Of Bloodlines and Blue Notes is a hybrid work of music writing and cultural criticism by Terry Blade that brings together lyrics, album notes, and essays grounded in Black American blues as lived practice.
Written in conversation with three interconnected albums, American Descendant of Slavery, Ethos: Son of a Sharecropper, and Chicago Kinfolk: The Juke Joint Blues, the book treats music as evidence. Songs are not presented as nostalgia or abstraction, but as inheritance shaped by history, labor, and survival. Blade writes from inside the tradition, examining how lineage settles into voice, rhythm, silence, and family memory, and how those forces continue to operate in the present.
The essays move between personal lineage and cultural analysis, addressing the ethics of listening, the limits of tidy historical narratives, and the responsibilities that come with carrying a tradition forward. Album notes document the artistic decisions behind the recordings, including the use of acoustic instrumentation, room sound, and archival voices, and explain how those choices function as acts of care rather than ornament.
Throughout the book, Blade rejects museum framing and heritage packaging. The blues here is not preserved at a distance. It is active, unfinished, and accountable. These pages insist that history does not stay behind us, and that art made from inherited conditions must reckon honestly with what it carries.
For readers of music criticism, creative nonfiction, African American nonfiction, and LGBTQIA+ nonfiction, Of Bloodlines and Blue Notes offers a clear-eyed, uncompromising work where sound, story, and responsibility remain inseparable.