Reviewed by: The Blues Come to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book by Alan Govenar, and: The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville by Lynn Abbott, Doug Seroff Greg Johnson The Blues Come to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book. Compiled by Alan Govenar. Essays by Alan Govenar and Kip Lornell. The John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. [xii], 457. $95.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-638-8.) The Original Blues: The Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville. By Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. viii, 420. Paper, $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-2326-7.) In 1959, pioneering blues researchers Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick began work on an investigation into the history of blues music in Texas. This massive undertaking was almost doomed from the start, as the Oxford, England–based Oliver and the Houston, Texas–based McCormick had to share [End Page 205] research via the postal service, which could take weeks between mailings. As McCormick acknowledged in an early letter to Oliver, “any point-by-point collaboration is impractical at this distance, and would have other difficulties” (p. 2). Regardless, the pair devised a research and writing regimen, with McCormick conducting the on-the-ground fieldwork, interviewing blues musicians, and making recordings of performances; Oliver compiled McCormick’s fieldwork with his own research and wrote the manuscript. The pair worked on this project sporadically until 1978, when communication between them effectively ended. What was eventually diagnosed as bipolar disorder in McCormick also slowed down progress on the book. In periods of mania, McCormick worked tirelessly conducting interviews and gathering census records, news clippings, and other data. The research and collecting expanded to the point that Oliver wrote to McCormick, “I am almost frightened by the amount of material! For it demands to be used and used well. . . . This is obviously a never ending quest” (p. 9). In other phases, McCormick sank into depression, finding work on the project difficult. Frustrations with each other’s interpretations of source material and other aspects of the book led to some heated correspondence between the two. There were various unsuccessful attempts to revive the project, but it was not until Texas blues authority Alan Govenar (author of Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound [College Station, Tex., 2008]; Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues [Chicago, 2010]; Living Texas Blues [Dallas, 1985]; and others) met Paul Oliver in 1996, that the process to publish the manuscript was revived. Govenar contacted blues and folk music scholar Kip Lornell (author of, with Charles K. Wolfe, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly [New York, 1992]; and of Exploring American Folk Music: Ethnic, Grassroots, and Regional Traditions in the United States [Jackson, Miss., 2012]; Happy in the Service of the Lord: Afro-American Gospel Quartets in Memphis [Urbana, 1988]; and others), and the two began the difficult task of bringing Paul Oliver’s unfinished draft to life. Govenar and Lornell are clear that this published work is unfinished. They wanted to present the manuscript as close to the form in which Oliver left it, though with some added contextual information. What was originally conceived as a two-volume work has been composed into a single volume, partly by reducing font size and including two columns of text per page, making this 457-page book effectively 914 pages. In addition to the original manuscript and Oliver’s intended original preface, Govenar and Lornell have added an introduction, explaining the complex history of how this book has finally seen the light of day, and a section titled “Recording the Blues and the Folk Revival: A Prelude,” intended to contextualize this work’s scholarship. Long awaited by blues scholars, The Blues Come to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book gives incredibly rich information on the history of blues in the Lone Star State and parts of nearby Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. While there is excellent information on well-known Texas artists like Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Mance Lipscomb, The Blues Come...
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Oct 18, 2024
Anu Kohli + 1
Open Access
