The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ’n’ Roll by Preston Lauderbach (review)

Abstract

THE CHITLIN' CIRCUIT AND THE ROAD TO ROCK 'N' ROLL. By Preston Lauderbach. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 2011.For over a century, examinations of the blues and blues-rooted have shaped critical discussions of African cultural production in the United States. Scholars and writers, assuming a range of positions along the blues continuum, have explored and discussed ways that the blues connect artists and audiences to African experiences. Sterling Brown, Daphne Duval Harrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Dwight Andrews, and Julio Finn, are among those who situate the blues within broader discussions of aesthetics and culture. Recognizing the blues' capacity to move fluidly between expressive forms and performance modes, their work facilitates discussions that make it possible to connect poetry by Duriel E. Harris to collages by Romare Bearden, and bring Furry Lewis' guitar stylings into conversation with the vocals of Rachelle Farell.Preston Lauderbach's The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'N' Roll (2011) contributes to this tradition in the study of Black music. In the course of his detailed narrative history, Lauderbach maps the business in Black America and discusses developments in blues-rooted throughout the twentieth century. Identifying the deep imprint that the blues have made upon the United States and culture, The Chitlin' Circuit surveys blues responses to conditions in African life. Investigating a set of distinct social and geographic spaces during specific historical moments, Lauderbach's study delivers an extended examination of African life during the Great Migration-era. The Chitlin' Circuit charts the blues' movements into an urban, industrial North as well as its adaptations to changing circumstances in the South. The volume, thereby, connects the form and function of Black to social conditions experienced by African Americans throughout the United States.Pursuing these ends, The Chitlin' Circuit engages the groundbreaking work that poet and critic Amiri Baraka performs in Blues People (1963). However, Lauderbach's study forges this connection while making claims for a broader discussion of American music and working through notions of Black and the color line that differ greatly from those espoused by Baraka in Blues People. For example, writing about the big-band era in the chapter Swing, from Verb to Noun, Baraka asserts that as widespread development of the swing style [during the 1930s and 1940s] . . . pass[ed] into the mainstream of culture, in fact, [it] could be seen as an integral part of that culture. …