Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

Adoff creates a moving meditation on the roots of American blues. The poet explores the profound relationship between the enslavement of Africans and the music born of that brutalization: "This New World music m o v e s with shackle sounds." Recurring metaphors flow through the 60 poems, riffing on trauma and triumph. Metal, for one: the clank of chains on ships and chain gangs; a hoe striking rock; the reverberating steel of guitar strings and piano wire. Blood signifies death but also "the / r i c h / red / c h i l d / b i r t h / c o l o r / o f / j o y." Spare, spondaic lines pulse, connecting the mundane (church, cooking) with the music's transcendence. Some poems center on specific performers. The poet wryly considers Robert Johnson's alleged bargain with the devil: "We can still tell that story and smile as we sing his words. His soul is in his songs and his songs live deep on blue e a r t h." Christie's Expressionistic acrylics employ a palette of crimson, teal and brown, reserving grays for faces and hands, linking shackled slaves with sharecroppers, rocking grandmothers with juke-joint dancers. An incandescent, important work. (Poetry. 8 & up)

Horn Book (Mon Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2011)

Evoking blues music through theme and sometimes rhythm, Adoff's sixty free-verse poems, idiosyncratically punctuated and spaced, flow easily. There's not much variety to the pieces: the subject is African American life, the imagery largely rural and Southern. Dignified scenes by Christie don't illustrate the book, exactly, but they give it some welcome contrast. The lack of table of contents and index is frustrating.

Starred Review for Publishers Weekly

In this visceral collaboration, Adoff and Christie honor the enduring legacy of blues music. Vibrant, haunting acrylic paintings portray crowded slave ships, chain gang labor, and the crackling energy of juke joints. Several poems titled ""Listening"" capture the sounds of the decades in which they're set (the ""high-metal shuffle of chains between wrists"") and mimic the rhythms and repetitions of the blues (""Singing vegetables for sale near Auction Square./ Silence under heavy snow one Kansas City winter./ Memphis waterfront noise and rush/ Saint Louis waterfront noise and rush""). This is a challenging, open-hearted collection with images and poems that bleed into one another, but also stand powerfully alone. Ages 8%E2%80%9312. (Jan.)

Starred Review ALA Booklist (Tue Feb 01 00:00:00 CST 2011)

Starred Review Celebrated children's poet Adoff here offers nothing less than a sensory history of the blues. In short poems and prose vignettes, he traces the roots of song and rhythm as they are passed down and shaped through collective memories, experiences, visions, and sounds across oceans, on plantations, up and down the Mississippi, in chain gangs and back rooms, and finally on the main stage as a celebrated, uniquely American art form. Christie provides arresting and soul-stirring paintings that echo the poems here and add texture and harmony there, but Adoff's poems are themselves things to be savored visually as well as out loud. It's not necessarily concrete poetry, but the placement of words on the page and even the spacing of the letters within the words stretch and contract like deep breaths across the lines, lending sustain and staccato accents to the language. In "Muddy Waters Steps Down," the words form a rough outline of Illinois up top and Louisiana down below as the bluesman arrives in Chicago. Many of the poems, though, are not nearly so direct: "Brown fingers moving with the regularity of rhythm / onto stretched skins onto smooth carved wood. / This new world music m o v e s with shackle sounds." These are fleeting bits of sound and slippery-to-grasp flashes of imagery that, like song, are meant to evoke more than inform, and they come with generations' worth of weight and rhythm.

School Library Journal Starred Review (Tue Feb 01 00:00:00 CST 2011)

Gr 5 Up-This exquisite collection of poems and paintings celebrates the history and culture of blues music. Adoff traces the horrific journey of slaves to America and the role that music played as a means of survival, of passing on "the ancestor words." Even as the lyrics describe harsh realities, the innate beauty of music made with sticks, spoons, or whatever was at hand speaks of an irrepressible hope: "Under the hot sun: the chop chop/hoe/measures out the beats of freedom." Christie's haunting acrylic images bring to life the drama and emotion of the music, as well as the dignity of his subjects. In the latter half of the book, Adoff introduces blues performers Bessie Smith, Lonnie Johnson, Son House, Ma Rainey, Robert Johnson, Johnny Lee Hooker, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters, stepping down on the "Chicago/train/station/platform/with a suitcase/of Mississippi River/with a suitcase/of Mississippi/Delta with a suitcase of Mississippi/dripping/on side/walk/s." As with Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers's Blues Journey (Holiday House, 2003), this splendid addition to American history units should resonate with a wide audience. Adoff comes full circle with this stirring poem: "And we have always sung about hearts and healing/broken pieces into new and beating creations when/eyes open to first light of morning sun shining/in my back door/shining/in my back door./Shining/shining:/Always."— Marilyn Taniguchi, Beverly Hills Public Library, CA

Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews

Adoff creates a moving meditation on the roots of American blues. The poet explores the profound relationship between the enslavement of Africans and the music born of that brutalization: "This New World music m o v e s with shackle sounds." Recurring metaphors flow through the 60 poems, riffing on trauma and triumph. Metal, for one: the clank of chains on ships and chain gangs; a hoe striking rock; the reverberating steel of guitar strings and piano wire. Blood signifies death but also "the / r i c h / red / c h i l d / b i r t h / c o l o r / o f / j o y." Spare, spondaic lines pulse, connecting the mundane (church, cooking) with the music's transcendence. Some poems center on specific performers. The poet wryly considers Robert Johnson's alleged bargain with the devil: "We can still tell that story and smile as we sing his words. His soul is in his songs and his songs live deep on blue e a r t h." Christie's Expressionistic acrylics employ a palette of crimson, teal and brown, reserving grays for faces and hands, linking shackled slaves with sharecroppers, rocking grandmothers with juke-joint dancers. An incandescent, important work. (Poetry. 8 & up)