Folk Blues Research Articles

Lyric Formulas as Traditional Compositional Processes in the Folk Blues: A Case Study of Furry Lewis

Abstract The spontaneous combination of traditional, borrowed, and original lyric formulas is the central process by which traditional blues lyrics are composed. Building on theories of formulaic composition first developed by Milman Parry (1930) and Albert Lord (1960) and later adapted for the study of the blues by David Evans (1982, 2007, 2010), this article maps and compares blues lyrics by Furry Lewis as a means of better understanding this process. The article also identifies how Lewis’s idiosyncratic approach to this process makes his lyrics simultaneously typical and extraordinary.

“Those Songs Are Gonna Be Sung All Over This World!”: Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy, and the Tangled Routes of Folk Blues in Early Postwar Britain

“Those Songs Are Gonna Be Sung All Over This World!”: Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy, and the Tangled Routes of Folk Blues in Early Postwar Britain

Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley (review)

Reviewed by: Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley Patricia R. Schroeder Paige A. McGinley. Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. 304pp. $24.95. In Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism, Paige A. McGinley takes an inventive approach to studying the blues. Weaving her analysis from the varied threads of blues history, theatre history, and performance studies, McGinley argues convincingly that attention to live performance has been understudied in existing blues scholarship. Her aim, as she explains in the Introduction, is to “trace a linked but discontinuous genealogy of theatrical blues performance” (3) in which tent shows, touring shows, and the early touring performers, many of them women, played pivotal roles, despite their near-erasure in the many blues histories that valorize wandering male musicians in the rural Delta. She highlights the way that all performance, whether on a proscenium stage with lights and glitter or on a seemingly innocent front porch, is always already “theatrical,” featuring a mise-en-scène, costumes, props, and interaction between performers and audience. She notes that blues emerged along with (and partly from) various other forms of Southern black popular entertainment, such as tent shows, vaudeville theatres, and minstrel shows, and laments that the role of popular theater has been “marginalized in blues scholarship.” While she insists that she is not trying to create a new master narrative for [End Page 478] blues history, she does intend to “shift an understanding of blues performance and its histories by treating its relationship to theatrical practices as central, rather than secondary” (7). A second, complementary goal of Staging the Blues is to deconstruct the notion of “authenticity,” which has gone a long way to privileging those male, rural blues singers working in a folk tradition and underrating the historical significance of classic female blues artists. In McGinley’s persuasive argument, the notion of “authenticity” valorized by folklorists like John and Alan Lomax is itself a staged construction: overalls are as much a costume as a feather boa when worn by an entertainer. In fact, noting the persistent first-person speaker—the witnessing “I” of most blues lyrics—McGinley sees even the most apparently untutored blues artist as a ventriloquist (22), since he or she is already performing a character whose experiences and attitudes do not necessarily match those of the artist. Her emphasis on “theatricality’s and authenticity’s intertwined and interdependent stage histories” (9) helps her establish blues “authenticity” as a construct. This recurrent theme, reiterated in various ways in each chapter, is perhaps the most significant contribution of the book. After the provocative Introduction, Staging the Blues comprises four chapters, each one focused on a pivotal moment in the history of live blues performance. Chapter one, “Real Personality: The Blues Actress,” centers on the careers of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, both of whom had long histories of performing in traveling road shows as well as in the theaters on the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit. For McGinley, these touring performance shows worked as travelogues, with the performers relating to their often migratory audiences through the idiom of travel and representing the enormous cultural shifts in African American experience during the early decades of the twentieth century. Their glamour also offered black audiences a new possibility for black womanhood that depended neither on plantation stereotypes nor on the strictures of the racial uplift movement. A highlight of this chapter is McGinley’s nuanced exploration of various publicity photographs of Rainey and Smith, where she notes that the photos, like the stars’ musical performances, suggest a consciously “theatrical self-fashioning”: the photographs are another site of performance (56–57). Chapter two, “Theatre Folk: Huddie Ledbetter on Stage,” is especially compelling, as it divides Ledbetter’s career into three stages: the first forty-five years; the six months he spent touring with John Lomax; and his late international touring career. Seeing Ledbetter as “the hinge” between the theatrical traditions of Southern touring shows and the postwar emphasis on the folk blues tradition, McGinley effectively demonstrates that white folklorists created musicians in a theatrical image just as powerfully as the minstrel and...

Germany Gets the Blues: Negotiations of “Race” and Nation at the American Folk Blues Festival

In this essay, I focus on the emergence of a transatlantic blues culture by analyzing the work of two German concert promoters, Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau. Lippmann and Rau organized the American Folk Blues Festival in both Germanys and other European countries beginning in 1962. I argue that Lippmann and Rau supported attempts to claim middle-class respectability for jazz and the blues and saw a potential for modernizing West and East Germany through black music and tapped into Romantic constructions of authenticity and blackness that posited the blues as the premodern or “primitive” root of jazz. They aligned jazz and blues in the earlier years of the festival but gradually began to cater to the less “respectable” young fans of the emerging rock culture in the latter half of the 1960s who saw the blues as the “primitive” root of rock and roll. Lippmann’s and Rau’s claim that listening to blues music could serve as an antiracist strategy in the larger context of German denazification was undercut by their deployment of racialist ideology and their ignorance of then-current black civil rights politics. Despite its specific localized meanings in the postwar Germanys, the American Folk Blues Festival revealed the more ubiquitous problematic construction of blackness that has informed white countercultural discourses of the 1960s and beyond. The American Folk Blues Festival employed a specific German primitivism, which had been developed through German colonialism, scientific racism, and German Expressionist art, and other factors and which implicitly negated the history of Afro-Germans and other black people in Germany. By invoking this history, I argue that in their conceptualization of the American Folk Blues Festival Lippmann, Rau and their stage designer Günther Kieser relied on a conservative or preservative approach to blues. The organizers of the American Folk Blues Festival made no references to civil rights struggles in the U.S. until 1965, and then only did so from the safe distance of an ostentatiously liberated, anti-racist West Germany. However, conceptualizations of blues as simple, raw and uninhibited but ultimately non-threatening were occasionally challenged on and off stage by the participating musicians. It is important to acknowledge the local specificity of the blues in both Germanys and the way in the music has been used in efforts to overcome the Nazi past and, to a lesser degree, to resist East German authorities while simultaneously adhering to colonialist and primitivist traditions. Although I emphasize the specific localized context for the American Folk Blues Festival, I argue that its authentication of blues worked strikingly similarly to other Eurocentric discourses. The American Folk Blues Festival helps us to understand that what other scholars have carved out for a specific U.S. context was (and is) a transatlantic phenomenon in which problematic racial conceptions easily travel from the United States to Europe and back.

Formulaic Composition in the Blues: A View from the Field

Abstract Recent publications by Robert Springer and Michael Taft have brought renewed attention to the subject of the formula in blues lyrics. This article critiques these works. Drawing insights from the author’s fieldwork in the blues tradition, it agrees with Springer that a blues formula can be a half-line, whole line, or couplet unit and suggests that the blues formula should be understood, as Parry and Lord understood the oral epic formula, to be a lexical rather than semantic unit. The author offers a method of structural analysis of highly formulaic blues texts and discusses the relationships of folk blues to commercially recorded blues.

Formulaic Composition in the Blues: A View from the Field

Recent publications by Robert Springer and Michael Taft have brought renewed attention to the subject of the formula in blues lyrics. This article critiques these works. Drawing insights from the author's fieldwork in the blues tradition, it agrees with Springer that a blues formula can be a half-line, whole line, or couplet unit and suggests that the blues formula should be understood, as Parry and Lord understood the oral epic formula, to be a lexical rather than semantic unit. The author offers a method of structural analysis of highly formulaic blues texts and discusses the relationships of folk blues to commercially recorded blues.

Langston Hughes and the Blues (review)

Reviewed by: Langston Hughes and the Blues Kevin Eyster Langston Hughes and the Blues. By Steven C. Tracy. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Pp. ix + 305, introduction to the paperback edition, introduction, notes, bibliography, discography, indexes.) The release of the first paperback edition of Steven C. Tracy's Langston Hughes and the Blues, originally published in 1988, coincided with Hughes's one hundredth birthday on February 1, 2002. In this book Steven Tracy, himself a talented blues musician and the author of many contributions to blues scholarship, explores Hughes's appropriation of blues forms and themes in his poetry throughout his literary career. Though he does not make it explicit, Tracy is indebted in his literary folkloristic approach to Alan Dundes's emphasis on identification and interpretation when analyzing folk and literary genres. The significant addition to the 2001 edition is the new introduction. Tracy reflects on the responses of initial reviewers, notes recent publications on the blues and on Hughes, and praises the rise in popularity of the blues in the United States during the past decade. Tracy also lists websites where blues music in all of its styles and forms is now available on compact discs rather than LP records; readers more familiar with Hughes than the blues will find this list especially useful. The rest of the book comprises endnotes, bibliography, discography, the original introduction, and three chapters that place poet and genre in historical, cultural, literary, and musical contexts. One strength of the book is the extensive endnotes, forty-three pages in all, which are "meant to take the reader back to the source, the elemental realm of the blues tradition that inspired Hughes, frequently by providing sources for the great recordings of blues performers who do not need but deserve our attention" (p. x). In the first chapter, "Folklore and the Harlem Renaissance," Tracy draws on Dundes and Barre Toelken for functional definitions of folklore and relates them to the rise of the blues as marketable music during the 1920s. Tracy explores the attitudes of Harlem Renaissance intellectuals toward folk materials, dividing them into "the Old Guard and the New" (p. 17). Among the "Old Guard" triumvirate of W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Alain Locke, it was Johnson's understanding of folk music in particular that had the most influence on Hughes in his literary uses of the blues. Tracy places Hughes in the "New Guard" with Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, who understood the folk and their lore and championed both more readily than their predecessors. In chapter 2, "Defining the Blues," Tracy effectively explains the complexity of the blues. Acknowledging that "there are many different types of blues" (p. 49), he offers an insightful overview of previous studies of the genre. He juxtaposes multiple definitions with singers and their songs performed and recorded over time in various settings. As a blues purist, Tracy favors the indigenous nature of the folk blues while accepting the inevitable commercialization and urbanization of popular blues forms. Tracy states that Hughes "wished to be 'authentic'" in his use of the blues, "though he knew he wanted his poems to do more than he felt his sources did" (p. 45). Less concerned with the African and European influences on the development of the blues, Hughes was more interested in the blues as an American art form. [End Page 491] In chapter 3, "Creating the Blues," Tracy delineates the characteristics of the musical composition of twelve-bar and eight-bar blues stanzas, making fruitful comparisons between blues performances and Hughes's lyrics. He correctly asserts that there is no substitute for partaking of a blues performance or listening to recordings of blues songs and that "there has been no system of musical notation devised that totally captures the blues as they are performed" (p. 145). Nevertheless, Tracy's own line and stanzaic transcriptions are effective. In addition, he offers cogent close readings of Hughes's ethnopoetical and typographical renderings of blueslike songs as poems. In conclusion, he shows how Hughes's uses of the blues in such earlier collections of his poetry as Fine Clothes to the Jew (Knopf, 1927) and Shakespeare in Harlem (Knopf...

Music Makers: Portraits and Songs from the Roots of America (review)

Music Makers: Portraits and Songs from the Roots of America. Edited by Timothy Dviffy. Foreword by B. B. King. Athens, GA: Hill Street Press, 2002. [xiii, 194 p. ISBN 1-58818-085-9. $35.] Illustrations, compact disc. This book profiles the lives and music of sixty-six current or recent performers of blues and closely related types of folk and popular music. Most are from Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia, and almost all are African American and elderly (some now deceased). Each ariisl gets two or more pages, containing one or more photographs, brief biographical blurb, and some song lyrics and an interview excerpt or both. A compact disc, bound in the back cover, features the music of some of performers on twenty-two tracks. This package serves as an advertisement for and summary of the work of the Music Maker Relief Foundation (MMRF), which was established by editor Timothy Duffy in 1994. The Foundation's purpose is help the true pioneers and forgotten heroes of Southern musical traditions gain recognition and meet their day-to-day (p. 4). These needs include life maintenance, instrument acquisition, tour support, and emergency relief. The Foundation also sponsors concerts and tours, visiting artist programs, and produces series of compact discs. The MMRF received help from many small contributors and one major anonymous benefactor. Various celebrities and music industry movers and shakers came on board, and for time Winston cigarettes served as sponsor. Duffy began his work in 1989 when he befriended James Slim Stephens in Greensboro, North Garolina, during the last year of his life. Then Duffy moved on to Guitar Gabriel and the world of drink houses-informal neighborhood establishments where beer is sold and consumed. Musicians would often hang out at houses. Duffy played guitar with Gabriel and eventually helped him to get some prestigious concerts. Frustrated with the then current blues record and concert scene, lie began helping other and eventually founded the MMRF, getting it off the ground by appealing initially to the audiophile community. Duffy is to be congratulated for the MMRF's charitable and promotional work and for being one of the very few people still doing broad based and ongoing field research in type of folk music. The book certainly succeeds in describing and promoting his and the Foundation's work. As survey of the current state of folk blues, however, it is inadequate and artistically somewhat disappointing. The problem is not only the brevity and superficiality of each artist profile but, to some degree, the very premise of the Foundation's work. In the introduction, Duffy states that this book introduces new cast of to dispel the notion that the most real and rooted blues no longer exists (p. 12), and the dust jacket claims that these had been either ignored or abused by mainstream record labels and music media and were living in poverty and artistic neglect as result. In the 1960s and 1970s, when much more of sort of documentation was going on, notions had certain degree of validity, but full generation later they have become questionable. Most of the folklorically and artistically interesting musicians profiled here are holdovers from the fieldwork of earlier researchers several decades ago and are thus not a new cast of artists (e.g., Etta Baker, Precious Bryant, James Davis, Frank Edwards, Cora Fluker, Preston FuIp, Big Boy Henry, Algia Mae Hinton, John Dee Holeman, Diamond Teeth Mary McClain, Jack Owens, Neal Pattman, Eugene Powell, James Slim Stephens, Robert Thomas, Othar Turner, J. W. Warren, Jimmie Lee Williams, and John Lee Zeigler). Others had been on the blues scene for some years and already had modest or even substantial careers (e. …

Musical Innovation in the Blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson

Although a few other guitar-playing bluesmen had made records before Blind Lemon Jefferson, it is he who wears the crown for being the first popular star of folk (or country) blues. His rivals for this distinction (i.e., his predecessors in the recording studio) either had brief and commercially unsuccessful recording careers, were accompanists to more famous vocalists, were not solo guitarists but worked instead in combinations with other instruments, or were professional stage entertainers and thus did not fit easily into the model of a folk/country-blues singer-guitarist. Nevertheless, some of these predecessors probably laid the groundwork for Paramount Records' decision to record Jefferson and for Jefferson's spectacular reception by African-American record buyers. His commercial success in turn opened the door to recording opportunities for hundreds of other guitar-playing blues singers, male and female, black and white, and for blues-singing pianists and small combinations of singers and instruments variously known as jug, washboard, skiffle, hokum, and juke bands (see Oliver 1969; Dixon and Godrich 1970; Barlow 1989). It would be well, therefore, to look at Jefferson's recorded predecessors in order to see how he differs from them and how he became the first to epitomize the solo guitar-playing bluesman (see Dixon, Godrich, and Rye 1997 for discographical information on these artists). The era of blues recording began in 1920, and until Jefferson's debut in early 1926 virtually all recorded blues singers came from the vaudeville stage circuit, northern urban cabarets, and black theater shows. The vast majority of them were female, and almost all were accompanied by a pianist or a larger combination of instruments. When male blues singers were recorded, it was usually in a duet with a female singer, accompanied by one or more other musicians. These trends reflect the predominant patterns of blues performance that had been established on the vaudeville stage in the 1910s. Although a few male blues singer-pianists became well known on the vaudeville circuit prior to 1920, solo performers with guitar are virtually unreported in this setting (Abbot and Seroff 1996). We know, however, that there were plenty of them performing all over the South and in northern cities since the beginning of the twentieth century (Evans 1982, 32-41). Undoubtedly, blues singer-guitarists served as filler acts on local vaudeville stages from time to time prior to 1926, but the highest level to which any of them could apparently aspire as a touring professional was as a member of a medicine show or small tent show working a very limited southern circuit. If they aspired to tour otherwise, they were on their own. Their normal venues were universally considered to be on the fringes of popular entertainment--the realm of musical amateurs, hustlers, freelancers, or even beggars--and it is mainly for these reasons that it took six years after they first began to record blues by black vocalists for the record companies to discover that they could successfully market recording artists like Blind Lemon Jefferson. The recording of guitar-accompanied blues was also greatly aided by the discovery of the electrical recording process, which came into use in 1925. One result of this was less surface noise on the records and better recording quality of softer voices, regional diction, and accents, as well as of instruments such as the guitar and piano. Jefferson's initial recordings, however, were made with the older acoustical recording process, and his immediate success, therefore, cannot be ascribed to the advantage of a new technology. Starting in late 1923 and lasting for about a year, there was a small flurry of recording of guitar-accompanied blues. Then the sound became scarce on records through 1925, only to burst out in a sustained fashion with Jefferson's recordings in early 1926. The first-known guitar-accompanied blues to be recorded were made by vaudeville blues star Sara Martin with Sylvester Weaver on guitar (Van Rijn and Vergeer 1982). …

Hybrid highbrow: The Pacifica foundation and KPFA's reconstruction of elite culture, 1946–1963

This article argues that the creators of the first listener‐sponsored FM radio station in the United States altered the meaning of “highbrow”; culture. Since the late 19th century, serious music and literature had been defined as a narrow range of Eurocentric classics, to be reproduced only in their “pure”; forms. Torn by conflicting cultural objectives, the founders of KPFA in Berkeley redefined high art. Responsive to what they saw as “authentic”; folk music, blues, and jazz, they thought nothing of including Leadbelly and Liszt on the same afternoon schedule, an act of cultural blasphemy to an earlier generation.

I Say Me for a Parable—The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman (review)

Reviews513 rity Administration). They make clear that the photographs were essentially a political undertaking, intended to be used by the Roosevelt Administration to advance its own farm agenda. The discussion of the photographs is thus sensitive to the ongoing political disputes that accompanied them. As evidence in a bitter political contest, these photographs have lost much of their partisan tone. The years since the Great Depression have produced such extensive debate regarding the effect of New Deal farm policy that the photographs are now enveloped in that ambiguous legacy. What remains, according to Carlebach and Provenzo, are historical and cultural artifacts that happen to be works of art. Both editors and the University Press of Florida are to be commended for the quality of writing and production. Readers will return to these photographs again and again. I Say Me for a Parable—The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman. By Glen Alyn. Norton, 1993. 508 pp. Cloth, $28.00. David Evans L· professor of music at the University ofMemphis. He is the author of Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues and the producer ofmany records ofblues and folk music. Mance Lipscomb (1895-1976) lived most his life in the Brazos River bottomlands in and around Navasota, Texas. He spent most of these yean as a farmer, sharecropping and renting land, and playing guitar and singing blues and other folksongs at "Saturday night suppers " in the community. His life changed dramatically in 1960, when he was visited by two music researchers. Recordings made for them led to a series of concerts, tours, festival appearances, documentary films, and more recordings that lasted until his death. An outstanding representative of the folk blues tradition, Lipscomb reached hundreds of thousands through recordings and personal appearances and influenced many young folk and rock musicians. His repertoire numbered some 350 songs. Glen Alyn recorded interviews by Lipscomb between 1973 and 1976, which resulted in 1,600 transcribed pages. Alyn also lived in the Navasota area from 1974 to 1979, soaking up the region's culture and history. His work on this book is a labor of love. Lipscomb strikes the reader as an honest observer of life and a garrulous, grandfatherly type who could reminisce for hours on his front porch. His discovery by the outside world occurred at an age when most people are ready to retire and take life easier. The system that had kept most black people like him in perpetual poverty and social subordination permeated his opinions and attitudes. He viewed his new career, fame, and comparative wealth as a God-sent reward for years of hard work, stoic endurance of the system, and civil treatment of others. Alyn began his project at a time when Lipscomb had become comfortable enough with his new existence to be as philosophical about it as he was with his earlier life. The autobiography presents a rare and singular view of both worlds from the inside. Alyn consistently and accurately preserves Lipscomb's nonstandard speech patterns and uses dialect spellings to convey the sound of his speech. Readers unfamiliar with this sort of speech may appreciate the nonstandard spellings. (I prefer the standard rendering , though I didn't find the book too difficult to read at a fairly rapid pace.) 514Southern Cultures The chapters are organized thematically in a more or less chronological order. Each chapter begins with two or three pages of setting and background by Alyn, followed by Lipscomb's nanative. The enthusiastic foreword by musician Taj Mahal and Alyn's introduction are mostly raves about Lipscomb and his importance as a musician. In the opening chapter Lipscomb describes himself in terms of religion, work, and home life. Other chapters follow: his mother, family, and schooling; guitar playing with his fiddler father and exposure to life outside the home; his adventures as a driver for legendary Texas lawman Frank Hamer and encounters with lynching and violence; his early musical influences , which included Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, andjimmie Rodgers; performances at Saturday night suppers and parties for white folks; work, farming, exploitation, and racism; his move to the city and a work injury that provided a cash settlement...

Mama Yancey and the Revival Blues Tradition

David Evans has conceptualized the folk blues tradition as consisting of concentric circles expanding outward from individual practitioners into their local traditions, and thence to the regional traditions, with all such contributions contained finally within the folk blues tradition as a whole. The elements of tradition (repertoire and musical style) are seen as normally traveling in both directions through these circles from one level to the next. It is also possible for material of an especially influential performer to leap across more than one boundary at a time through recordings or personal contact (Evans 1982, 265). This model has been used successfully to describe the blues tradition in its first stages of development and as it continues to exist in the rural South to the present time.

RELENTLESSLY WRITING THE WEARY SONG: BLUES LEGACIES IN LITERATURE

Houston A. Baker, Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. xviii + 122 pp. Illus. Daphne Duval Harrison. Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988. xv + 295 pp. Illus. Pleasant "Cousin Joe" Joseph and Harriet J. Ottenheimer. Cousin Joe: Blues from New Orleans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. xi + 227 pp. Illus. Nathan W. Pearson, Jr. Goin' to Kansas City. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. xviii + 252 pp. Chronology. Illus. Steven C Tracy. Langston Hughes & the Blues. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. xiii + 305 pp. Performing the blues translates emotion into art; writing the blues traps the music in an alien environment, for the music is necessarily linked to performance. As Langston Hughes laments in his poem, "Burden," It is not weariness That bows me down, But sudden nearness To song without sound.* Despite the difficulty of capturing blues on paper, the five books reviewed here demonstrate that blues must be written, rewritten and preserved— whether through musical notation, poetry, fiction, non-fiction or photography. Writing the blues captures the spirit of the African-American community, as well as the memory of folk blues and jazz musicians. As Houston Baker notes in his eloquent and moving essay, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, blues legacies in literature sound "from fields burning under torpid Southern suns, or lands desolately drenched by too high rivers" (93). Blues also tell the story of a socially marginal urban black community which created a "culturally specific" (93) and resilient voice in modern intellectual history and literature, as well as in music-leading to the birth of jazz. Writing the blues recreates and preserves the "black bottom boogies, fish fries, frenzied church-going, and furiously loving" (103) people in the black community as they resist racism and demand to be heard both as cultural critics and as artists.

Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues

Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues

Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues

Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues

Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues

This book analyzes the process of composition, learning and performance of the Southern folk blues of black America. Never before has this musical form been examined so scrupulously. Evans traces the impact of commercialism, especially the phonograph record, on blues history, as well as the various local traditions that produce a given blues tune and text. The author has done extensive field work in Mississippi and provides here a structure for understanding not only the blues but almost any other oral literature from other cultures. This book won the University of Chicago Folklore Prize. All of the greatest blues singers - Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Muddy Waters, Blink Willie McTell, Blind Lemon Jefferson - are discussed in relation to their predecessors and followers.