Talking 'Bout Your Mama

Rob Harvilla, Spin Magazine A profanely sacred history lesson that vacillates between monster one-liners and carefully articulated deep thoughts.... Wald...is your only plausible tour guide, capable of illuminating both the blunt simplicity and fraught complexity, the cheerful frivolity and deadly severity of it all.

Harper's Magazine Like yo mama - short but thick, a good trick, and easy to get all the way through.

Washington Post The author's affection and respect for this strange, unheralded current of folk culture shine through every word of his book.

San Francisco Chronicle A lively and engaging history of the oral insult game... Wald is a respected historian of American music and has authoritatively mastered (and clearly summarizes) the vast research on the Dozens.

and the one that will give newspaper reviewers the most trouble, since virtually every paragraph of is studded with obscenities of the highest possible voltage... a superlative piece of work, which won't surprise anyone who's read any of Elijah Wald's earlier books. If I ran the world, I'd give him a MacArthur.Terry Teachout, ArtsJournal This impeccably researched study of the classic black insult game may be the funniest work of serious scholarship ever published

Bruce Jackson, author of "Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me": African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition The dozens is the most ephemeral and most contextual of the black verbal traditions, hence the hardest to get a handle on. The origins of blues, toasts and dozens, even the sources of the names are all lost in time. But after reading Elijah Wald's superbly researched and splendidly written book, no one will have any doubt what this important tradition is and means.

Buffalo News Fascinating and groundbreaking all the way through.

Library Journal This book-length study of sexualized insults makes for colorful reading and will appeal especially to anyone interested in forms of cultural expression that are considered obscene or subject to censorship.

Susan McClary, author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality This has got to be the dirtiest scholary book ever!

Sandra Jean Graham, The Bulletin of the Society for American Music A pleasure to read from front to back, and Wald's vast knowledge of blues repertory allows him to make connections between songs themselves and between blues and other genres that employ the dozens. The many quotations from dozens exchanges make for colorful reading (Wald himself censors nothing), Wald's prose is consistently entertaining, the pace is brisk without sacrificing detail, and the breadth of sources ensures that every reader will come away with new information.

Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who has toured on five continents and written thousands of articles for newspapers, magazines, and album notes. His ten published books include Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: AnAlternative History of American Popular Music, and The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. He has taught blues history at UCLA and won multiple awards, including a 2002 Grammy.

1. A Trip Down Twelfth Street ; 2. The Name of the Game ; 3. Singing the Dozens ; 4. The Blue Dozens ; 5. The Literary Dozens ; 6. If You Grin, You're In ; 7. The Martial Art of Rhyming ; 8. Around the World with Your Mother ; 9. African Roots and Branches ; 10. The Dozens and Race ; 11. Why Do We (They) Do that? ; 12. Rapping, Snapping, and Dueling on YouTube