The literature on the blues, and to a somewhat lesser extent that on gospel, rhythm and blues, and soul, is of considerable interest to the jazz student. It also has a specialized readership of its own. As an ingredient of jazz itself, the blues is of special significance, particularly as the basic twelve-bar format provides a vehicle on which countless improvisations are possible. Many jazz bands, large and small, are firmly based on the blues, and most individual musicians will acknowledge that their playing is considerably influenced by it.
There is a particularly strong sociological content to the blues literature, since it is a folk music very closely interwoven with all aspects of Black American lifestyles, whether rural or urban. As Blacks moved from the rural South into the big cities of the North, their music reflected their changing lives, and several writers have captured this successfully in print.
The leading British authority on the blues is Paul Oliver. His reputation for scholarly research is probably unequalled, and his excellent books make a tremendous contribution to understanding blues development. He has also been responsible for editing a complete series of important, if brief, monographs by specialized authors on individual styles and performers.
Oliver’s first major work was Blues Fell This Morning (1960), which was published in the United States in 1963 as The Meaning of the Blues. This important and pioneering study uses 350 blues citations to illustrate aspects of the life of the rural Black, and has chapters on work, gambling, travel, love, crime, etc. It is illustrated with extracts from the “race” catalogs of the record companies, and is well-documented with a full discography of quoted blues, an index of quoted blues singers, and a four-page select bibliography.
Oliver’s second book, Conversation with the Blues (1965), is a sequel to the first, and consists of verbatim extracts from the conversations the author had with sixty-eight singers during an extensive field trip in 1960. Again, it is well-illustrated with eighty unusual photographs, and there is an appendix on selected recordings of the singers quoted, as well as biographical details. One critic suggested that “this book conveys more of the essence of the blues than any other.” It is certainly an extremely valuable source book.
Screening the Blues (1968) is a series of illuminating essays on several major themes, and in it Oliver attempts to interpret the blues enigma by explaining how a vocabulary of allusion, symbol, and imagery carries code implications for the Black audience. This allows blues singers to get their songs on record and past the screen of white censorship. A review of this work in the leading British newspaper The Sunday Times described it as “a remarkable piece of scholarship, almost completely persuasive in its argument (and) meticulous in its research detail.”
The Story of the Blues (1969) is a balanced historical narrative with over 500 illustrations, and Savannah Syncopators (1970) traces the West African roots of the blues, linking it to American developments. This work is one of the first in the Blues Paperbacks series that appeared in the early 1970s. It is remarkable that anyone so geographically, racially, and socially removed from his subject as is Oliver could produce such authoritative work.
American scholars have also produced some excellent studies; Samuel Charters is one who has specialized largely in this field. He is a prolific documentor of the music, starting with The Country Blues (1959), which is both highly readable and a mine of information on the early country singers such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leroy Carr, Bill Broonzy, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. It is still a useful source book, though it is now partly superseded by later research findings. The English edition of this work appeared in 1960 and included an extra appendix.
Charters followed this in 1967 with The Bluesmen, an excellent study of pre–World War II country blues in Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama; his Sweet as the Showers of Rain (1977) is the second volume of this work. Its descriptive subtitle, The Story and the Music of the Men Who Made the Blues, including Furry Lewis, Willie McTell, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, and others, indicates its scope.
Another significant study by Charters is The Poetry of the Blues (1963, reprinted in 1970), which looks at blues lyrics as literature and includes much interpretative and explanatory material. A monograph on Robert Johnson (1973) tells the story of Johnson’s life and music and is based on reminiscences of other musicians who knew and played with him, plus musical transcriptions of his recorded repertoire.
This review of Charters’s work so far is completed by reference to The Legacy of the Blues (1975), subtitled A Glimpse into the Art and Lives of Twelve Great Bluesmen.
Earlier works by American authors include W. C. Handy’s Blues (1926), an anthology that traces “the development of the most spontaneous and appealing branch of Negro folk music,” according to its extended title. It includes complete words and music of sixty-seven songs by Handy with a historical and critical text by Abbe Niles, and was reissued in 1949 under the title A Treasury of the Blues. Handy’s autobiography Father of the Blues (1941, reissued in 1970) is also of interest.
Other autobiographical works by blues singers include “Big Bill” Broonzy’s Big Bill Blues (1955), which was completely revised by his collaborator, Yannick Bruynoghe, after Broonzy’s death and published in the United States in 1964. This is a valuable book that provides background details to the lives of rural singers in Mississippi. There are some excellent line drawings by Paul Oliver and a comprehensive discography of Broonzy’s recorded work included as well. Another book of significance is Perry Bradford’s Born with the Blues (1965), which includes interesting details of early jazz in New York.
Huddie Ledbetter, who was known as Leadbelly, was a major figure in blues history, and his work and songs are discussed in a number of published sources. John and Alan Lomax’s Negro Songs as Sung by Leadbelly (1936) was an early work in the blues field, and its subtitle succinctly described Ledbetter as “King of the Twelve-String Guitar Players of the World (and) Long-Time Convict in the Penitentiaries of Texas and Louisiana.” Alan Lomax was also associated with Moses Asch in the briefer Leadbelly Songbook, published by Oak Publications in 1963.
An even briefer pamphlet by British critics Max Jones and Albert McCarthy, Tribute to Huddie Ledbetter, appeared in 1946 and is still of some considerable interest. An excellent series of television programs about the blues was produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation and was solidly based on documentary sources. An edited text of these broadcasts was published as The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues (1976) by Giles Oakley.
Another useful general overview, written in a popular and readable style, is Bruce Cook’s Listen to the Blues (1973), while James H. Cone’s The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (1972) is a useful introduction, though stronger on spirituals than blues.
The Blues Paperbacks series produced some important titles in 1970 and 1971. This series examines important musicians, styles, traditions, and themes, and the history and influence of the blues. It is aimed, in the words of the publisher, Studio Vista, at “enthusiasts of modern musical idioms, sociologists and folklorists, and students of the popular arts.”
Several titles are biographical studies of individual singers and typical of these are Tommy Johnson (1971) by David Evans, Charley Patton (1970) by John Fahey, The Devil’s Son-in-Law: The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw and His Songs (1971) by Paul Garon, and Deep South Piano: The Story of Little Brother Montgomery (1970) by Karl Gert zur Heide. Others in the series deal with groups of singers from a particular area or sharing a particular style. Bengt Olsson’s Memphis Blues and Jug Bands (1970) and William Ferris’s Blues from the Delta (1970) are examples of the latter.
Ferris’s book is a study of Black folklore from the Mississippi Delta and examines the creative processes of the blues through interviews and recording sessions with singers. Derrick Stewart-Baxter’s Ma Rainey and the Classic Blues Singers (1970) is a critical discussion of the women singers of the 1920s who first recorded the blues and established its relationship to jazz.
It is appropriate to mention Bessie Smith at this juncture, and especially the excellent biography by Chris Albertson, Bessie (1972), which is dealt with more fully in chapter 4 along with other biographies of major figures. The work of Blind Boy Fuller and fellow singers of the blues in the Carolinas and North Georgia is documented in Bruce Bastin’s Crying for the Carolinas (1971); a final title in this excellent series is Bob Groom’s The Blues Revival (1971). This traces the growth of blues appreciation, especially in the British context.
Charles Keil’s Urban Blues (1966) is a scholarly work of considerable interest. Keil has produced a masterly account of a limited field and propounds the thesis that the urban blues is part of a valid, valuable, and distinctly Black culture. There are vivid chapters on B. B. King and Bobby Bland skillfully intertwined within his analysis. He is trained in the fields of musicology, anthropology, and sociology, all of which are vital to a balanced analysis of this musical culture, and has also worked as a practicing jazz musician. Keil is exceptionally well qualified in the fields he is discussing and thus brings authority of the highest order to this important document.
Mike Leadbitter, who died at the age of 32, was a leading British enthusiast who edited the pioneering journal Blues Unlimited from its inception in 1963 to 1970. His book Nothing but the Blues: An Illustrated Documentary (1971) is a compilation of material that originally appeared in its pages. Leadbitter also produced Delta Country Blues (1968), which is a very readable booklet concentrating on the 1940s and early 1950s.
Paul Garon, whose contribution to the Blues Paperbacks series has been previously mentioned, published Blues and the Poetic Spirit (1975) in the Eddison Blues Books series edited by Tony Russell. This title includes a brief chapter on “The Literature of the Blues.” Another in the Eddison series is Mike Rowe’s Chicago Breakdown (1973), which studies the blues singers of Chicago. It is well researched, authoritative, and particularly good on the development of postwar styles.
A very well-illustrated volume is Blues (1975), compiled by Robert Neff and Anthony Connor. This conveys the personal experiences of some fifty-five singers rather than being either a musicological treatise or a history of the blues.
Books of musical transcriptions include Eric Kriss’s Six Blues-Root Pianists (1973), which includes pieces by Jimmy Yancey, Champion Jack Dupree, Little Brother Montgomery, Speckled Red, Roosevelt Sykes, and Otis Spann. It also has a useful, though brief, annotated bibliography. Earlier works in the same vein include Shirley’s The Book of the Blues (1964) and Jerry Silverman’s Folk Blues (1958). The former includes some 100 items for guitar with useful discographical notes on each title and brief biographical details of the alleged composer.
A manual on The Country Blues Guitar (1968) by Stefan Grossman includes guitar instruction with examples and lyrics from early records, while Tony Glover’s Blues Harp (1965) is an instruction method for playing the blues harmonica.
A remarkable and lengthy book edited by Eric Sackheim, The Blues Line (1969), completes this section. Sackheim is a lifelong collector of blues lyrics and a publisher of poetry. The book contains 270 carefully selected verses laid out artistically and very effectively on its pages. The authors range from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters. As one reviewer said, “the text sings with the voices of the men and women from whose lives the songs grew.” It is brilliantly illustrated—a minor masterpiece.
Blues-related popular music, together with gospel, is worthy of brief mention here, especially as there are several superior texts among many mediocre ones. John Broven’s Walking to New Orleans (1974) is the story of New Orleans rhythm and blues, and particularly relates this to earlier New Orleans jazz. It is an especially useful study of the period 1946–73 and has excellent coverage of artists, clubs, and recordings.
A more general work, The Sound of the City (1970) by Charlie Gillett, is subtitled The Rise of Rock and Roll and is claimed to be the best history of rhythm and blues, soul, and rock, as well as rock and roll itself. Another important work is Michael Haralambos’s Right On (1974), which attempts to trace the relationship between Black society and culture and Black music, and especially to explain the decline in popularity of the blues and the rise in popularity of soul. This is another excellent title from the Eddison Blues Books series.
Also on soul is Phyl Garland’s The Sound of Soul (1969) and Ian Hoare’s The Soul Book (1975), while gospel is covered by Tony Heilbut’s The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (1971). Finally, a book which, according to some critics, appears not to have received the attention it merits is Richard Middleton’s Pop Music and the Blues (1972), which offers an original and valuable cultural analysis based on the study of the blues and how it influenced popular music as a musical form. British trumpeter and writer Ian Carr regards it as “a fascinating attempt to explain the music in terms of its sociopsychological background in the fusion of Western and non-Western cultures.”
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Categories: British Literature, Literature, Music Criticism
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