Deep Roots: Frankie Finds the Blues by Joel Harper

"Hello?

"Hello, Frankie."

"Hi, Grandma! What's up?"

"I have two tickets to a blues concert. Would you like to join me?" asked Frankie's grandmother.

"I like hip-hop," said Frankie. "What kind of music is blues?"

Frankie goes along with his grandmother. He's a happy kid and he definitely doesn't have the blues. But now the blues have got him, all right.

"The music is beautiful!" Frankie whispered.

Frankie is moved and excited by the music and as soon as he gets back home, he takes off for the garage to look for his old, abandoned guitar. Grandmother explains that what he's heard was fingerpicking, going back to slave days, and Frankie is determined to learn how to play that way. He listens to the CD his Grandmother bought at the concert, but he realizes he's going to have to have some help. He signs up for a lesson, which makes him remember why his guitar was abandoned in the garage.

It was hard work, and IT HURT HIS FINGERS.

But this time, he would not give up.

His friends tease him and tell him to play hip-hop, but Frankie knows what kind of music he wants to make. The blues have got him, and practicing in the park one day, he hears somebody say,

"Sounding real good!"

It's Walter, the old guy who collects cans in the park to sell, and he offers to show Frankie how he learned to play the blues. Frankie hands over his guitar, and then, again, something wonderful happens.

Frankie began listening to the most beautiful music.

The park paused to listen.

"The blues are the roots; everything else is the fruits," said Willie Dixon. Like all good music, blues comes from deep down, rooted in the human heart. And in Joel Harper's new Frankie Finds the Blues(Freedom Three Books, 2018), Frankie finds his teacher and his own way to play the blues, too. In a story of how music sometimes finds kids where they least expect it, author Harper combines family and roots American music in a story that shows how music seems somehow to seek us out to change our lives, actually "striking a chord" that lives within.

The softly-realistic blue-hued illustrations by Gary Kelley are infused with the universal feeling of the blues, evoking the mood of the music that ties us together with our past and present. With endpaper thumbnails of famous blues singers, male and female, black and white, a foreword by Taj Mahal, and comments by artists such as Bonnie Raitt, Keb' Mo', Charlie Musselwhite, and Mavis Staples, this one is a first purchase for school and public library music shelves.