★ “A powerful union of text and image transmutes itself into a work of art-and it explains what the blues is, besides. Walter Dean Myers takes fragments of blues songs and creates an arc of poetry with them. His son, Christopher, using only brown paper, blue ink, and white paint, creates a visual counterpoint to the words that sometimes reflects them and other times goes to a different but related place.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
★ “In this collection of original poems, Myers’s blues extend themselves to themes of racism, loneliness, slavery, and just plain hard luck. Christopher Myers’s illustrations are impressively composed and imaginatively varied in design. You’ll have to make up the tunes, but Myers père et fils are so deeply immersed in the rhythms and idioms of the blues that the music will seem to come right out of you in response.” —The Horn Book, Starred Review
“The blues’ deceptively simple rhyme scheme tracks the deeper feelings of lives that have been bruised. In this picture book for older readers, Myers offers blues-inspired verse that touches on the black-and-blue moments of individual lives. His son Christopher’s images, which illustrate the call-and-response text, alternate between high spirited and haunting.” —Booklist
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