Marybeth Hamilton’s thoughtful book, In Search of the Blues, tell almost-lost stories — not of delta bluesmen — but of whites who devoted much of their lives to collecting these musical masters.
Authentic Delta Music
Many who perform blues, and many lovers of the genre, hear something authentic in early recordings by Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, and other acoustic performers. What is this authentic quality of sound that the collectors identified, and what is its cultural meaning?
Blues Sounds
According to one legend of the origin of the blues, W.C. Handy, the great African American band leader, songwriter, and music publisher, was waiting for a train in a lonesome station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, about 1900, when, as he later wrote, “a lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me as I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of a guitar… The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me as instantly.”
The man sang “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog,” and repeated the line three times. Handy wrote, “the tune stayed in my mind.” He returned to Memphis and began to write what are now called blues songs.
Blues and Suffering
Handy’s description emphasizes the poverty and suffering of the musician, and suggests that the simplistic, mournful sound expressed a bitterly hard life. This vision of the bluesman has stuck. In fact, it was the primitive sound of suffering that many collectors believed they were capturing on the first recording devices.
Depending on the politics of the collector, this sound might have been interpreted as evidence of racial inferiority (Howard Odum), of the loss of an agricultural, pre-machine society (Fred Ramsey), or the experience of imprisonment (John and Alan Lomax interpreting the songs of Leadbelly). For Norman Mailer, in his powerful 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” blues gave voice to the singer’s “rage…joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.”
The Problem With Recording Machines
The early collectors believed they were capturing sounds of a primitive, oral society, and that the essence of folk music was performance. Recordings at the time were of poor quality, and contributed to the idea that any machine must distort real blues, which is somehow — magically? — coming to us from an earlier stage of history.
The very act of collecting authentic music on a record involved a contradiction. The collectors believed that the singers were “pure,” or “uncontaminated by the industrial age,” yet their recorded voices were necessarily distorted. This problem still troubles some people, for example those who privilege analog recordings over digital ones, or those who argue that reverb and other effects lessen the purity of recording a vocal “dry.”
Who has the best Blues?
Another interesting issue given rich treatment by Hamilton is how we decide which Blues are best. Should we use the standard of what songs were most popular with early 20th Century black record buyers (and thus represented their authentic experience)? Or should we ignore this in favor of a description of a single collector’s favorite sound, such as James McKune’s description of Charley Patton’s singing?
Fine Writing, Challenging Discussions
Marybeth Hamilton is a terrific writer, and she has brought to light stories of the early blues collectors that no lover of this music should miss. She suggests at times that the collectors “invented” the Blues, pushing this thesis in a colorful way. But she also acknowledges that Blues has a “magic” of its own (and thus must have been “out there” to be discovered). The point of reading this book is not to argue over definitions, but to learn how people today gained access to this beautiful music, and to examine one’s own criteria for an authentic life.
Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of The Blues. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
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