A Southern Song (without A Mammy, A Mule, Or A Moon)

“No experienced writer would ever think of using Massachusetts in a song title, and yet this state is just as picturesque and romantic as New Hampshire.”

-- E.M. Wickes, Writing the Popular Song (1916)

As a follow-up to my previous essay, I've started reading Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald – another of the recent group of revisionist blues histories. Wald does a much better job, as far as I can see, of providing a proper historical and musical context for the “invention” of the blues. Along the way, Wald makes a fairly brief aside that struck me as interesting: he contrasts (pp. 31-32) the marketing of music in the 1920s to the African-American and country markets. He notes that African-American records were marketed as “race records”, and were sold as up-to-date music, while country records were marketed as “Old-Time Music.” Wald then proceeds to draw a line of nostalgia from 1920s “old time” music through country-and-western history up to “new country” stars today. 

I Thought I Heard James McKune Say: A Review of In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton

In the Beatles mockumentary “All You Need Is Cash” – tracing the story of the “prefab Four,” the Rutles – the narrator (played by Eric Idle) looks to discover the “black origins of Rutle music.”  To do so, he travels to the Mississippi River in Louisiana, “the cradle of the blues,” or, as he explains,  “black music sung mainly by whites”.  What he finds are the musicians Blind Lemon Pye, who it turns out only became a musician because of the Rutles; and Ruttling Orange Peel, who claims the Rutles visited him and stole his music – as did Frank Sinatra, the Everly Brothers, and Lawrence Welk.  The narrator can only conclude that “we seem to be rather wasting our time here . . . still, pretty, isn’t it?”

Marybeth Hamilton, in In Search of the Blues (2008), acknowledges this absurdity in the search for the origins of music like the blues.

In purporting to reveal a music’s beginnings – the moment of emergence, when we can see it in its pure, unadulterated, natural state – stories of musical origins are always social and political fables. (p. 188)

Certainly, with musical forms (like blues, or jazz, or rock ‘n’ roll) reflecting a gradual development rather than a sudden invention, fashioning an origin story out of a complex set of cultural systems is naturally selective, and purpose-driven.  In addition, with blues and jazz, the development lies largely or completely outside the popular recording industry, meaning documentation is limited.  

So it should not surprise us that recent scholarship on the blues has been characterized by revisionism, by the puncturing of myth (see a summary of these in Christian O’Connell, “The Color of the Blues: Considering Revisionist Blues Scholarship,” Spring 2013).  Deconstruction is by now a longstanding genre in scholarly writing, and the myths of the blues are ripe for deconstruction.  Along with Elijah Wald’s Escaping the Delta, Hamilton’s book is the most prominent of these works.  For Hamilton, the origins of the blues in the Mississippi Delta are a myth; instead, the origins – or, at least the origins of the myth, or the origins of our conception of the blues – are to be found in the song collectors, record collectors, critics, and enthusiasts of the blues and African-American music generally over the first two-thirds of the 20^th century.  But is Hamilton’s narrative correct?  How does she deal with the fact that, in her own words, “stories of musical origins are always social and political fables”?