Good evening.

I recently had the opportunity to read a new book that is Wichita-centric.

Wichita Blues was copyrighted in 2024.

The book is written by Patrick Joseph O'Connor and is subtitled Music i the African American Community.

I found the book to be both scholarly and entertaining.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Patrick O'Connor is an active blues musician, and he is a man with a keen interest in the roots of American vernacular musical style.

He is a former lecture on the blues at Wichita State, and his research has been published in several academic journals.

Wichita Blue was published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Just over 50 years ago, O'Connor was pursuing a rock career of his own, recording a couple of demos in London, including one with the legendary Session guitarist Chris Spedding.

However, O'Connor ran afoul of British labor laws and was summarily dispatched back to the U.S..

The book is based on a number of interviews that O'Connor conducted with blues musicians in the 1990s.

In the acknowledgments, O'Connor advises that the majority of the interviews were part of a 1996-97 study conducted at the Kansa African American Museum at 601 North Water Street in Wichita which was funded by the Wichita Community Foundation and the Kansas Humanities Council, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

With these interviews, O'Connor seeks to paint a picture of a vibrant black music scene in the city of which blues was a significant part.

The book has nine chapters, with chapters one and two providing some interestin historical context for the book.

Chapter one provides information on early African Americans in Kansas; the cowboys, the soldiers, settlers, and minstrels, and includes a discussion abou the establishment of Nicodemus and about the migration of the Exodusters.

Chapte two discusses Topeka and Wichita as two early urban centers in Kansas.

Chapters three through eight provide summaries of 19 interviews that O'Connor conducted with black musicians from the 1930s to the 1960s.

I would here parenthetically note that the interview summaries are highlighted by wonderful photographs of the various performers taken by Arthur Kenyon, a Wichita based photographer known for photographing the music scene in Wichita over a course of decades.

See the Arthur Kenyon Collectio at the Wichita Public Library.

Chapter nine then seeks to provide a summary, analysis and some conclusions about Wichita's importance in Blues history.

Of course, I really enjoyed learning more about Kansas and Wichita history.

However, the essence of the book and where it really comes alive is the personal interviews.

O'Connor was a thoughtful, patient, careful, and caring interviewer.

If you are interested in history, music, culture, and the human story, I suggest you will enjoy this book as much as I do.

O'Connor has done us all a favor by capturing so much of the past, which is, of course, always relevant to the present and our future.

I am very happ to recommend this book to you.

Let me leave yo with this earnest and thoughtful quotation from ‘Harmonica Chuck, Charlie Phillips.

‘Times is really rough and Blues came in specifically because it was something to ease the pressure.

Like sometimes you had blues when you were sad, you played blues when you'r happy, you lose your girlfriend.

You play some blues.

When you win her bac from the fellow you lost her to, you play blues again.

So I think blues is just according to how you feel at the time.

Everybody loves to play blues.

I can play blues and be just as happy as I want to be and never think anything about it.

Good night and keep on reading.