The Essential Idea of the Blues Formula: A Response to David Evans

Abstract

I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of American Folklore for inviting me to respond to David Evans's Formulaic Composition in the Blues: A View from the Field (2007), and I also thank Evans for taking the time and energy to write his critique of my work. In the following pages, I will answer Evans's major arguments, many of which stem from his view of the blues formulaa view at odds with the one I describe in my book (Taft 2006). I agree with his assessment of my transcriptions: there are many errors and quite a few howlers. But I transcribed I heard, making use of question marks where I did not feel confident enough to guess, and bracketing words and phrases in aster isks where I was unsure of my transcription. While I obviously would have preferred my transcriptions to be entirely accurate, Evans's corrections to my transcriptions are, as he admits, what I heard on the original recordings, since the singers left no written versions of their (2007:497 n. 2). I am sure that Evans has a better ear than I, and his transcriptions of particular words and phrases may well make more sense than mine. Transcribing for the purposes of formulaic analysis, however, pres ents a problem: one is likely to hear formulas or formulaic language where they might not exist, because one is predisposed to looking for formulas-a situation that would work against any objective analysis of the blues formula. For this reason, I tried not to prejudge the lyrics and erred on the side of some mishearings. One of my strategies for countering inaccuracies in the transcriptions was quan titative. By transcribing a corpus of over two thousand blues songs, my percentage of inaccuracies-perhaps 10 percent of the words in any given song-would become statistically less significant than if I had analyzed only a few hundred lyrics. My inaccuracies, in fact, tended to make my corpus seem less formulaic than it actually was, since the words and phrases that I misheard often excluded those parts of a song from identification with any particular formula. For example, considering my transcription of Bo Weavil Jackson's 1926 recording Poor Boy Blues, Evans cor rects Thinking about the wire that my brown had sent to Thinking about the words that my brown had said. My phrase is found nowhere else in the corpus,