Fresh overview of blues

[brownie]

What looks like a new (or old??) perspective on blues history is out on a new book.

This is the book review in The New York Times today.

February 28, 2004

Revisionists Sing New Blues History

By BEN SISARIO

Robert Johnson left 29 songs and little else, but it was enough. Johnson has long since become the most famous blues singer of all time, reaching a level in the pantheon of American music occupied by figures like Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. The myths inevitably grew up around him. Most writers who have dealt with him have found it impossible to resist the story of his deal with the devil, or the image of him pursued by "hellhounds."

But as Johnson's popularity has grown — the box set of his "Complete Recordings" (Columbia/Legacy) has sold nearly two million copies worldwide — a growing number of music scholars have begun to question Johnson's place in the canon, and the received wisdom about blues history itself.

Elijah Wald's new "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues" (Amistad/HarperCollins) is one of the most contentious yet, daring to suggest that Johnson's primacy was largely a creation of white fans and music critics of the 1960's.

"As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure," Mr. Wald writes, "and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note."

With extensive research into the listening habits of the audience of the time, Mr. Wald describes a history of the blues that is markedly different from the one in accounts like Martin Scorsese's recent seven-part PBS series, "The Blues."

In Mr. Wald's history, the principal players are not lonesome folk singers from dusty hamlets, but seasoned professionals riding the latest trends in black pop. They have names that are largely unknown today except among experts: Peetie Wheatstraw, Leroy Carr and Kokomo Arnold. And most of them were women. The kings of the blues were actually the queens of the blues: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and dozens of others now all but forgotten, singers like Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey and Sara Martin.

Johnson, who died in 1938, emerges in Mr. Wald's account as a regional player eager to copy the latest hits. And he was only marginally successful. Just 11 of his songs were issued in his lifetime — the biggest stars recorded well over 100 songs, Mr. Wald points out — and his biggest hit, "Terraplane Blues," sold about 5,000 copies.

Mr. Wald and other critics argue that the discrepancy between Johnson's stature and his accomplishments stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of blues music by later, mostly white, writers.

Last year Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch's "Robert Johnson: Lost and Found" (University of Illinois Press) traced the paper trail of the Johnson myth through the decades and found that white critics and promoters were telling tall tales about him while he was still alive. The authors tracked down misleading articles about him dating to 1937, and reconstructed the comical spread of Johnson's Faust legend — that he sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in return for his extraordinary gifts as a guitarist — from a single, dubious 1966 interview with Johnson's friend and fellow blues musician Son House.

Another book, Patricia R. Schroeder's "Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture" (due from University of Illinois Press in July), traces the persistence of Johnson's image in the culture at large, from postage stamps to novels to plays. Johnson's myth, it suggests, is truly larger than his life.

"This just adds to the legend of Johnson," said David Evans, a professor of music at the University of Memphis and a veteran blues researcher. "Like Elvis and Hank Williams and certain other stars, he can be all things to all people."

Stopping for coffee at a Midtown hotel during his recent book tour, Mr. Wald explained that "the blues was pop music — it simply wasn't folk music."

He continued: "It was invented retroactively as black folk music, which brought a new set of standards to bear on it and created a whole new pantheon of heroes. Suddenly the people who were the biggest stars were too slick to be real."

Johnson became a perfect model for the 1960's rock star. He lived hard, played like a man possessed and died young — at around 27 — in mysterious circumstances. No wonder he appealed to the Jim Morrison generation.

The obsession with Johnson at the expense of almost all other blues singers, Mr. Wald suggests, has grossly distorted the history of the blues. Prewar blues musicians were much more versatile and pop oriented than is widely known; Mr. Wald notes that when Alan Lomax interviewed Muddy Waters in Mississippi in the early 1940's, he found that Waters's repertory included "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and seven Gene Autry songs — more pop than blues. And the immediate origins of the blues, Mr. Wald writes, are most likely in black vaudeville, not in field hollers. The blues, in other words, was up-to-the-minute pop, a sign of urbanization, technology and sophistication, not primitivism or tradition.

Not all historians agree with Mr. Wald's critique. Johnson may not have been a star, some say, but he had many important followers like Muddy Waters and Elmore James, who continued to play his songs in the decades after his death.

And the blues queens, some argue, cannot really be considered neglected. John Szwed, a professor of anthropology and African-American studies at Yale and currently the Louis Armstrong visiting professor of jazz studies at Columbia, called them overvalued. "The classic women blues singers have always received more attention from jazz critics and historians, the folks who canonized the blues tradition," he said.

Some critics also see a red herring in measuring importance in terms of raw pop appeal. "You can argue that Emily Dickinson wasn't that important," said Jeff Todd Titon, a professor of ethnomusicology at Brown. "Nobody in the 19th century was influenced by her poetry, not until literary critics got ahold of her."

But the notion that Johnson's fortunes and the history of the blues have largely been decided by the white rock 'n' roll world appeals to many blues experts.

"There are problems with the idea of the blues as a roots music," Mr. Titon said. "Because if so, then rock 'n' roll is the flower. It used to be that the flower was jazz, which is equally misleading. Blues is a music in and of itself."

Mr. Wald has a looser definition. Blues music, as he sees it, is simply part of a continuum of black pop. Robert Johnson, Leroy Carr and Bessie Smith were not moaning field laborers. "They were Sam Cooke, they were Snoop Dogg, they were Aretha Franklin," he said. "That's what we've forgotten, and that's what a lot of white blues fans don't want them to be."

Will be looking for a copy of this book...

[Alexander]

I'm reading it now. It's quite interesting, although I find the writing to be a bit annoying...

[Chuck Nessa]

I find the thesis "to be a bit annoying".

[Alexander]

I find the thesis "to be a bit annoying".

Well, yeah, that too, but I'm trying to give it the benefit of the doubt.

One problem I have with the book is the way the author constantly hedges and qualifies his statements. "Robert Johnson wasn't all that important. Well, he was. Obviously he was. But he wasn't all that important at the time. Except to the people he influenced. He was important to them. But he wasn't as important as Bessie Smith. Which I mean in a wider sense. Johnson's importance was played up by white critics and blues collectors in the sixties. Not that there's anything wrong with that..." It's like Wald REALLY doesn't want to offend anybody, so he's constantly checking over his shoulder to make sure that he's covered his ass. That's what I mean about the writing being annoying.

[Dr. Rat]

I find the thesis "to be a bit annoying".

I think the white critic/black artist element may be a bit out of place and exploitative (though elsewhere I find this line of argument to be interesting and enlightening).

But I think the time is long since past when "Old Blues" stops meaning "Robert Johnson." Personally, I've never thought his music stands out to the degree that his retrospective fame does. How much more ink gets spilled on Johnson that on Patton and House? Or Weldon or McTell or . . . I think we could go on quite a bit.

Was Johnson great? Yes. Was he better than his elders and peers? Maybe (personally, I think not). Was he that much better? I think the answer is "no."

Not that standout musical figures don't exist, I just don't think Johnson was one of them. Johnson was an important practioner of and innovator within a tradition that existed before him and after him.

The crucial factor is his rise to legend status was not the color of the critics, but their desire for a good story to tell about the origins of the blues. Johnson was the vehicle for that story.

(Though I do begin to wonder about the race factor, as one of the architects of the Johnson legend was John Hammond, whom I think of as one of the great encouragers of misplaced primitivistic interpretations of black American art. Though he was a lot more than that.)

[Larry Kart]

Sure, some important facts usually remain to be uncovered, and sometimes new frameworks help to make better sense of what's there, but even though I've yet to read these books, I get the feeling from this piece of a new wave of academics and the like trying very hard to stake out turf, with a revisionist "everyone before me (or us) got it wrong, and for tendentious reasons" stance being a familiar way to go about that.

[Dr. Rat]

Sure, some important facts usually remain to be uncovered, and sometimes new frameworks help to make better sense of what's there, but even though I've yet to read these books, I get the feeling from this piece of a new wave of academics and the like trying very hard to stake out turf, with a revisionist "everyone before me (or us) got it wrong, and for tendentious reasons" stance being a familiar way to go about that.

Unfortunately, that's how you make your way in academia and academic publishing.

But critics who built Johnson's reputation were part of the generation who established tendentiousness (accusations and implications of racism abound in this literature) as a modus operendi for cultural critics. It may be tiresome, but I suppose it's only just that their tools should be turned against them.

--eric

[Larry Kart]

WNMC writes of "tendentiousness as a modus operendi for cultural critics" -- "It may be tiresome, but I suppose it's only just that their tools should be turned against them."

No, what's just is for everyone to try their disinterested best to get things right -- witness Chris Albertson's Bessie Smith bio, for example. Also, when you focus on overturning prior biases, it's easy to miss potentially important aspects of the piece of the cultural past you're looking at that don't show up on that particular radar screen, now matter how you squiggle around with the "tendentiousness" factor.

For instance, a crucial little (actually not so little) point I ran across today in Donald Clarke's excellent Frank Sinatra bio, "All or Nothing At All." Writing of the big Sinatra-T. Dorsey hit "I'll Never Smile Again," Clarke says: "It is a story song, almost harking back to the Tin Pan Alley of the turn of the century (which EVERYONE STILL REMEMBERED in 1940...)" (My emphasis.)

Likewise, perhaps, from a piece I once wrote about the early '30s Gershwin musicals "Of Thee I Sing" and "Let 'Em Eat Cake": "Both the plots and the music of these shows allude to idealized conventions of heroism and romantic love that were, from the vantage point of the early 1930s, felt to be comically outmoded--although these conventions were still familiar enough, alive enough, that references to them could be meaningfully humorous or charming. Consider 'A Kiss for Cinderella' from Of Thee I Sing, which President John P. Wintergreen delivers just before he and Mary Turner are married. It’s a takeoff, as Ira Gershwin has said, 'on the bachelor-farewell type of song, best exemplified by John Golden and Ivan Caryll’s ‘Goodbye Girls, I’m Through’ (Chin-Chin, 1914).' So, at least for a 1931 audience, the meaning of 'Cinderella' cannot be separated from the song’s network of allusions--which places ironic quotation marks around Wintergreen’s adieu to his former girlfriends, while it also permits some genuine wistfulness about his impending marriage to seep through (an emotion that would emerge in a quite different way if Wintergeen directly stated it)." Etc.

The point is that the piece of the cultural past we're looking at isn't (or isn't necessarily) looking forward, at us. It may be looking backwards, into its past or pasts (or its conceptions of the past), it may be looking sideways or obliquely in several different directions at once -- looking wherever it found or felt there to be meaning. And we'd better damn well be curious and scrupulous about these sorts of things, because this is just the sort stuff that gets lost and is forever forgotten, especially when we're all het up about "correcting" the last wave of our supposedly tendentious predecessors in the reacting to culture business.

[Simon Weil]

...what's just is for everyone to try their disinterested best to get things right...

Absolutely (and I agree about Chris). The basic emphasis has to be on getting it right. That surely has to be one's prime discipline as a writer. And please don't anybody give me that Post-Modern drivel about there is no such thing as truth and everyone's point of view is valid and yada, yada, yada.

And it does sound like turf wars, this thing (sorry Brownie).

Simon Weil

[Dr. Rat]

It has nothing to do with "post modern drivel about there being no such thing as truth." That's just a bugaboo anyhow.

It has to do with the fact that books get written and published in institutional and social contexts that impinge in pretty big ways on the project of finding "truth."

Truth may be out there, but what you write is an interpretation, not truth, and your interpretation is liable to be influenced by things like what'll get you tenure, or what will get your book reviewed, or what your peers (who may be pretty casually interested in your topic of specialty) are going to think is cool.

These things have demonstrably influenced scholarship, even that written by men (used advisedly) who were quite effusive in their dedication to truth and beauty.

Today, I may say I am absolutely dedicated to getting to the truth of the matter. In twenty years someone will come along and show just how distorted--and by what distorted--my idea of truth was.

The generation of social critics and musical historians who built the Johnson myth had agendas (aside from uncovering truth) that are pretty obvious to me in retrospect, and at times they were pretty unabashed about putting these agendas forward (unlike their immediate predecessors).

Well, that tendentiousness set a standard. That's the fact of the matter.

Getting rid of that tendentiousness will make things work a bit more pleasantly and smoothly, I think. And it has gotten very old.

But if you think returning to a dedication to truth will get us closer to it, I propose reading some scholarship from folks trained in the Victorian era or in the early part of the twentieth century. Their effusions on behalf of truth are rhapsodic. But of course they considered people like Robert Johnson to be veritable apes.

Zero-tolerance for "outiside influence" on scholarly interpretation is just naive and misleading. Better to acknowledge it where one sees it with whatever equanimity one can muster and acknowledge there may be plenty of places where one doesn't see it.

And this whole argument goes to style rather than matters of fact anyway--whether or not and how quickly scholarly disagreement ought to descend to ad hominem attack. Personally, I'd rather it be a slow descent. But that hasn't been the style for 30 or 40 years. Doesn't mean there haven't been lots of scholarly advances: there have. Just means that one generation always tries to trash the last. This is unjust, but the generation getting trashed now did it themselves.

My sympathy for them is limited.

Meanwhile, the book's thesis is interestingly suggestive.

[Dr. Rat]

The point is that the piece of the cultural past we're looking at isn't (or isn't necessarily) looking forward, at us. It may be looking backwards, into its past or pasts (or its conceptions of the past), it may be looking sideways or obliquely in several different directions at once -- looking wherever it found or felt there to be meaning. And we'd better damn well be curious and scrupulous about these sorts of things, because this is just the sort stuff that gets lost and is forever forgotten, especially when we're all het up about "correcting" the last wave of our supposedly tendentious predecessors in the reacting to culture business.

I agree with you, and I am not so sure we ought to suppose that this book has none of that attention to detail and context that you mention.

In fact, jettisoning the Robert Johnson Legend, I think, is an important step in getting to a point where we CAN properly contextualize the story here.

Thing is: in important respects the cultural past we're looking at isn't looking anywhere at all: it isn't anymore. All we've got are remnants and memories and consequences.

To make it live again requires our imaginative intervention, and here is where things get complicated. Then when you throw in already received retrospective interpretations, things begin to get really complicated.

NOT to say that the detail doesn't matter. It does. And the people who preserve it are crucially important.

But there are stories we know much better from the standpoint of detail and context: the late 1960s, say. But if I ask you to give me the story of the 1960s, what are you going to tell me that is "True?"

When it comes down to it, it doesn't matter what Armstrong said when he landed on the moon (detail), what matters is what that moment meant.

Soon, we are reduced to some level of tendentiousness. Personally, I'd prefer to keep things reasonably civil. But, as I've said, that's not how things have been of late in this business.

--eric

[Simon Weil]

It has nothing to do with "post modern drivel about there being no such thing as truth." That's just a bugaboo anyhow.

Sure it has. Because the atmosphere we live in, the intellectual atmosphere anyway, is infused by attacks on the very conception of truth.

It has to do with the fact that books get written and published in institutional and social contexts that impinge in pretty big ways on the project of finding "truth."

Right, and the social atmosphere right now is, as above, infused by these attacks on the very 'project of finding "truth."' And, indeed, by putting "truth" in inverted commas, you yourself do something very representative of the social context of now.

Truth may be out there, but what you write is an interpretation, not truth, and your interpretation is liable to be influenced by things like what'll get you tenure, or what will get your book reviewed, or what your peers (who may be pretty casually interested in your topic of specialty) are going to think is cool.

Au contraire, truth is out there and what you write might be truth, if you get lucky and are sufficiently competent and all that. And what I write is intended to be right, the truth. It may never rise above an interpretation, but damn I'm going to be displeased if that's all it is - or, in fact, that's what it mostly is. Or perhaps it's just going to be entirely interpretation - i.e. complete drivel. But I want to get it right.

In the area I know about, being "a productive historian" gets you peer acceptance.

The generation of social critics and musical historians who built the Johnson myth had agendas (aside from uncovering truth) that are pretty obvious to me in retrospect, and at times they were pretty unabashed about putting these agendas forward (unlike their immediate predecessors).

Well, that tendentiousness set a standard. That's the fact of the matter.

Getting rid of that tendentiousness will make things work a bit more pleasantly and smoothly, I think. And it has gotten very old.

If, as now, society doubts that there is such a thing as truth, that effectively undermines the search for truth. After all, there might not be such a thing as truth, so why bother. People decide, then, that they might just as well write their bullshit, sorry interpretation - because, as there's no truth, it's all going to be interpretation anyway. In that circumstance, the fact that one is writing tendentiously - and knowing that one is doing so - might in fact be seen to be a desirable form of honesty. For as there is no such thing as truth, one is being honest with oneself only when one knows one is lying.

But if you think returning to a dedication to truth will get us closer to it, I propose reading some scholarship from folks trained in the Victorian era or in the early part of the twentieth century. Their effusions on behalf of truth are rhapsodic. But of course they considered people like Robert Johnson to be veritable apes.

I think returning to a dedication to truth will allow us to absorb the useful elements of Post-Modernism, of which there are many, and lose the tendency to tendentiousness (above) that I see flowing from a questioning of the concept of truth.

Speaking as a guy who loves deconstructing texts.

Simon Weil

Edited February 29, 2004 by Simon Weil

[Dr. Rat]

Right, and the social atmosphere right now is, as above, infused by these attacks on the very 'project of finding "truth."' And, indeed, by putting "truth" in inverted commas, you yourself do something very representative of the social context of now.

Speaking as somebody who recently spent quite a while in a desperately hip graduate department, I don't really see this. In fact, I think it's pretty remarkable how little effect all the high-falutin theory talk has had on scholarly practice in fields like history.

Most folks whom anyone pays any attention to learned the lesson pretty quickly from the hash Edward Said made of Orientalism. In historical analysis, no standard of truth means no basis for complaint.

I specialized in 18th-century periodicals, and I can assure you, putting truth in quotes didn't get me out of one bit of dusty book reading or out of one monograph on 18th-century historical and social context.

And, of course, I want to be right, too. (Making the big assumption that I actually finish this damn thing--highly doubtful) It would be wonderful to just bring an end to some of the sociological debates I work around with some truth that will strike everyone like Paul on the road to Damascus.

That'd be super. But I doubt very much that'll happen.

What'll probably happen (if I do very well, and making the further assumption that anyone gives a damn) is that what I write will have a big effect, it'll have to be responded to, and those who wish to beleive something other than what I believe about how social and communicative processes work will set to work, find other facts and sources, find mistakes and blind spots in my work, and transform the picture to fit their set of assumptions and cherished beliefs about the contemporary world.

That I take to be about as true as true can be.

That'll represent a bit of progress, no doubt--arguments will be honed, certain ways of seeing things ruled out. But the big important questions will remain open.

Now there are probably ways of transcending this process, but it won't be through historical fact-gathering. The route to truth is just too long and winding in that direction. Well-thought-out scientific approaches to fields like contemporary sociology, psychology and ideology suggest themselves, but they aren't quite on the horizon yet, I don't think (at least not all of them).

--eric

[John L]

The Wald book is an interesting read. He put a lot of thought into it, and there are some interesting ideas.

Yet I have the distinct feeling that the book tries to be more controversial than the content would really call for. He continually refers to the "accepted wisdom" about the blues or "existing blues histories" without giving any citations whatsoever. I try to read most blues histories, and have never seen one that argues some of the points that Wald is supposedly taking issue with.

What existing blues history claims that Robert Johnson had anything close to the popularity of Bessie Smith, Leroy Carr or Lonnie Johnson druing his lifetime?

Wald's use of the term "insignificant" for Johnson refers only to his relative lack of popularity in the 1930s as compared to nationally known artists. There is nothing new here. Johnson's regional musical influence did have a measurable effect on the subsequent classic Chicago blues sound, however.

What blues history claims that the famous country blues artists were not influenced by urban blues? In many cases, these links are obvious. As for the question of which came first, urban or rural blues, there is evidence gathered in a number of studies by David Evans and other scholars that Wald appears to be unfamilar with. He doesn't even raise the main questions.

What existing blues history claims that Robert Johnson and other commercial country blues artists limited themselves to only blues? The fact that they were, for the most part, professional entertainers who played a variety of music for various different publics has been well documented in past literature.

On the other hand, Wald goes much too far here, in my opinion. He concludes that the only reason why these artists did not record their full repertoire is that record companies did not allow them to do so. He also argues that the Mississippi Delta was no different than other blues regions in that respect, and discounts generational differences as well.

While it is true that record companies were looking for blues, and did often limit the scope of what "blues" artists could record, that is not the full story. Just because Robert Johnson played non-blues music at white country dances to make ends meet doesn't mean that he would have wanted to record all of that music under his own name. There are also strong generational differences in the scope of music recorded at the very same dates in the 20s and 30s, with the younger generation of country blues artists focused much more exclusively on blues. Does Wald think that record companies placed different restrictions on artists conditional on age? Finally, the development of country blues in the Mississippi Delta relative to most other regions clearly reflects the effects of hightened segregation and a relatively greater weight to African versus European and white rural elements. Wald doesn't touch this issue, and instead paints a picture that discounts race as a factor in the nature of rural music. Show me a white artist who sounded ANYTHING like Charley Patton, Son House, or Robert Johnson.

Edited March 1, 2004 by John L

[brownie]

Thanks to the various posters around, this will be my next book purchase. Seems like an interesting read.

JohnL., your input it very much appreciated!

[Dr. Rat]

What blues history claims that the famous country blues artists were not influenced by urban blues? In many cases, these links are obvious. As for the question of which came first, urban or rural blues, there is evidence gathered in a number of studies by David Evans and other scholars that Wald appears to be unfamilar with. He doesn't even raise the main questions.

You obviously are more deeply read than I in this field, so I'll defer to your judgement on these issues.

I think, partly because of Living Blues and the people surrounding it, the state of blues scholarship is well ahead of where Wald might like it to be. A lot of his disputes seem to be with the legends that still seem to have a lot of popular currency.

But I'm thinking on the country/city issue, he might be referring to Sam Charters' early work? There seemed to be a pretty strong current of thought in John Hammond/Alan Lomax day that in the country (or the prisons) there was to be found some kind of purer, ur-music.

But then it turned out that the delta region had had a lot of in-migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was about as far from Lomaxian hopes of a "Land that Time Forget" as you could get in the rural US.

But again, I'm sure the scholarship is well beyond this.

Thanks a lot for the very interesting post.

--eric

[Dr. Rat]

If, as now, society doubts that there is such a thing as truth, that effectively undermines the search for truth. After all, there might not be such a thing as truth, so why bother. People decide, then, that they might just as well write their bullshit, sorry interpretation - because, as there's no truth, it's all going to be interpretation anyway. In that circumstance, the fact that one is writing tendentiously - and knowing that one is doing so - might in fact be seen to be a desirable form of honesty. For as there is no such thing as truth, one is being honest with oneself only when one knows one is lying.

Been rereading your post.

I am as much against competing lies as a model for discussion as anyone. You see this a lot in science debates right now--in topics touching on health and environmentalism, especially.

I regard people who publish without regard to truth with contempt. But on the other hand there will be no direct access to truth in these matters--there will always be doubt. One simply should not publish things and call them truth, because six months later someone overturns your truth and you've done nothing but confirm just the sort of feckless skepticism you decry.

The scare quote serve a purpose: they guarantee a healthy doubt. Something I feel that is absolutely necessary.

And I'll say again, people have been publishing baldfaced lies and bullshit forever, since long before the death of unscarequoted Truth. They do it because they can get away with it, not because they do or don't beleive in unscarequoted Truth.

Are there shockingly low standards in some areas of academia and publishing? Yes, indeed. But I just don't think it has anything to do with people not beleiving in truth, mostly because I haven't met anyone who doesn't operatively beleive in truth yet and I've met few people who OK with the competing lies syndrome outside of politics.

Standards get ignored and dummified because people are overburdened or lazy or afraid to exercise their judgement. In publishing and academia, I think we have more of that today than we have had, but I think that has a lot more to do with the economics than philosophy.

--eric