Heart and Soul: A Celebration of Black Music Style in America 1930-1975

Anyone even remotely interested in the roots of the music we hear today needs to know where it came from. The people included in this book gave birth to do many, many kinds of "American" music their importance cannot be overstated, even if the never had a best seller, or were "one-hit wonders". Today's rap and hop-hop stars draped in gold, driving flashy cars and using women like personal adornments owe an endless debt to the old blues men drifting around the country with their harmonicas and guitars, or playing the Apollo, even Vegas, but denied the right to stay in hotels. These people ARE American music!

A wrap-up of black music mixing all styles with the use of record covers to visually hold it all together. The breezy text is very generalised and really no more than naming performers, their hits and odd bits of showbiz gossip. I found it rather annoying that black music styles were mixed together, Charlie Parker, James Brown, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Terry and Hadda Brooks are some of the record covers on pages ninety-four and five, the only common element is that they are all black, their music though, is completely different in style. Jazz is probably the only black music, in the past, to develop eye catching covers and the book ignores anything from record companies like Blue Note, Riverside, Atlantic or Verve. The last chapter, 'Soul for sale', includes several movie posters of black musicians appearing in pop music movies but it also deals with the marketing of black musicians as role models in advertising, mostly for cigarettes, alcohol and hair products and though it rather strays from the book's main focus it is a subject that would make an interesting visual book about this area of black life. Most of the four hundred illustrations in the book are covers and as expected none are of any design merit but put them all together in a book and they superficially become interesting. A similar thing occurs in 'A Separate Cinema' (ISBN 0374523606) probably the only book to concentrate on black cast movie posters. None of them will win any design awards yet they all have an exuberant colorful style when so many are presented together. 'Heart & Soul' is worth getting if you are interested in black visual culture and to bring it right up to date have a look at 'The Book of Hip Hop Cover Art' (ISBN 1840009195) by Andrew Emery. In this book some of the covers really are a treat to look at. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

I interrupted my wife's Sunday newspaper idyll to read aloud another's review of this book. My kids were stumped for birthday gift ideas. She put two and two together. What I expected was words that attempt to describe an art form. What I got was a date to a Saturday night text-dance and a trip down album-cover memory lane. This book is a "Land of 1,000 Dances" for the eyes. Stay away if you can't tap your feet and read at the same time.