Review: The Blues Comes to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book, by Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick

Abstract

In 2014, writer John Jeremiah Sullivan penned an essay for the New York Times Magazine about blues musicians Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. Thomas and Wiley were unlikely candidates for such a profile. “The Ballad of Elvie and Geeshie” traced the strange legacy of the Black Mississippi women from little-known pre-World War II recording artists to subjects of present-day New York Times Magazine curiosity. Their recordings were scant: a sum total of three records released nearly a century prior by a small Wisconsin-based furniture-turned-record company known as Paramount. Copies are exceedingly rare; their format—the vaunted 78 rpm. shellac disc—has not been mass-produced since the 1950s, when it was eclipsed by the slower-spinning but better-sounding microgroove LP and seven-inch EP. This combination makes the simple audition of their music feel like a discovery. Sullivan’s profile exemplified this: “There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great,” writes Sullivan, “but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent.”1 This dynamic between rarity and artistry is not unique to Thomas and Wiley but rather common to retrospective interest in the blues more generally. Blues history is, in many ways, a cultural justice project aimed at identifying and elevating “lost” musicians, such as Thomas and Wiley. It has a long and storied history of its own.In 1959, Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick, two major players in the enterprise of blues historiography, began work on a collaborative book project on the history of blues music in Texas in particular. The duo offered seemingly complementary methodologies. Oliver, a British academic known for his writings on African American vernacular music, had developed a reputation as a kind of big picture thinker—what McCormick himself would call Oliver’s “comprehensive historical view gained through records.” McCormick, on the other hand, dug more into the weeds. As a white Southerner living in Texas, the amateur folklorist and odd jobs person had direct access to blues culture in the Lone Star State. He was an ethnographer of Texas blues, an interviewer of musicians, relatives, and fans who bore ear- and eyewitness to the development of a vernacular tradition in the opening decades of the twentieth-century.Together, Oliver and McCormick wanted to write the definitive history of Texas blues. Over the next two decades, Oliver and McCormick worked in earnest to complete their project. A finished product would never surface. McCormick collected interviews in Texas and shipped them overseas to Oliver. In turn, Oliver would send McCormick chapter drafts for review and annotation. The distance, immensity of scope, and differences in vision stalled the project. Bouts with mental illness on McCormick’s part and gaps in communication strained their relationship. By the mid-1970s, the pair were no longer speaking and the project was shelved.The Blues Comes to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormack’s Unfinished Book is the culmination of that long dormant collaboration. Published only after the passing of both writers (McCormick died in November 2015; Oliver followed in August 2017), the book exists thanks to the diligence of folklorist Alan Govenar, who compiled the book and authored introductory essays alongside fellow folklorist Kip Lornell. By no means a casual task, Govenar combed through thousands of pages of chapter drafts, planning notes, and correspondences to assemble this weighty, two volume, thirty-three chapter, textbook-sized tome of Texas blues. Everything, as they say, is bigger in Texas, and the saying goes for Oliver and McCormack’s unfinished text.The tagline heading the back cover, “Uncovering the emergence of Texas blues music and scholarship,” is more than appropriate; The Blues Comes to Texas is both a book about Texas blues music and a book about producing a book about Texas blues music. Govenar places the reader in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when the research and writing were in production, as well as the contemporary present, when Oliver and McCormack’s work was finally pieced together. Govenar’s introduction graces the reader with several extended passages of correspondence between its transcontinental authors. The result is an interior view into the process of two scholars, collectors, and friends working through their sometimes divergent, sometimes complementary methodologies toward a singular goal: to document and celebrate the history of blues music in Texas.The question then becomes, what does an unpublished, unfinished manuscript from forty to fifty years ago offer a present-day readership? The Blues Comes to Texas is revelatory on several fronts. For starters, both Oliver and McCormick have become figures of particular interest in their own right. The friendship and falling out that develops over the course of their correspondence pulls back the curtain on the working relationshipThe manuscript is also an addition to the historiography of blues scholarship. Although Oliver and McCormick began work on the project at the beginning of serious study of the blues in both monograph and compilation LP formats, their extended period of research reveals significant developments in the scale and scope of interest in the genre. The book displays an interest in a wider variety of blues musics and blues musicking than is present in earlier histories. Although still playing a notably minoritarian role, Black women, such as Hociel Thomas, Sippie Wallace, and Bernice Edwards (names you are unlikely to find in other monographs), are offered more prominence in The Blues Comes to Texas. Oliver and McCormick’s blues pluralism reflects a broader turn toward pluralities in the multi-ethnic and gender-cognizant cultural imaginary of the 1970s.Likewise, the text also serves as an insight into racial thought of the period. Racialization in The Blues Comes to Texas is distinctly more cultural than earlier blues scholarship, which too often assigned the value in blues music to the very biology of Black blues musicians. Here Oliver and McCormick openly question the blood rationale of racial distinction, arguing that political and cultural phenomena shape race as a concept as opposed to genetics. Even though race is understood as socially, versus biologically, determined, evidence of older thinking on race still comes through at points. Govenar’s decision to give us McCormick and Oliver’s work as-it-stands—clearly the only reasonable presentation of it—tests the limits of a contemporary reader’s willingness to accept or dismiss prejudices of the past. Nowhere is this clearer than in the section “Old Country Stomp,” where the authors not only write without trepidation about the easy “interchange between white and Negro communities of songs and customs…after the painful years of Reconstruction,” but also regale us with the decidedly more odious observations of Black culture authored by antebellum whites. Likewise, Oliver and McCormick’s description of Huddie Ledbetter’s physical person as evidence of his Black and indigenous heritage certainly tests the cringe-quotient.Most significantly, The Blues Comes to Texas adds detail at the granular level to the development of the blues in Texas as well as the broader history of Black American vernacular expression. Like the women musicians mentioned earlier, there are countless names that do not regularly appear in accounts of blues history, too many, in fact, to do justice in a book review. Of course, the age of the research does show at points. Some of the information presented here does not reflect contemporary historical consensus. For instance, the idiosyncratic gospel blues musician Washington Phillips is still described as having “played an instrument that has been identified as a dulceola,” when more recent accounts have definitively stated that the mysterious, toy piano-sounding accompaniment was a homemade instrument strung with violin strings and played like an autoharp that Phillips dubbed a “manzarene.”2 These details are rare and vastly outnumbered by the quantity and quality of new information available here. A must read for any serious student of blues music, The Blues Comes to Texas delivers on Oliver and McCormick’s long-abandoned promise.