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Singer-songwriter Mike Mattison is an award-winning musician and founding member of Scrapomatic and Tedeschi Trucks Band. Literary historian Ernest Suarez is the David M. O’Connell Professor of English at the Catholic University of America and the executive director of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.

Mattison and Suarez joined forces to create Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry, a book that lovingly examines the relationship between blues-based music and poetry starting in the 1950s. It starts with early blues and Beat coffee houses and runs through Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and beyond. The evocative lyrics by these artists puts them in a special category of singer-songwriter.

This episode of Watching America is a must-listen for “music freaks” and literary lovers alike.

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