On Demand
Blues History, Rewritten
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Blues music is forever associated with the Mississippi Delta and storied artists like Robert Johnson. But a new book details how our understanding of the Delta blues genre was shaped by white folklorists and record collectors. Writer Marybeth Hamilton, author of "In Search of the Blues," joins us to challenge the history of an influential form of black music.
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Why don't this lady leave us (blacks)alone! She wrote a book based on a false assumption. Its the typical "algo ego" to claim everything as theirs. Is Jazz black music cause they use european instruments? I think its a battle to copyright content they the white establishment didn't create. GET REAL!! There is much to say about this issue. PLeae have this lady email me!!! ASAP!
Inquiries into authenticity and mythologizing are useful. However it seems the focus of this work is focused on the collectors and advocates, mostly white, but overlooks the agency of black people themselves. The fact that Johnson was influential on other musicians, and operated in a context of African American society implies to me that African American musicians and people in general were not simply passive vessels to be manipulated by Lomax, Keil, and record companies.
How is blues different than any other music in this respect? It seems to me that our understanding of any music only emerges after the fact of that music's making when devoted listeners organize it into a coherent body of work, united by a narrative so that less devoted fans can have a body of work to look back at. Admittedly, there's a difference with the blues because it's white people organizing black music, but our understanding of "classical" music as a genre or jazz as a genre was also shaped by collectors, critics, etc.
Why is this author not mentioning Elijah Wald's book "Escaping the Delta?" What is she saying that he did not? Is she doing anything more than just jumping on the bandwagon?
Well, I'm a jazz musician and if there weren't blues, specifically Delta blues, there'd be no jazz. If this theory is true that it's a white invention or at least shaped by whites (and I wholeheartedly do not agree), then you're going to have to explain it to legions of followers like B.B. King, Clapton, The Stones, all of the British Invasion - hell, every new form of music from the 20th Century (jazz, rock, reggae, everything). I'd hate to think all these music movements that I've absorbed were less genuine.
You know, Wynton Marsalis is very visible in focusing American jazz lineage to be based at Louis Armstrong's feet to the exclusion of other influences and discarding more modern influences. This thought seem similarly revisionist.
i Think you guys are missing the main point. Of course whites didn't make the "delta blues"; Instead they claimed this as the voice of blacks. What if they had decided to push some other kind of music that blacks played. There the ones that made this music more "special" than other kinds of music.
The music was and is as black as can be, the criticism and promotion did not come from the largely illiterate musicmakers of the time, of course, cause they hadn't the means or influence to produce it. And as for Lomax's worry about the authenticity of Leadbelly and others, he was absolutely correct to worry about that. Look at Leadbelly's New York Period, when he sang songs like Bourgeois Blues. Does anyone imagine that Leadbelly really even knew the word bourgeois before he fell in with various pinkos like Woody Guthrie? It was a New York lefty folksong, not a delta blues song. This happened to many of the real Delta Blues stylists when they got urbanized, and the result was Chicago blues.The same thing eventuall happened to punk music. It's evolution, and happens to most music and musicians, whether we like it or not and no matter if it brings an end to each artists "authentic" period. Success invariably makes suffering hard to express.
Authentic is a relative term, meaning authentic as opposed to something else. It is sophistry to suppose otherwise.
Great segment!
I don't understand why Mary Beth Hamilton is setting up a series of strawmen. In the forties and 50s Delta blues was known as "country blues'. Big deal. There are in fact regional differences and the Delta did have a distinctive style -- W.C. Handy first heard the blues there in 1903-- so he said. Though there were other blues all over the South, which is where the overwhelming majority of the US African American population (virtually all rural) lived before 1945.
The other strawman is Griel Marcus who is a rock critic and didn't know much about this topic. The story about Robert Johnson and the crossroads was a folkloric commonplace and was told about virtually every local bandit (Railroad Bill, for example), healer-conjuror, or other highly skilled person (such as a musician). The devil was the hoodoo god Lamba, gatekeeper to the underworld, who conferred shape-changing and other magic powers. It could have easily applied to Johnson, but to any other skilled musician as well. So the fact that it was told about Johnson (or not) is neither here nor there.
Two: There are many excellent scholars who have written extensively and knowledgeably about the blues (in some cases well before the 1960s): John Cowley, Harold Courlander, Paul Oliver, Jeff Todd Titon, and Bill Ferris come to mind, to name a few. Why are their voices and inputs absent from this discussion. Why set up a postal employee of the 1960s as the strawman to knock down?
Three: Before recording Leadbelly John Lomax had had a twenty-year career of collecting folk music. He did not collect only in prisons. He also collected "Home on the Range" and several other very famous cowboy songs and credited them to black cowboys. He also collected from black musicians in turpentine camps in the 1920s jointly with Carl Sandburg in some cases.
Leadbelly was associated with John Lomax for six months (Sept. 1934-March 1935). In that time he recorded many kinds of songs with ARC (a budget race label) but ARC released only his blues.
In the three months that Lomax was his manager, Leadbelly performed for the U of Texas Alumni Association, the MLA and all the major universities of the northeast. Arguably his career was enhanced by this exposure.
After he broke with Lomax for good in 1935, Leadbelly went on to have a very respectable 15-year career as an independent artist, playing at the Village Vanguard and for colleges all over the country, and even at one point having his own radio show on WNYC (!) with Henrietta Yurchenko. At one point he went to Hollywood. He became ill and died after coming back from a trip to Europe. His last concert was a tribute at the University of Texas to John Lomax, who had died that same year.
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