Adam Gussow

Adam Gussow has a joint appointment in English and Southern Studies. Recent themes in his seminars have included “Southern Musicians’ Autobiographies,” “Freedom Summer 1964: Mississippi’s Civil Rights Watershed,” and “Robert Johnson, the Devil’s Music, and the Blues.” His research and teaching interests include blues music, literature, culture, and tourism; southern music (especially country, bluegrass, and jazz); African American literature and cultural politics; the persistence of the pastoral South idea and other southern mythologies; and the long arc from slavery and segregation through the Civil Rights movement and contemporary struggles for racial justice.

Adam has a Ph.D. and B.A in English from Princeton University and an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Between graduate degrees, Gussow spent a decade as a blues harmonica instructor and performer, part of a Harlem-based duo that was recently profiled in a Netflix documentary, “Satan & Adam,” and he continues to record albums and play gigs here in Oxford when time permits.  His books include Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (1998), Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (2000), Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition (2017), which won a Living Blues Award as “Best Blues Book of 2017,” and Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music (2020).  His new book, My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir, will be published by Post Hill Press in the spring of 2025.

publications

• “From Cottonfields to Cadillacs:  Explorations in a Blues Lyric Archive.” In Bale After Bale:  Cotton and the Twentieth-Century U.S. South, ed. David Davis, University of Virginia Press (forthcoming 2024)
• “The Freest Thing in the World:  Black Woman, White Men, and the Latest Battle of Ole Miss.”  Journal of Free Black Thought.  Web.  (May 2024).
• “Howard Men:  Prince Jones, Carlton Jones, and the Evasions of Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Quillette.  (3 October 2023).  Web.  A “Quillette Editors’ Choice of 2023.”
• “Parchman Blues:  A Teacher Becomes the Student in the Prison-to-College Pipeline Program.”  The Southern Register. (Fall 2023):  22-25.
• “The Best Books About the Blues set in Mississippi, Chicago, Florida, and Beyond.”  Shepherd.com.  19 June 2023. Web
• “Don’t Start Me Talkin’:  Muddy Waters’s Daughter, the Good Ol’ Boy, and the Blues Foundation.”  Medium.com.  26 March 2021.
• “Bien al Sur:  Notes Towards a Genealogy of Blues Music’s Global Spread.”  The Global South 14.1 (Spring 2020):  1-22.
• “Out There in That Sun:  Cotton Sharecropping, Self-Making, and Mississippi Blues.” Valley Voices:  A Literary Journal20.2 (Fall 2020):  89-107.
• “W. C. Handy and the ‘Birth’ of the Blues.”  Southern Cultures 24.4 (Winter 2018):  42-68.
• “Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos.”  Study the South (January 2018).
• “I Will be Free, I Will be Me:  Rethinking Blues Origins, ‘Bluesmen,’ and Blues Feelings in the Age of #blacklivesmatter.”  Arkansas Review 48.2 (Summer/August 2017):  83-98.
• “Giving It All Away:  Race, Locale, and the Transformation of Blues Harmonica Education in the Digital Age,” Journal of Popular Music Education 1.2 (July 2017):  215-232.
• “’I Got a Big White Fella From Memphis Made a Deal With Me’:  Black Men, White Boys, and the Anxieties of Blues Postmodernity in Walter Hill’s Crossroads,” Arkansas Review 46.2 (Summer/August 2015):  85-104.
• Review of Yoknapatawpha Blues: Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Roots Music, by Tim A. Ryan, The Southern Register(Fall 2015): 23-25.
• “Playing Chicken With the Train: Cowboy Troy’s Hick-Hop and the Transracial Country West,” Southern Cultures 16.4 (Winter 2010): 41-70. A longer version of the essay was published in Hidden In the Mix: African American Country Music Traditions, ed. Diane Pecknold (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 234-262.