My Hands Sing the Blues: Romare Bearden's Childhood Journey
by Jeanne Walker Harvey (Author) Elizabeth Zunon (Illustrator)
As a young boy growing up in North Carolina, Romare Bearden listened to his great-grandmother's Cherokee stories and heard the whistle of the train that took his people to the North--people who wanted to be free. When Romare boarded that same train, he watched out the window as the world whizzed by. Later he captured those scenes in a famous painting, Watching the Good Trains Go By.
Using that painting as inspiration and creating a text influenced by the jazz that Bearden loved, Jeanne Walker Harvey describes the patchwork of daily southern life that Romare saw out the train's window and the story of his arrival in shimmering New York City. Artists and critics today praise Bearden's collages for their visual metaphors honoring his past, African American culture, and the human experience. Elizabeth Zunon's illustrations of painted scenes blended with collage are a stirring tribute to a remarkable artist.
My Hands Sing the Blues is the recipient of the 2012 IRA Childrens and Young Adults Book Award-Primary Non-Fiction, as well as the gold winner of a Moonbeam Children's Book Award in the category of Picture Book-All Ages.
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Publishers Weekly
Harvey weaves collage artist Bearden's recollections of his North Carolina childhood into a first-person memoir, casting the lines as blues lyrics, which gives the book a slow, rocking rhythm. Newcomer Zunon's illustrations combine folk-style portraits of Bearden's family with flat collage elements as Harvey recounts the Bearden family's move north during the Great Migration. For the first time, the Beardens became passengers on the trains that Romare and his great-grandfather had watched togethertrains that would later figure into his collages. It's a soft-spoken exploration of the ways in which experience is transformed into art. Ages 5-8 (Sept.)
Copyright 2011 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.
School Library Journal
K-Gr 3--In a first-person narrative that incorporates some of artist Romare Bearden's phrases and ideas, and using his famous painting "Watching the Good Trains Go By" as her inspiration, Jeanne Walker Harvey gives voice to the history and experiences that inspired his famous collages. Born in North Carolina, Bearden and his family moved to Harlem in 1914 to escape discriminatory Jim Crow Laws and attitudes. In his collages, which he called paintings and "visual jazz," he analyzed the social and political issues of his time and also related his personal story as well as the daily life of African Americans in both the North and South. Kevin R. Free reads Harvey's fictionalized account (Marshall Cavendish, 2011) of the artist's life with a cadence that turns the rhyming lines into a blues song, its rhythm rising and falling and bouncing along, sometimes singing the train whistles and engines like a jazz tune. The audio version perfectly accompanies Elizabeth Zunon's Bearden-like collage illustrations and text that changes size and color for emphasis. The author's note, which details the life and describes the work of Bearden, is included, but source notes from the book are not. While this fictionalized biography provides an excellent introduction to the Great Migration North and the Harlem Renaissance, it is also a work of art in words and pictures.--MaryAnn Karre, Horace Mann and Thomas Jefferson Elementary Schools, Binghamton, NY
Copyright 2012 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
JUV057000 - Juvenile Fiction | Stories in Verse (see also Poetry)
JUV031040 - Juvenile Fiction | Performing Arts | Music
Stories in rhyme
Harlem (New York, N.Y.)
North Carolina
Blues (Music)
