Arthur Flowers, Another Good Loving Blues. New York: Ballantine, 1993.

“The blues is about a lot of things…. The blues about accepting life for what it is, good and bad. Its about making folks feel what you feel. And its mostly about people and life and stories. You know any stories?”

Arthur Flowers knows some stories; he knows some magic, too. In Another Good Loving Blues he gives us “a fine old delta tale about a mad blues piano player and a Arkansas conjure woman on a hoodoo mission.” Set in the years when Southern blacks began the great migration north, it follows Lucas Bodeen and Melvira Dupree from the moment he first sees her in the spring of 1918 until the moment, nearly six years later, when he says “I don’t ever want to lose you again.” In between are a lot of pain, a lot of music, and enough magic to make it all work out, told in a rich, muddy voice that brings the South roiling up out of the pages as viscerally as the mighty Mississippi in full flood.