This is too academic of a documentary with interviews of scholars who only use blues to get ahead. It is pretty obvious that that do not really love or live the blues and the blues they do listen to tends to be the most famous musicians such as Muddy Waters, and etc. They left out and made mistakes with so many of "so-called" facts talking about blues. How you discuss Delta blues without discussing Northern Mississippi Blues or Bentonia blues. No mention of Louisiana or Texas blues. If you want to watch a real blues documentary then watch "I am the Blues" or "Deep Blues." Much better performances and a lot more soul and amazing stories. Country and Bluegrass came from Ireland immigrants and maybe later mixed with blues so that was wrong. Just disappointed by the academics or editors of this documentary who leave so much out. It's a very cold, soul-less film made by someone who probably did it as a project to get tenure instead of a love letter. Very disappointed.

"I'm not surprised that America's Blues has been winning awards. It does a better job than any blues documentary I can think of—and I mean any—in placing the music in dialogue with the full range of its contexts: not just African American social history, but jazz, film, literature, drama, tourism, and fashion. Patrick Branson and Aaron Pritchard have avoided what I'd call the "usual suspects" syndrome in the matter of interviewees, giving screen-time not just to a broad array of contemporary blues performers ranging from Leo "Bud" Welch and Bill Sims, Jr. to Samantha Fish and Jimbo Mathus, but to scholars such as Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Patricia R. Schroeder, foreign-born entrepreneur Theo Dasbach, and jazz trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard. This documentary manages to celebrate the inescapably African American roots and continuance of this great American music and, without seeming contradiction, document its spread far beyond African American communities. America's Blues is a winner—and a must-see for any blues fan, scholar, or performer."

--Adam Gussow, associate professor of English and Southern Studies, University of Mississippi and author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition