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In an interview in 1964, John Lee Hooker said: "I know why the best blues artists come from Mississippi. Because it's the worst state. You have the blues all right if you're down in Mississippi."

The state has produced some fine writers, notably William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, but otherwise its role in the country's larger scheme has been small and often toxic. Its long history of violence and brutality against its black citizens has been even more grotesque than in the rest of the Deep South.

But Mississippi has given America and the world one shining gift: the blues.

The blues were born in the Delta, the wide band of tarlike fertile land that the Mississippi River over the ages has deposited along its banks from Memphis, Tenn., to Vicksburg, Miss. The Delta was plantation country, slave country, sharecropper country. Most of its people, nearly all of them black, led lives of backbreaking labor, relentless poverty, illiteracy, despair and violence.

The only means of self-expression the Delta people had were religion and the blues, a style of music sprung from African seeds, often played on homemade instruments and sung or shouted by rough voices full of anger, grief and hopelessness. The blues grew in cotton-patch shacks and juke joints in the woods, where people found relief from their lives in bootleg whiskey and songs about murder, sex, prison and, maybe most often, about moving out, catching a train, escaping the Delta.

Most blues musicians never got away and died unknown. But during the early decades of the 20th century, many did move to Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, Dallas and New York. They made records, sang on the radio and in clubs and auditoriums. They attracted white fans as well as black. And over the years they deeply influenced every form of popular music from jazz to country to rock 'n' roll.

Now Ted Gioia gives us Delta Blues, a book we've needed for a long time. Mr. Gioia, formerly of California and now of Plano, is one of the outstanding music historians in America. His 1997 The History of Jazz is as near definitive as a one-volume work can be. In Delta Blues he has written an equally excellent work as meticulously researched and lucidly written as its predecessor.

Mr. Gioia's subtitle, The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music, reveals his method. He assembles the mundane facts and figures that must be included in a scholarly history and threads them through and wraps them around brief biographies of such Delta giants as Charley Patton, Son House, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and – the greatest, the Shakespeare of the blues – the mysterious Robert Johnson, who some believed had traded his soul to the devil in exchange for his genius. Of him Mr. Gioia writes:

"For seventy years now, devotees have followed the elusive trail of Robert Johnson. At times the pursuit has taken on the aura of a vision quest, a chimerical attempt to come to grips with a figure more legendary than real. ... Robert Johnson emerges as a larger-than-life folk hero, but one who happened to leave behind a stack of 78s before being apotheosized alongside Pecos Bill, John Henry and Paul Bunyan as a colorful piece of Americana."

Johnson recorded the last of those 78s in San Antonio and Dallas not long before a jealous husband murdered him.

In Delta Blues Mr. Gioia offers 400 pages of exhaustive scholarship, original oral history, crystal-clear writing and great love for his story and its heroes. Like The History of Jazz, it's a fine and important work.

Bryan Woolley is a journalist, author and past president of the Texas Institute of Letters.

Delta Blues

Ted Gioia

(Norton, $27.95)