Coon shouters and titular blues -- Blues vaudevillians, jug bands, and medicine show songsters -- Delta transcendentalists, Texas troubadours, and East Coast fingerpickers -- Robert Johnson's satanic verses -- The thirties and forties: rural, urban, and midway between -- Leadbelly's black body -- Home truths: Muddy, B.B., and the last race labels -- Chuck and Elvis, hands-on preservationists, and soul in the biblical sense -- Blues connotation/from songsters to soulsters.