Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to the steamy bars of Chicago's South Side, to international popularity, recognition, and imitation. Palmer tells the story of the blues through the lives of its greatest practitioners: Robert Johnson, who sang of being pursued by the hounds of hell; Muddy Waters, who electrified Delta blues and gave the music its rock beat; Robert Lockwood and Sonny Boy Williamson, who launched the King...

In this book, silicon photonic integrated circuits are combined with electro-optic organic materials for realizing energy-efficient modulators with unprecedented performance. These silicon-organic hybrid Mach-Zehnder modulators feature a compact size, sub-Volt drive voltages, and they support data rates up to 84 Gbit/s. In addition, a wet chemical waveguide fabrication scheme and an efficient fiber-chip coupling scheme are presented.