"Music moves throughout this novel as a central theme, drawing 
the characters together again and again into something like a song, 
haunting and lovely. Nobody in the world writes as well about music 
as Robert Love Taylor. Blind Singer Joe's Blues is a miracle itself."
—Lee Smith

Set in the first two decades of the twentieth century, mainly around 
Bristol, Virginia (which is partly in Tennessee), the novel focuses on 
Hannah Ruth Bayless, an untutored Appalachian singer with a 
beautiful voice; her handsome, thieving, backwoods husband, Dudley 
Crider; their child, Singer Joe, who is born blind and inherits his 
mother's gift; and Pink Miracle, a fiddler from Oklahoma, who falls 
in love with and later marries Hannah Ruth, taking her away from 
Bristol and her family and forming a musical partnership with her. 
Broodingly lyrical, the novel deals with faith, blindness, betrayal and 
trust, the tug of family versus selfhood, and the claims of music 
versus the claims of ordinary life.

"A book with a beating heart, its voice pure and lonely as a train 
whistle. To read this story of Hannah Ruth and Dudley Crider is to live 
in their hardscrabble lives, shot through with longing. An extraordinary 
book, a chronicle of a past world brought passionately to life."—Cary 
Holladay

"Blind Singer Joe's Blues has the power of a heated fever dream."
—Denise Giardina

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For over three decades ROBERT LOVE TAYLOR taught creative 
writing and Appalachian literature at Bucknell University. He is the 
author of two collections of linked stories and two other novels. His 
short fiction has appeared in such venues as Georgia Review, 
Southern Review, and Southwest Review, and in Best American 
Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. 
A passionate old-time fiddler, he plays with the Buck Mountain Band 
in Virginia and North Carolina. He grew up in Oklahoma City and now 
lives in southwestern Virginia.