Adam Gussow’s Whose Blues?: Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music and George Henderson’s Blind Joe Death’s America: John Fahey, the Blues, and Writing White Discontent were both published in the last three years, a time of Black revolution. As revisiting the politics of cultural appropriation and dismantling the violent construction of whiteness become increasingly urgent, so too does the study of histories of Black creativity and of the ways that whiteness has been historically constructed against and through ideas of Blackness. It is within these imperatives that I situate these two books. Each looks to roots music as a lens through which to deal with the shifting history of white longing for a particular, socially contingent idea of Blackness.In Whose Blues? Gussow answers the question proposed in the book’s title by staging a debate between two positions that he calls “black bluesism” and “blues universalism.” The former doctrine says that blues will always be both culturally and historically African American—that because blues music comes from the uniquely Black experience of racism born of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, and because the songs echo that experience, white people who profit in any way from their relationship to the music are performing a violent cultural, even spiritual, form of expropriation. Blues universalists, on the other hand, believe that the music is “a subcultural endeavor with an antiracist sense of purpose” (61) or a “colorblind” (36) utopia. As the Mississippi Tourism Authority puts it: “No black. No white. Just the blues” (23).Gussow provides these definitions in what he calls “Bar 2.” Rather than divide his book into the usual chapters, he organizes it into the twelve bars of a standard blues song. Bar 3 explores “blues conditions.” These are “the material facts and social environment that together constitute the ground out of which blues feelings emerge” (50). Those “blues feelings” include anxiety, homesickness, romantic hopelessness, romantic abandonment, and loneliness (Bar 4). Each feeling is vocalized through “blues expressiveness” (formal elements such as AAB verse form, call-and-response, and blues idiomatic language) and encompassed by a “blues ethos” (resilience against and through pain, or “attitudinal orientation toward experience, a sustaining philosophy of life” (98) that is the subject of Bar 5). Defined as such, the “blues ethos” has the potential to support a nearly limitless diversity of experiences and feelings. It is partly for this reason that Gussow takes what he calls a “both and rather than either or” (15) approach to blues music. Whose Blues? converts a truism of blues scholarship—that the genre is dialectical, marked by “a productive tension between two opposed orientations toward experience” (147)—into the framework for analyzing the debates between “black bluesists” and “white universalists.” Gussow argues effectively that the dialectic is at work in the fabric, performance, and Black experiences of the genre: blues is sacred and profane, popular and rarefied, tragic and comic, lonely and romantic, hopeless and resilient.As well as being a scholar of music, Gussow is a harmonica player and literature scholar, and his book draws from novelists, poets, liberation theologists, producers, label-owners, and, of course, musicians. Following poet Tyehimba Jess’s proposal that “literature is where you find the real ripple effect of blues the strongest” (72), Gussow locates the “two important historical precedents” to “today’s new black consciousness” (199) in the literatures of the Harlem Renaissance and of the Black Arts Movement. In, near, and adjacent to Harlem, Gussow applies the frameworks he introduced in Bars 2-5 to the analysis of texts by W.C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright (Bars 6-9). Handy was neither a dilettante nor the inventor of the blues, but he did capture it in sheet music; Hughes wanted his poem “The Weary Blues” to progressively emplace the reader in the narrator’s subjectivity and physical body (an argument, here, for cross-racial empathy); Hurston wrote from the vantage of a “blues-themed writer and folklorist” (151); Wright substitutes literal blues music in Black Boy for an invocation of three forms of blues violence; and Ellison’s Invisible Man seeks the “blues ethos”: “the half-comic insight that wrings transcendence out of misery and frustration” (193).While Hughes’s and Ellison’s connections to blues music are well-known among literature scholars, this book, pitched broadly to “the blues community” (10), has the potential to draw new connections with literary texts for blues fans who have not been exposed to the literary history of the genre. But these interventions also raise the question: what is the “blues community”?1 Many may find a home at blues concerts, conferences, radio shows, conversations, and gatherings, but others may find blues fans to be alienating. “Blues fraternity” can sometimes feel more accurate. That was the feeling I had when I put down Whose Blues? Gussow positions his book early on as “the whole story” (11) of the relationship between blues and race leading into the present,2 but about four-fifths of the way through the narrative he also concedes to using “a masculinist vocabulary” because “the world of blues-playing men is the world I know” (232). This results in a series of superficial accounts of women’s blues: at best, a lesson from Angela Davis’s foundational Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is briefly repurposed to the gender-neutral task of describing blues sexuality; Ma Rainey’s “See See Rider Blues” is partially reproduced to support a gender-neutral claim about “black blues romance” (80); Memphis Minnie’s “Bumble Bee Blues” gets a bit of air time in conversation with Hurston; and Josie Miles’s “Mad Mama’s Blues” is swiftly and partially reproduced to evoke the same “sort of blues-bearing retributive violence” (186) of Richard Wright’s Black Boy. At worst, Gussow imagines Hurston’s reactions to being domestically abused, then uses that conjecture to analyze her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. He guesses that “hyper violent threats” of two women Hurston met on her first field recording trip provided her with “living models of feminine indomitability” that counteracted “the sort of soul-killing subordination that Hurston herself apparently was,” as Gussow puts it, “forced into” (164–65). While this analysis may be good-natured, it is also pathologizing: how does the author know that this is Hurston’s reaction to her abuse? Affording a spectrum of grief responses to a once-living, human figure would have saved this otherwise compelling chapter. As is, it indicates a problem of audience: an assumption that the “blues community” shares its priorities and experiences with the author.While sexism has troubled blues scholarship at least since the genre was redrawn and rarefied by white, obsessive country blues collector and enthusiast James McKune in the 1940s,3 there is also a wealth of writing that expands the creativity and daring of Black women blues artists.4 We are in the midst of a Black women’s blues renaissance,5 with artists differently revivifying Daphne Brooks’s dual claims that Black women’s voices are theory,6 and as such, that “their music created the conditions for crafting other ways of inhabiting the world.”7 A blues historiography that explores the genre’s full depth of impact in art and life should attend to arguments like Brooks’s.Because female-fronted “classic blues” of the 1920s was wildly popular, the artistry and influence of that same blues are alive in today’s hip-hop, rock, R&B, and country music, as well as in the work of contemporary blues women. In the face of these artists’ talent as well as their embrace by Black audiences, however, blues historians have long avoided blues women’s contributions. As mainstream tastes and technologies shifted to amplified big band jazz in the early 1940s, white male eccentrics built their own blues canon, conflating scarcity with value and value with artistic merit.8 Ushered in by the so-called “blues mafia,”9 this canon produced a mythic Delta whose image of alienated, otherworldly bluesmen has threatened to overtake the material realities of Black life in post-Reconstruction Mississippi.10 This mythmaking continued into the 1960s and 70s, with some outliers: Charles Keil presented the work and lives of blues musicians as being vibrantly contemporary in Urban Blues,11 for example, and Victoria Spivey and her partner Len Kunstadt founded Spivey Records to release new recordings by country and classic blues musicians, sometimes on the same album. Still, these interventions happened in the context of a narrative that seated country blues at the beginning and foundation of the genre, at the expense of blues women and the Black audiences who loved them.The idea that blues musicians were alienated and somehow both out-of-time and stuck in the past is countered by the music itself, and especially by recent critics who embraced blues musicians as entrepreneurs and taste-makers. By reframing genre history in this way, writers such as Lynn Abbott and Douglas Seroff, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Paige McGinley, and Elijah Wald—all cited by Gussow—have refocused the narrative on a broader scope of artists, including women and white musicians.12 Gussow celebrates these writers’ shared proposal that blues has an interracial history. He also finds in their books a shared conclusion that blues music is purely a product of popular, contemporary tastes. This may be an overstatement, but his rejoinder is still significant: a Delta blues musician’s interest in “cutting edge” musical styles was likely motivated by the “specter of hard, exploitative labor backed up by vagrancy law and lynch law” that was understood by “black bluesists” to haunt the genre, “and that was your fate unless you found another way to get by” (70).It is a moving point, but in the context of Whose Blues? and Gussow’s “blues dialectic,” it is also a frustrating one. While it affirms the coexistence of resilience and business savvy in Black blues artistry, it is fundamentally used within Gussow’s larger argument to situate the author himself in the middle of two different positions that he believes do not understand their relationship to one another. Whether intentionally or not, Gussow has crafted a schema where the best place to be is right where he is, in the center: a sensible moderate in the middle ground, the fifty-first vote in the blues senate.So while Gussow situates the middle ground as a mitigation of and compromise between positions, the more urgent, unspoken meeting point is the reason that drives both arguments. Specifically, this group of contemporary white authors who produce a multiracial origin for blues music and this group of Black authors of the Black Arts Movement claiming a Black origin for the genre actually share a goal: to celebrate the dynamic and resilient creativity of Black blues artists. Wald, Hagstrom Miller, McGinley, and Abbott and Seroff all offer their own correctives regarding the racism and misogynoir that have permeated depictions of Black blues histories; it is this same pernicious set of myths to which Black nationalists are also reacting.13 Acknowledging this consistency would trouble Gussow’s critique of both sides and open up a freer celebration of Black Studies and Black nationalism.Instead, he prioritizes what he calls, in an analysis of the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival program, “a seemingly effortless marriage between black artistry and the emotional response such artistry compels” from “an almost entirely white festival audience.” This meeting of Black artistry and white emotional response “celebrates a pantheon of black blues gods only to explode the idea of a black nation: an integrationist rather than ethnic-consolidationist ethos” (222). Would Luther Allison, who wore a “FREE BOBBY” T-shirt in support of the incarcerated Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale to perform at that same festival that year,14 have agreed with this analysis? It is not just that Gussow makes white listeners equal partners in the blues. More than that, he uses white listeners to elevate the blues from a “nationalist” music into an “intergrationist,” universal one. This strategy aligns white celebration of Black music with rationality, dialectical moderation, and perniciously, civil rights, at the expense of Black people trying to claim blues for their own. But, in the words of bell hooks, Black nationalism is not “fundamentalism,” nor is it “a naïve essentialism, rooted in notions of ethnic purity that resemble white racist assumptions.” Instead, it is “a survival strategy” that often emerges under threat of decontextualization and erasure.15At this pivotal moment in Whose Blues? Black perspectives on blues focus on Black Arts figures’ ambivalent reaction to the genre: Black Arts author Larry Neal wrote about both its irreducible Blackness and his openness to a white audience’s authentic appreciation of it, and poets such as Maulana Ron Karenga and Sonia Sanchez were embarrassed by what they saw as its outdated defeatism. By contrast, white responses culminate in the organizers of the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival celebrating Black blues power with “white blues feeling” (222).Gussow’s belief that blues music harbors in its form and fiber the political potential to forge interracial connection, activated by anyone’s feelingful connection to it, stands up to neither the critique Grace Elizabeth Hale16 published a decade ago in A Nation of Outsiders nor to Lauren Michele Jackson’s in her more recent White Negroes.17 Actually, his own “baptism in the blues” (83) could have served as a case study in either Hale’s or Jackson’s work. As a twenty-six year-old, after his girlfriend “cuckolded and deserted” (98) him, Gussow had what he recounts as a “spiritual rebirth” (83) at a blues club in the East Village. It is here, at the conclusion of Bar 4, that Eric Lott’s paradigmatic minstrel formation of identification without resistance and of “love and theft”18 meets Toni Morrison’s critique in Playing in the Dark of “the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them”19:The Holmes Brothers, an African American trio of wise older men, were the house band presiding over the weekly jam sessions. I’d get a drink, or a few drinks, and sit at the bar listening to songs about the women who’d done them, and me, wrong; I’d lose myself in edgy guitar solos that tracked and voiced my pain, share in the yells of approval that the room gave back to the bandstand. I’d look around at the motley interracial brotherhood and decide that I’d found my place and that all was not lost (85).Encounters like this one recur throughout the canon of blues literature written by white men. One of the more memorable examples comes from John Fahey, who in his essay “The Center of Interest Will Not Hold” describes accompanying local Black blues artist Elmer Williams to a spontaneous nighttime party on Ritchie Avenue, an African American neighborhood in their shared hometown of Takoma Park, Maryland. In Blind Joe Death’s America, named for Fahey’s own minstrel character Blind Joe Death, George Henderson reconstructs this scene to show the ways that Fahey avoids the facts of anti-Black violence and segregation that his fantasies of folkloric Blackness depend on.In Fahey’s account, the party begins when, as Williams plays the blues on guitar, “men and women, young and old” come out and dance “alone” and “differently” (187), each in their own space, without uttering even a syllable. When Williams gives Fahey the guitar, the dancing continues for another hour, then everyone silently disperses. Henderson points out that Fahey forces the scene “through the sieve of…minstrelized images” (190), reconstructing it as a plantation dance, where Black people mirror the silence of the setting’s “primeval” forest scenery. Fahey, in his ability to see himself in his audience, blends right in. Henderson situates this scene alongside “psychological maps” that Fahey drew on notebook paper as well as Fahey’s enigmatic essay “Performance as War.” In each, Henderson finds the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “hodological space” and urban planner Kevin Lynch’s theory of the “edge.” Hodology “concerns the emotional bearing human beings bring to their everyday, actual physical comings and goings…including the emotional relationships to everyday objects” (131); the “edge” is both frontier and border, where different ideas, spaces, and people meet. If Fahey’s narrative is of a hodological concert on the edge of Takoma Park, then what he relays is a story of a Rousseauian “festival of democracy,” where for a moment Black and white live in an individualist, feelingful harmony of relation. For Henderson this stands as one of many instances of unactualized possibility: Fahey may have been knowingly trying to subvert the minstrel associations that his narrative produces, but even that knowingness would not counter the racism that inheres to the narrative’s mode of communication.Blind Joe Death’s America is filled with this sort of analysis. Henderson’s research is meticulous, the connections that he draws are creative and unexpected, and he treats Fahey with a tricky mix of criticism and generosity—even when the latter is lacking in Fahey’s own writings. As a study of John Fahey, Henderson reads the guitarist’s written works—essays, liner notes, a master’s thesis on Charley Patton and even a high school newspaper article—in order to “[create] new possibilities for listening to his music” (5), recreate the socio-cultural shifts of his moment, and reimagine Fahey’s art from within these contexts. The book’s interventions will also be of interest even to those who are unmoved by the sound of fingerstyle guitar: Henderson uses Fahey to reconstruct the history of late twentieth-century America, using his work to place 1960s New Left counterculture at the conjuncture of creative writing and psychological pedagogies, academic folklore, existentialism, urban planning, and environmental psychology.Bookended by an Introduction and Coda, Blind Joe Death’s America has three sections, each of which contains an introduction, “listening session,” and two chapters. Each chapter examines “the story Fahey tells in spite of himself” (27) about one aforementioned aspect of 1960s and 70s counterculture, and each concludes with the failures of Fahey’s approach to Black life. Section one sets the scene by questioning the inevitability of the affiliation that Fahey celebrates between writing and self-expression. Through his analysis of Fahey’s tongue-in-cheek high school essay titled “My Dear Old Alma Mater” and “Communism”—an essay reflecting on Fahey’s adolescence anthologized in How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life—Henderson produces a brief history of popular psychology and psychoanalysis of the period and its influence on creative writing in schools. This opens the door for an engagement with the social elements of emotional attachment that Whose Blues? lacked. Neither celebrating nor critiquing Fahey’s essay itself, Henderson describes its affect: “the ‘Communism’ essay is not the mere self-validating of self-expression as a substitute for real politics, as Grace Elizabeth Hale argues in A Nation of Outsiders, for Fahey’s representations are indeed about how the self is always already really political” (63).By juxtaposing prominent psychologists’ claims that writing “aid[s] self-exploration” (47) with psychoanalytic claims that adolescence is a formative time for individual psychopolitical development (53), Henderson pushes against Hale’s claim that in that countercultural moment, feelings are not interchangeable with politics. Because youth and self-exploration were considered to be political across multiple disciplines and spheres of influence during Fahey’s time, Henderson places youthful self-exploration through writing within the realm of politics itself. Politics and the New Left, in Blind Joe Death’s America, are an unstable arena of attitudes and affects, such that Fahey is of the movement rather than in it. To be political, in this sense, is to be proximal. Fahey is not an activist, and the book takes great pains to consider his relationship to his time and place without the finality of judgment—save for a current of skepticism that Henderson sustains against Fahey’s tendency to value his own feelings just because he feels them deeply.Blind Joe Death’s America is at its best when it surveys the limits of Fahey’s desire to relate Black to white music without losing sight of the value of his affective and artistic practices. In Part II, Henderson shows how Fahey constructs his own epistemological “white discontent” both within and against his folklore and mythology studies program at UCLA and in the relatively new textual medium of album liner notes. By close-reading Fahey’s master’s thesis-turned-book and liner notes on Charley Patton, Henderson shows how Fahey rejected structural approaches to Patton’s genius in favor of a racist reading of “Patton as being as inscrutable as he, Fahey, thought himself to be” (106). In the process of disidentifying from the critiques of structural racism and the connection between (implicitly male20) blues and Black struggle that he associated with middle-class whiteness, Fahey reduces Patton’s awareness of his social milieu to gibberish. By obfuscating Patton’s connection to his present, Fahey makes them both into men out of time.Henderson posits that by prioritizing inscrutability and language-play in his and Patton’s writing, Fahey produces the imperative for his own creative, personal, textual experimentation—one that elicits both the reader’s emotional response and their struggle to form an individual interpretation of his text. In this sense, Fahey’s own inscrutable writing performs a counterclaim to what he sees as the anti-individualist socialization of white middle-class listenership. According to this reading, Fahey’s racist identification with colorblindness also contains an anti-essentialist understanding of “a certain inventedness of folklore in folklore studies” (113). He and Patton are not “romancing the folk,” to quote the eponymous study by Benjamin Filene;21 they are inventing it. In fact, the book’s Coda argues for Fahey’s growing awareness of the political and structural quality of his emotions, as well as the inexorable frustration of Fahey’s attempts “to shrink the distance and decrease the inequities between Black and white worlds even as [his writing] could only deploy aspects of that distance and those inequities in order to do so” (197). The book ends as a paean to Fahey’s songs.Blind Joe Death’s America is as much about the inevitable failures and inadequacies of whiteness as it is about the possibilities contained in each moment of artistic and social interaction. Reading it, I can’t help but think about what lies outside of the precision of Henderson’s critique. Listening to the world through Fahey’s ears means missing some sounds. The title of the book is instructive: in Blind Joe Death’s America, we encounter Blackness primarily through Fahey’s perception of it; I wonder what Henderson would do with the potential worlds that a direct engagement with Black sound and Black Studies would have opened up.In its final paragraph, Henderson briefly extricates the book’s narrative from Fahey’s. While he was writing Blind Joe Death’s America, music critic Jessica Hopper hosted a radio show comprising interviews with three women whom Fahey loved and mistreated,22 opening a conversation about what Henderson calls Fahey’s “behavior towards women” (197). Rather than describe or engage Fahey’s behavior directly, Henderson pivots, encouraging listeners to “claim the right to enjoy the music because it is indelibly part of their lives” (197). At this point, Henderson does something both beautiful and frustrating: he adapts Fahey’s system of value to his own writing, addressing Fahey directly and with feeling and cautioning the reader to neither reduce art to its context nor obliterate its context entirely. To this task he deploys as both his and Fahey’s mouthpiece Ellen Willis, a left-wing feminist music critic who appreciated Fahey’s songs. Like Fahey, Willis believed that “one source of art’s power…has to do with our own power to be affected by it,” and thought that even contemporary music with “patriarchal, commercial, or other origins within sites of privilege that listeners such as herself do not share” still had the power to produce “an explosion of libidinal energies” (198). The narrative, it seems, is immaculately self-contained. But what could a deeper engagement with the stories of women as they gesture and stir outside of John Fahey’s perception and within his work have done for the story of his writing? These other possibilities haunt both texts alike.