In Search Of The Blues: Black Voices, White Visions [Paperback]

This is a marvellous book that challenged many of my preconceptions about the blues. Since the 1960s, when Robert Johnson was successfully marketed as the `King of the Delta Blues Singers', it has become conventional to proclaim the Delta as the location of the most authentic blues. It was an appropriately primitive setting for this eerie music where deals were done with the devil at the crossroads and blues singers were pursued by hellhounds.

Hamilton looks at different accounts of `the birth of the blues' and asks why we believe one version rather than another. She notices that in the 1920s `Crazy Blues' sung by Mamie Smith sold a million records. Blues sung by women backed up by jazz bands were the first hits in the newly constituted `race records' market. Yet today these recording are routinely described as a version of vaudeville or show business, and the early giants of the blues are Robert Johnson and Charley Patton, mysterious men who seem to have flourished in a landscape far from the city, the radio and the record business.

The best known version of `the birth of the blues' is a story that W.C.Handy told in his autobiography `Father Of The Blues', published in 1941. Handy is vague about the date but - probably around 1900 - he describes a memorable encounter with a ghostly black vagrant who, in the dark of the night, played a haunting song on his guitar:

"As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable.
Going where the Southern cross the Dog
The singer repeated the line three times accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard."

Marybeth Hamilton's book contrasts this version with one recorded slightly earlier. Three years before Handy published his autobiography, the folklorist Alan Lomax recorded jazz pianist "Jelly Roll" Morton telling his stories of how he first heard the blues. In this version, the setting was a New Orleans brothel, also around 1900. He told of a prostitute and singer, Mamie Desdoumes, playing a piano and singing a plaintive blues tune:

I got a husband and I got a kid man too
I got a husband and I got a kid man too
My husband can't do what my kid man can do.

Which location seems most appropriate? The ghostly rural railway station at night? Or a bordello in the middle of the red-light district of one of the most cosmopolitan cities in America? Marybeth Hamilton's book is an not an enquiry into where the blues came from. But an account of how the blues has been defined, and how this music has been heard as `pure' and at odds with radios and records and white civilisation.

John and Alan Lomax, the legendary folk song collectors, explored the American South many times in the 1930s and 1940s, collecting material for the newly established Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress. John Lomax decided to search in the prisons for his material because "Our purpose was to find the Negro who had had the least contact with jazz, the radio and the white man." Their most memorable discovery happened in July 1933 in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. A convict was introduced to the Lomaxes as Huddie Ledbetter but everyone called him Leadbelly. Leadbelly sang into the Lomaxes' field recording machine an astonishing variety of spirituals, blues, cowboy tunes and field hollers.

Marybeth Hamilton explains how Leadbelly was released from prison, after performing so eloquently. But when John Lomax brought this `untutored Negro minstrel' to New York, Leadbelly fulfilled all Lomax's anxieties that the big city would corrupt folk music. Leadbelly visited the most famous jazz club in the city, the Cotton Club, where he got drunk with Cab Calloway, who offered him $1000 a night to sit in with his band. Horrified, Lomax removed Leadbelly to a house in Connecticut.

The story of Lomax and Leadbelly reaches a tragic-comic climax in this genteel setting in New England, when `The March of Time' newsreel arrived with their camera and lighting and proceeded to film a mocked-up re-enactment of Leadbelly's journey from singing convict to grateful minstrel performer. The way in which, in the film, Leadbelly thanked Lomax for his release from prison was to cause John Lomax much grief: "Thank you, boss, thank you. [Clasps his hands.] I'll drive you all over the United States and I'll sing all songs for you. You be my big boss and I'll be your man. Thank you, sir."

Hamilton's book does not make facile judgements about who is a racist and who is exploiting whom in the field of early blues recordings. John Lomax did extraordinary work recording music that would otherwise have been lost. Yet he laboured with the mindset of a man born two years after the American Civil War had ended. This is a subtle book, full of unexpected voices, that makes you listen to the music with fresh ears and think twice about the origins of some of the greatest black music ever recorded.

Marybeth Hamilton is an American who teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has written extensively on American popular culture. In her recent book, In Search of the Blues", Hamilton tells the story of how and why several white researchers from the early 20th Century to about 1960 set out to find a uniquely African American style of American music untainted by commercialism. In their searches, Hamilton concludes, these individuals told at least as much about themselves as they did about the music. Hamilton comes to argue in her book that the "primitive" Delta blues which today fascinates so many listeners was invented by a small coterie of record collectors beginning in the 1940s. This claim is unconvincing. Yet, there is much to be learned about the discovery of the blues in Hamilton's study.

Hamilton explores five pioneers in the study of African American music, focusing on their racial attitudes as the motivation for their interest. The first pioneer is the early southern sociologist Howard Odum. Early in the 20th Century, Odum moved from the study of the classics to explore and record African American hollers and work songs off obscure and dusty roads, logging camps and farms. In a further chapter, she details the work of John Lomax, also a southerner with the prejudices of his time, who discovered the folk singer Leadbelly in a Louisiana prison and attempted to market him in the northeast. Lomax's son Allen continued his fathers efforts to record southern African American folk music, including the blues, while moving away from his father's segregationalist views.

A story I did not know before was that of Dorothy Scarborough, a highly educated daughter of Confederate supporters who taught at Columbia University. She became interested in African American music by virtue of growing up on a plantation. In 1925, she published a book "On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs which Hamilton describes as "part song anthology, part history, part folklore compendium, part memoir." (p. 61) Because of its racial attitudes, Scarborough's book is little read today. But Hamilton seems right in suggesting that much is to be found in it.

Opposing the rural origin of authentic African American music, Hamilton turns to the work of three writers, William Russell, Charles Smith, and Frederic Ramsey. In 1937. these writers published "Jazzmen" which conflates jazz and the blues and finds African American music reached its purest expression in the historic Storyville District of New Orleans.

Probably the most importantt figure for Hamilton's purposes is her final character, an obscure record collector named James McKune. For 25 years beginning in the mid-1940s, McKune lived in a YMCA in Brooklyn where he collected old recordings and stored them in a cardboard box under his bed. McKune soon grew partial to old obscure songs from the Delta blues, particularly to recordings by Charlie Patton. Ultimately, other collectors followed McKune's tastes.Songs by Patton and others were released on small labels in the early 1960s. By the middle of the decade, the blues revival had began. McKune himself lost interest in the blues and was the victim of a bizarre murder, alcoholic, lonely, poor and perhaps mentally ill, in 1971.

Hamilton tells a fascinating story about McKune efforts and those of other individuals to discover a native African American music. But she simply fails to make her case that McKune somehow "invented" the Delta blues. Hamilton claims that interest in Delta blues is both racial and sexist in character as men tried to flee responsibility and from the change in gender roles resulting from egalitarianism. She writes that the "blues revival stands alongside the Beat movement as an opening salvo of ... the male flight from commitment that percolated through American culture. What united both movements was their almost exclusively male constituency and their romance with outsider manhood, with defiant black men who seemed to scorn the suburban breadwinner's stifling soul-destroying routine."(p.241)

Readers who want to learn about Delta blues themselves would do better to turn to Ted Gioia's recent book "Delta Blues". Hamilton has much of valuable to teach about the individuals who pioneered in the study of the blues, but many of her conclusions must be viewed with skepticism.

Robin Friedman