one features a blues singer at a mike: The thrill is gone, but love is still in my heart . . . I can feel you in the music and it's tearing me apart. Much of Myers' poetry here is terrific, by turn, sweet, sharp, ironic, but it's the memorable collage artwork, executed in the bluest of blue ink and brown paper, that will draw readers first. Once inside the book, some children will immediately hear the songs the poetry sings; others will have to listen more closely.

This handsomely designed volume by the father-and-son creators of Harlem succeeds as an introduction to the blues genre but lacks a story line to unify the disparate verses. The author begins with a history of the blues, tracing its roots to Africa and describing its metamorphosis in America, as freed captives began to explore lyrics fully and white musicians became influenced by the musical form. He explains that the first two lines represent a call, and the third is the response. In one of the most effective spreads, Walter Dean Myers subtly alters the repetition of the call to chilling effect: """"My landlord's cold, cold as a death row shave/ My landlord's so cold, cold as a death row shave/ Charged fifty cents for a washtub, three dollars for my grave."""" Opposite, Christopher Myers uses blue ink and white paint on brown bags to depict two boys looking out one side of a window, one peering fearfully around the corner, the other holding up his hand, perhaps in protection, perhaps in an attempt to escape. The sides of the window and a collage screen create a sense of imprisonment. But a few juxtapositions are jarring, such as a portrait of a boy reading with a stately, elderly woman appearing over his shoulder, while the verse seems to indicate a romantic sentiment (""""I hollered to my woman, she was across the way/ I said I loved her truly, she said,/ `It got to be that way' """"). All ages. (Mar.)