Son House Research Articles

White Stripes, White Rock: The Uncontested Blues Appropriations of the White Stripes

ABSTRACT Despite the prevalence of the cultural appropriation debate in popular music discourse, white, popular rock band, the White Stripes, appropriated African-American Delta blues culture, particularly from Son House and his song “Death Letter Blues,” without causing contestation. Appropriation of Black culture has occurred ubiquitously throughout recent music history, causing widespread contestation due to power disparity and misrepresentation. Through reviewing literature regarding cultural appropriation, and semiotically analyzing the band’s 2003 performance of “Death Letter” at Sydney’s Livid Festival, we find that the White Stripes’ intentional methods of respectful representation and stylistic disguise mitigated the perception of cultural appropriation in their performance. We posit that the band emulated a pre-established process of transculturation whereby Delta blues traits were absorbed into the 20th century evolution of rock music.

Reinventing the Blues

Reinventing the Blues Gregory P. Downs (bio) B. Brian Foster, I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 206 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $99.00. In 1941, three Fisk University scholars—musician John Wesley Work, sociologist Lewis Jones, and sociology student Samuel Adams—documented the listening habits of Black residents of Coahuma County, Mississippi, and the jukebox offerings in the Black-patronized establishments of Coahuma’s county seat, Clarksdale, while their Library of Congress colleague Alan Lomax recorded local blues and folk musicians. Lomax was in search of Robert Johnson, who had died three years earlier, so instead recorded songs by Muddy Waters, Son House, and other Delta blues musicians that remain lodestars of the genre. Work, Jones, and Adams, however, discovered that many Black Delta people did not listen to much blues. At the King and Anderson Plantation, near Clarksdale, Black farmworkers and sharecroppers liked some blues songs (though primarily of the crooning type that would influence 1940s jazz) but listened mostly to popular songs, swing numbers, hymns, and gospel, admiring Cab Calloway and the sometimes-bluesy Count Basie but also Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Roy Acuff. On the jukebox at Messenger’s Café in Clarksdale, the top six numbers were by bandleaders Count Basie, Louis Jordan, Johnny Hodges, Eddy Duchin, and Sammy Kaye. Even in the cradle of the blues, scant miles from Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, in the town where Bessie Smith died, Black Mississippians were mostly listening to other things. Even in 1941.1 This disparity between apparent and actual Black Southern taste endures: now, Clarksdale is a center for blues tourism, attracting more than 100,000 visitors—almost all white—to the blues clubs downtown, while Black people repeatedly told sociologist B. Brian Foster that they mostly liked other music: soul (Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye, Patti LaBelle) and gospel, among older people, and hip-hop (Nicki Minaj, Moneybagg Yo, 2 Chainz), among the younger. Even when asked to name blues music they like, they refer to people who might be classed as blues but might also be called southern soul: Johnnie Taylor, Marvin Sease, Jackie Neal, Tyrone Davis. [End Page 422] How important are the blues anyway to Black Mississippians? This is the question Foster poses in his skeptical, sometimes-circular, but often compelling I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place & the Backbeat of Black Life. Over five years, Foster lived in Clarksdale for stretches, observing from diner booths and sidewalks, and conducted more than 200 interviews with Black Clarks-dale residents. What Foster wanted to know changed over the course of his interviews, in ways that help us pin down the elusive, unavoidable question of what the blues mean today. Foster arrived in Clarksdale determined not to write a study of the blues. He wrote in his notebooks, “I am not studying the blues” (p. 2). He wondered if “Black southerners were no longer blues people” but “post-blues people,” “beyond the blues” (p. 3). Foster himself hated the blues, and hated even more Clarksdale’s downtown blues district. And Black resident after Black resident told him that they too hated the blues and never went to those clubs. “Fuck that blues shit,” one tells him (p. 3). At its best blues was “old-timing,” (p. 51) as one of Foster’s subjects says, (a view arguably widespread even among 1930s Clarksdale Black residents); at worst, it was a put-on for white tourists, who got what they demanded and who saw in it what they wanted to see, mostly a façade of authenticity. Instead of the blues, Foster went to Clarksdale to explore an important lacuna in contemporary sociology (and arguably history): the study of 21st-century rural Black Southerners. Foster quickly sketches the emergence of the Black rural South as a problem in early-20th-century sociology, then its eclipse by urban studies, then by studies of what Foster calls the New South (Atlanta) and the Historic South (New Orleans.) What disappeared in these studies were the people who stayed in place, in places where the population was shrinking, the economy...

Wary and StrangeCast-Iron Pansexual

When I was invited to write an album review for this issue, I perused several volumes of JAS media reviews. Many thoughtful and well-written reviews highlighted albums readily legible as “Appalachian” through repertoire, style, and genre. Reflecting on this issue's focus on queerness, I decided to cover the work of two artists whose work invites audiences to listen carefully to the subtleties and nuances of queerness in and from the region. Yet both, in their own ways, also elide, bend, and “queer” canonic styles, genres, and aesthetics commonly associated with Appalachia and Appalachian studies.Over the past decade, Amythyst Kiah's work has implicitly centered the sounds and voices of African American musicians elided in canonic “Appalachian” music, while subtly opening space for queer performance and listening. Born in Chattanooga and an alumnus of East Tennessee State University's Bluegrass program and Old-Time Pride Band, Kiah's debut acoustic album Dig (self-released 2012) curated a “southern gothic” aesthetic that spanned traditional Appalachian ballads to songs by Dink Roberts and Son House. Here, Kiah's covers of these songs and her original tunes frequently invite queer readings through ambiguous representations of gender and narratives that subtly avoid heteronormative tropes. Her second album, Amythyst Kiah & Her Chest of Glass (Soul Step Records 2017), pushes these avenues further, using an electric blues and rock and roll sound (inspired by Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe) to re-invigorate tunes by Veera Hall (for example, “Troubles So Hard”), and less opaquely queer lyrics in Kiah's original songs like “Wildebeest.”An album comprised of original material, Wary and Strange (2021) more stridently articulates these intersectional priorities through new facets of Kiah's genre-bending sound. Kiah's Grammy nominated “Black Myself” signals the album's bolder songwriting through an anthem of black feminist resilience, liberation, and solidarity. Originally written and recorded for the acoustic roots Songs of Our Native Daughters project (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings 2019), Kiah's electrified and pop-produced version on Wary and Strange infuses the anthem with new energy and urgency. These political overtones resonate with more subtle songs that critique empty political rhetoric (“Soapbox”) as well as complacency in contemporary Western culture (“Fancy Drones [Fracture Me]”). However, Kiah continues to open space for queerness in narratives about relationships through including a country-influenced song about unrequited love (“Ballad of the Lost”) and rock ballads that address the difficulties of ending a fraught relationship (“Sleeping Queen” and “Opaque”). In these songs and others (“Firewater” and “Wild Turkey”), Kiah squarely addresses the importance of attending to mental health, particularly unresolved trauma.A self-proclaimed non-binary country singer based in northeast Tennessee, Adeem the Artist's 2021 album Cast-Iron Pansexual presents a similar queer ethic and politics. As an experienced singer-songwriter whose recorded output spans a decade and nearly as many styles, Cast-Iron Pansexual represents a more recent turn toward queerness in their work. Adeem explains in the album's visually and poetically beautiful lyric ’zine that they wrote the songs while reading gender theory, reflecting on their sexuality, and exploring their “divine femininity” in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, 1). This led to their coming out as non-binary and “drifting with the waters pace towards wholeness” (Adeem 2021, 1).In this spirit, most songs on Cast-Iron Pansexual work through unacknowledged and unarticulated queer experiences and desires. The album's lead track “I Never Came Out” describes not having words to say you're “not straight or gay” in order to reflect on recognizing and overcoming internalized misogyny. While personal, inward-facing reflections on gender and sexuality permeate the album (“Apartment,” “Honeysuckle Hipbilly Homoerotica”), Adeem's songs leverage commentaries on social, cultural, and political norms in contemporary Appalachia and the South. Sentiments about religion and spirituality range from ambivalence and gender-bending re-imagination (“Fervent for the Hunger”) to slapstick queer humor (“Going to Heaven”). “I Wish You Would've Been a Cowboy” moves beyond the parody the title implies, to launch a critique of masculinity and nationalism in both Toby Keith's music and the politics of early 2000s commercial country music. The album's titular track delivers the most direct political statement within an already queer Appalachian world replete with interdimensional pansexuals, Marxists, a restaurant where you don't pay anything, tarot readings, and plenty of barbeque and cornbread. However, accompanied by pithy banjo picking, the song's final verse calls for a “radical movement towards equity (and justice) to dismantle white supremacy entirely, brick by brick, by hand, together.”The works of Amythyst Kiah and Adeem the Artist stand out for constructing musically compelling spaces that call listeners to imagine and build intersectional queer solidarities, healing, community, and activism. Their albums also implicitly ask us to listen to the numerous queer musicians and performers in the region who work within and against narrow definitions of Appalachia and, in so doing, re-imagine queerness more expansively.

The Culture of ”Crossroads”: the Emergency of Blues as a Countercultural Declaration

Introduction. Apart from classical academic musicology, sociology, social anthropology and related disciplines such as sociolinguistics, philology, and cultural studies contributed to the development of research of music and its role in social, interpersonal relations, and individual experiences. The aim of this research is to investigate musical and singing traditions within the context of social relations, historical challenges, and sub-cultures by sociological and social anthropological approaches. In the last decades these research is of relevance for scholars interested in creativity and creative individuals whose impact effect is ambient in current social and political processes. The main tradition can be approached as a socio-cultural phenomenon emerging in the form of sub-culture.Methodology and sources. Methodological b ackground o f t his r esearch i s o f s tructuralfunctional character. Within this framework art and creativity can be approached by various sets of research techniques. Culture of music can be studies both as an object and as a text; hence, textual and contextual approaches are of significance. In result, we can discover reasons motivating people to influence social relations and preconceptions within certain groups and societies. This approach allows the analysis the connections between individual and collective perceptions of people regarding their identities and place in a society. Finally, not only music shapes the context of sociolultural phenomena, but it is the context itself per se. For this paper I used texts and bibliographic data of singers such as follows: Son House, Robert Johnson, Skip James, William Samuel McTell, Edward W. Clayborn.Results and discussion. The analysis of social history of blues in the end of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth centuries as well as biographies of bluesmen along with the texts of their songs clearly demonstrates poetic motifs, individual and social reflections of different communities. The images such as love and flirt, manqué love, rest from hard work, roads, railways, trains, abandoned home with simultaneous lack of home, prison, illness, death and cemetery as well as the demonstration of all the listed images by socially oriented creativity in music, represents deep forms of marginality of those who sing it out in front of respected citizens living normal lives.Conclusion. The material scrutinized in this paper clearly shoes that blues as a genre of music along with bluesmen who are representatives of a certain sub-culture, constitute a coherent social system which can be characterized a s a c ounter-culture. This social and cultural phenomenon in a way we encounter it derived from marginal status of its representatives. This marginal status becomes visible in blues as emotion and soulreflection to a large degree contradictory to the idea of respectable citizens and so-called “right way of life”.

Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues by Tammy L. Turner

Reviewed by: Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues by Tammy L. Turner Anthony Bushard Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues. By Tammy L. Turner. (American Made Music Series.) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. [xiv, 240 p. ISBN 9781496822697 (hardcover), $28; ISBN 9781496822680 (e-book), $70.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Son House, Fred McDowell, B. B. King, Junior Wells, Taj Mahal, Bonnie Raitt, Big Mama Thornton, Buddy Guy, and Arlo Guthrie are well known to aficionados of blues, folk, and American roots music, and their careers have been well documented. These artists all benefitted tremendously, however, from someone who is not nearly as renowned, but as Tammy L. Turner argues, should be: Dick Waterman (b. 1935). Waterman was a musical promoter, photographer, and freelance writer, and, in Dick Waterman: A Life in Blues, Turner develops a fascinating and entertaining narrative about a man whose experiences behind the scenes are as eventful, colorful, and harrowing as the lives of the musicians he represented. Turner's fine account is based almost wholly on personal interviews conducted with Waterman from 2013 through 2018—though her first encounters with him came in the late 1990s as a graduate student at the University of Mississippi—as well as correspondence with Bonnie Raitt, Buddy Guy, B. B. King, Eric Clapton, and other blues/folk/roots luminaries dating back to 2011. These primary-source "Interviews, Correspondence, and Personal Communications" (pp. 217–18) serve as the sole documentation for the book, as it lacks a formal bibliography or notes to guide the reader. Thus, while Turner demonstrates an impressive ability to synthesize her numerous personal interviews into a compelling narrative and provides important insights into Waterman's pioneering efforts in promoting blues artists, the lack of secondary literature and critical commentary tends to isolate the reader from the larger world of blues scholarship and renders problematic some of the less savory anecdotes. Chapter titles in the book each derive from Son House lyrics, and in the opener, "I Didn't Have No Blues," the reader gains insight into Waterman's youth growing up in a relatively affluent Jewish household in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Waterman was a shy child and prone to stuttering, but he believes his social awkwardness and difficulty communicating verbally actually made him a better craftsman of the written word. After military service in the late 1950s, Waterman became a reporter at the local newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut, during which time he became interested in folk music and witnessed firsthand the developing folk scene through frequent trips to Greenwich Village and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Turner paints a detailed picture of the various clubs Waterman visited and musicians he met, including Phil Ochs, in a particularly alarming account of the abject squalor in his apartment. Turner also makes clear that Waterman not only was a devoted fan of the music but also was completely invested in [End Page 236] the folk-music culture and advocated for its importance more broadly. For instance, Waterman moved to Cambridge so that he could be in the middle of the scene and began to write for the Broadside of Boston (in addition to simultaneous work for the National Observer) because it helped Waterman "diversify and learn about different kinds of music" (p. 15). Waterman's dedication led to his covering the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, where he was "captivated" by Mississippi John Hurt (p. 16) and earned himself a job at Folklore Productions, where he helped book gigs for Bob Dylan, Gary Davis, and even Hurt. These experiences compelled Waterman, along with two fellow blues enthusiasts, to find the whereabouts of Son House, a journey partially dramatized in the documentary Two Trains Runnin' (2016) and covered by Waterman for the National Observer. The trail ultimately led back to Rochester, New York, where House had been living for more than twenty years since his Library of Congress recordings for Alan Lomax, unbeknownst to the rest of the musical world. Waterman took it upon himself to help revive House's career, thus initiating his life's work as one of the foremost promoters of blues music. Through Turner's account of Waterman's relationship with House, the reader gains an intimate sense of House's visceral...

A Blues Odyssey

A Blues Odyssey Joel Harrison (bio) Guitar King: Michael Bloomfield’s Life in the Blues David Dann University of Texas Press https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/dann-guitar-king 776 Pages; Print, $34.95 Michael Bloomfield’s life was a great story waiting to be told, and David Dann has done it considerable justice. His passion for his subject and the depth of his research are extraordinary (leading to an equally extraordinary length of the tome— 776 pages.) He positions Bloomfield as something of a neglected genius, whose meretricious choices, refusal to be co-opted by the burgeoning pop industry, excessive drug use, and early death relegated him to the margins of rock n’ roll history. This book is foremost about music, but it’s also about mental illness. Bloomfield suffered his whole adult life from some combination of anxiety, manic depression, narcissism, and insomnia, and it ultimately killed him. Proper diagnosis and treatment seemed elusive as Bloomfield self-medicated with sleeping pills, heroin, and alcohol. However, even the best medical advice may not have saved him, as he was hell-bent on self-destruction. As someone intimately familiar with the back acres of guitar history, I was pleased to find myself the target audience of Dann’s protean effort. Though I was aware of the bare outlines of the guitarist’s best-known moments, playing with Dylan on Like a Rolling Stone, leading The Electric Flag, and playing in the first Paul Butterfield Band, I knew all too little about Bloomfield’s odyssey. Dann painstakingly chronicles his brief thirty-seven years in minute detail. Contemporaries such as Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana became household names, and Dann believes Bloomers, as his friends called him, deserves to be part of that pantheon. He claims Bloomfield as the first real rock guitarist to solo (as opposed to just playing chords), someone who inspired folk-rock and psychedelic rock, laid the groundwork for jazz fusion, and started the first rock band with a horn section. Some of this is disputable, but it may not matter. Bloomfield’s wild exploits are a terrific tale, a mirror for the cultural revolutions of the time. Dann methodically sets his story amidst momentous events such the Monterey Pop Festival, Jimi Hendrix’s arrival as Jimmy James in New York City, Dylan’s electric performance at Newport Folk Festival, and innumerable societal upheavals small and large. In the author’s hands the era leaps to life. Mike Bloomfield was first and foremost an excellent blues guitarist. The book opens with vignettes of him sneaking off from his rich parents’ mansion north of Chicago to the city’s poor South Side where he soaked in the sounds of blues masters such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Michael didn’t just worship these giants from the back of the room; he befriended them and as a teenager began to join them onstage. His idols apparently more than tolerated him, they appreciated and encouraged him. It was no simple thing to cross the lines of class and race in the urban geography of the late 1950’s. It took heart and guts. Bloomfield’s hunger for this music was bottomless, and his musical gifts shine most brightly when he plays the music of this lineage — electrified Chicago blues. He also mastered the acoustic ragtime, stomps, and novelty tunes of the previous era, written by country folk such as Josh White, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Tampa Red, and Son House. Bloomfield was one of the first white rock guitarists who built his sound firmly upon this rock. As Dann relates it, dramatizing a meeting that occurred in Chicago in 1963, Bob Dylan himself thought he was “about the best damn guitar player I ever heard,” and was amazed at the breadth of Bloomfield’s historical chops. Dylan, an authority on every aspect of American roots music, found a kindred spirit, and a year later hired him on his groundbreaking record, Highway 61 Revisited (1965). To understand Bloomfield’s impact, you must imagine those few years, ‘63 to ‘66, when rock guitar music was birthed. Specifically, you have to see the world before...

On Listening to My Father Sing, and: Where the Next Poem Is

On Listening to My Father Sing, and: Where the Next Poem Is Morgan Blalock (bio) ON LISTENING TO MY FATHER SING What that song is made of:ethanol, red dirt, throbbingfingers, the biggest porch you ever seen— whose father doesn't knoweach word to every kind ofblues there ever was? Our house got death letter blues, got brokedown engine blues, got downhearted,got travelers' blues: lined up, shot at with the Colt that soredmy shoulder. Son House,Blind Willie, Mississippi John wail around woodstack, Miss Dolly humsJolene's name left of propanetanks, Robert Johnson behind the brick pile. Twenty-some years, must'vebeen a hundred times Fathertold me all I need is a black cat bone [End Page 66] and some mojo; must've beencountless days of backbreakingwork he ran through Muddy's dirty bass. Wiki says a black cat bonepromises good luck, rebirth,success in love, wards off an evil eye. Guess my father lived adifferent life than I made up.To obtain a black cat bone: first catch the cat, boil it alive—midnightonly—and better be sure youpicked it right. Father says you'd hold the bones up front of a mirror, choose darkestreflection. See, he hasn't alwaysbeen here, making sure I know everybody's got to fall at their crossroadin order to pray and get back up, to seek, take aim. [End Page 67] WHERE THE NEXT POEM IS On the barest pantry shelf, where preserves crowdbefore summer jams heavy on us. At the core of the question Mother asks each July:Little girl, when did it get so bad? Inside three years in which I watched your bodymean things outside of speech. Second floor of the once-house where the sweetestblackest wine is stored in jugs near bathtub below half roof, filled up half-clearwith rainwater and ash, with light. Near the (now collapsed) kilns where WilliamBurrell lost both legs in a rockslide and bled fourteen minutes on the road to C&OHospital in Clifton Forge, 1941. At the moment Rodney Jones wrote and this iswhen it's not language; how I remember you standing apart from me acrossthe white yard grown impossible. [End Page 68] Morgan Blalock Morgan Blalock graduated from Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, but now lives in South Park, Colorado. You can find her work in CutBank, The Adroit Journal, Collision, and Prairie Margins. Copyright © 2017 Berea College

Book Review: Dennis McNally, On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom

Book Review: Dennis McNally, On 61: Music, Race and Evolution of Cultural Freedom. Berkley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2015. ISBN: 978-1619025813 (Paperback). $16.95. 384 Pages.[Article copies available for fee from Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2016 by Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]Last November, Bob Dylan released latest volume of his Bootleg Series titled The Cutting Edge, 1965-1966, in multiple editions. most elaborate of these was an 18-CD edition purported to include every note recorded during Dylan's studio sessions of year and included nine different takes of his song Highway 61 Revisited, song was also title track of Dylan album released in 1965. It has in fact become something of touchstone among Dylan fans, one has been discussed and dissected as much for its figurative lyrics as for channeling famed highway.Highway 61 carries both historic and symbolic power in American popular culture. As Greil Marcus, journalist and cultural critic, documents in his examination of Dylan, Like Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at Crossroads, Bessie Smith, Queen of Blues, died on 61 in 1937, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Muddy Waters grew up and where, in 1910s and '20s, Charley Patton, Son House, and others made Delta blues; some have pretended to know Robert Johnson's 1936 'Cross Road Blues' was set right there, where 49 crosses 61. Elvis Presley grew up on 61, in Lauderdale Courts public housing in Memphis; not far away, road went past Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was shot in 1968. (Marcus 2006, 166-7)Marcus notes most of Dylan's fans had probably never heard of 61 at time his album was released, but it is now subject of book by Dennis McNally, who has previously written biography of Jack Kerouac and books about Grateful Dead. McNally is publicist, lecturer, and, according to his LinkedIn page, music business multitasker. His new book won 2014 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson award for writing and has generated largely positive reviews from newspapers and periodicals.It is probably most accurate to note 61 serves as kind of motif for McNally's book rather than subject. McNally uses 61 as kind of template for an exploration of American culture, specifically influence of African American culture. In his introduction, McNally notes that [African American] culture, largely in its musical manifestations, carried forward message of in United States and allowed white people to see the intellectual shackles in their own lives and [learn] lessons those at bottom of social pyramid had to offer. effect of black on white people, he continues, did not always lead to overt changes, but to widening of vision, softening of heart, and an increase in tolerance. (1-2) McNally's discussion follows 61 northward from New Orleans to Minnesota, and encompasses chapters on Thoreau, Twain, minstrelsy, jazz, blues legends Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and others before final section on how Bob Dylan absorbed and reflected many of these influences in his music, thereby carrying on improvisatory tradition established by African Americans in blues and jazz music, as well as representing a great flowering of influence of African American quest for freedom on arts. (428)So it probably goes without saying this is an ambitious book, one attempts kind of grand unifying theory connecting Bob Dylan with African American popular (a literal nexus of musical transformation transcending time and space, as he puts it) and traces development of a moral critique of American society and culture in light of concept of freedom. …

El linaje se transforma en casas: de los Fajardo a los marqueses de los Vélez y de Espinardo

This article attempts to explain the change in the form of family and social organization of Hispanic aristocracy from the late Middle Age to theEighteenth century. It is observed that some lineages have enough power for them arise several houses settled in aristocratic group, from the foundingof primogeniture, advantageous marriages and royal favor. The study about lineage Fajardo refers much of ‘grandeza’ families that do not create second lines as expansion strategy. It was real grace that allowed the existence of two branches: the house of los Velez, elderly relatives, and Espinardo, second son house. The military services and courtiers will give an important position until the Seventeenth century, but at the end of the century the lack of marriage between the two lines will be that there is no alternative means of inheritance and diluted in other houses. The commitment to the birthright of the house of los Velez and the loss of the male line of the house of Espinardo involve the disappearance of the lineage. The surname Fajardo survived into other main houses just like a record of ancient glories.

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

Narrative Time in the Blues: Son House’s "Death Letter" (1965)

Research Article| April 01 2013 Narrative Time in the Blues: Son House’s "Death Letter" (1965) Julia Simon Julia Simon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Music (2013) 31 (1): 50–72. https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.31.1.0050 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Julia Simon; Narrative Time in the Blues: Son House’s "Death Letter" (1965). American Music 1 January 2013; 31 (1): 50–72. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/americanmusic.31.1.0050 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressAmerican Music Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Color of the Blues: Considering Revisionist Blues Scholarship

Seasick Steve's appearance on BBC breakfast television in 2009 and the acceptance within the public domain of a white man as a traditional blues musician also points to the possibility that, while some stereotypes remain, others, such as the fact that real bluesmen are black and from the Deep South, may have faded. Seasick Steve, Stockholm, 2009, courtesy of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Presenter: It's blues music that evokes a kind of hobo lifestyle, and people talk about your background in that way. Tell us a bit about where you were before you got to where you are. Seasick Steve: Well, you know, that's like another problem I have. People think they found me under a bridge a few years ago, but I raised five boys, you know, I had normal jobs, I had thirty-five years . . . But when I was a young fella, I had to leave home when I was thirteen, and I did some pretty rough living and wandering around. We used to ride trains or hitchhike and follow migrant work around the farm work. But, you know, that ended many years ago, and I just sort of had to be, tried to be, a regular fella. Seasick Steve's appearance on BBC breakfast television in 2009 to promote his aptly titled album, Man From Another Time, was an uncanny reminder of the post-war blues revival, when aging and forgotten African American blues singers, such as Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, and Son House, were rediscovered and presented to mainstream white audiences. The interview revealed how images and stereotypes conjured up during the blues revival of the mid-twentieth century—the bluesman as wandering hobo or anti-conformist rebel—are still with us in the twenty-first, a perception of blues musicians which, as the singer demonstrates in his response, needs to be repeatedly refuted. The acceptance within the public domain of a white man as a traditional blues musician, however, also points to the possibility that while some stereotypes remain, others, such as the fact that real bluesmen are black and from the Deep South, may have faded. In recent years, a number of writers have sought to deconstruct old stereotypes about the blues. Jeff Titon, Elijah Wald, Marybeth Hamilton, Patricia Schroeder, and Karl Hagstrom Miller have challenged depictions of the blues as an authentic folk music with roots firmly within working-class African American culture, most often presented at odds with modernity and consumer capitalism. This has taken the shape of dismantling the myth of the bluesman, revered as a rebel that renounced the worldly benefits of commercial success for his music. In essence, these revisionist writers have emphasized the irreconcilable variance between the blues as it really was and that which white middle-class enthusiasts and record collectors of the Sixties invented and wanted to see. This chosen view has resulted in obscure singers from the South, such as Son House, Skip James, and Robert Johnson, being idolized as archetypal blues heroes, at the expense of musicians like Leroy Carr and the Mississippi Sheiks, who were both more widely known among African American audiences and commercially successful during the Race Records era of the interwar years. However, while revisionists have highlighted the socio-cultural distances between commentators and the music, they have often limited their efforts by presenting the invention of the blues—that is, the rediscovery of the blues during the 1960s revival—as predominantly an American story. This has either neglected or downplayed the fact that the blues reached audiences far beyond the geographical borders of North America. The blues is American music with origins within African American culture of the South, but its story has not been limited by these national or cultural boundaries. Thus, to fully understand the nature of blues historiography and the way the blues has been invented since the revival, it is necessary to acknowledge that from the middle of the last century the blues was consumed, performed, and interpreted within a transatlantic context.

Steelin' the Slide: Hawai'i and the Birth of the Blues Guitar

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Although the work of eliminating blues myths is a hard row to hoe, scholars have successfully uprooted a few, including the persistent belief that into the early twentieth century, Mississippi Delta blues musicians nurtured their musical traditions in isolation from the sounds of the modern world. We know that they sought out the latest hits from Tin Pan Alley, enjoyed the raucous and worldly, cosmopolitan performances of traveling vaudeville singers, and often mimicked the singing (or, in the case of Jimmie Rodgers, the yodeling) of the biggest recording artists of their day. Robert Johnson now seems much less of a devil-conjuring mystic than a bright, observant professional guitarist who readily assimilated a huge body of riffs borrowed from all the records he could get his hands on. Indeed, our understanding of music-making in the early-twentieth-century South has changed dramatically in recent years. (1) One belief that seems to have remained relatively intact, however, is that the bottleneck slide guitar style was developed as an Africanism--a musical technology that survived from the Middle Passage into the twentieth century. According to this theory, children's instruments--monochord zithers, variously identified in Mississippi as the or jitter-bug--served as the direct inspiration for the slide guitar, the distinctive tradition originally and perhaps most beautifully expressed in the recordings of Charley Patton, Son House, Kokomo Arnold, Robert Johnson, and others. Indeed, folklorists in the 1960s and 1970s extensively documented uses and recollections of such one-stringed instruments around Mississippi and other parts of the South. These instruments were most often comprised of a wire string secured across a board or run from the exterior wall of a house to an anchor--often a brick--on the other end. One could generate sound and change the string's pitch by running a bottle or a similar object up and down the wire. A quick search on YouTube returns numerous videos of Mississippi diddley bow practitioners collected by Alan Lomax or even an electrified version built by modern rocker Jack White. Scholars have worked to link these instruments' roots to West and Central Africa. The connection seems plausible, and it was attractive to folklorists and historians in the 1960s and 1970s who, during and after the national Civil Rights and Black Pride movements, created scholarship that neatly calibrated with celebrations of African American culture and its ties to the African continent. (2) Upon closer inspection of the origins of the slide guitar tradition, however, the evidence linking it to African monochord zithers is rather tenuous. No monochord zithers seem to appear in the written record before the 1930s, well after African Americans had begun recording their slide guitars. This study will reveal that what we instead find in the South, in great preponderance, are Hawaiian guitars. Everywhere. Native Hawaiian guitarists, who slid metal bars over their strings to create sweeping glissando sounds, inundated the South in the first decades of the twentieth century. Yet, in the obsessively researched field of blues music, none yet have seen fit to consider the Native Hawaiian influence as anything more than a curiosity, a sideshow unworthy of serious contemplation. (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Thus, a significant reappraisal of blues slide guitar origins is in order, as is our understanding of southern guitar culture as a whole, as scholars have consistently ignored the presence of Kanaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian, guitarists in the South. This reappraisal requires a turn to the many African American and Kanaka Maoli convergences that took place in the early-twentieth-century South, from the country roads of Mississippi and Alabama to the boisterous city streets of New Orleans. The evidence of these encounters is at times fleeting and certainly also requires some speculation. …

“The Faint Plinking of a Guitar”: Faulkner’s Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

Faulkner Journal .Tim A. Ryan “The Faint Plinking of a Guitar”: Faulkner’s Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem W hile F. Scott Fitzgerald is renowned for having defined Americas metropolitan Jazz Age in his novels and stories, Faulkners ear­ ly fiction emphasizes instead the vernacular music of the rural South, most especially the blues. Soldiers’ Pay boasts the appear­ ance ofa band performing such staples as “Yellow Dog Blues” and “Shake It Break It,” as well as the singing of a gospel choir (156-59, 255-56).1 In Flags in the Dust, the Sartoris family’s black servants croon blues as they work, a street musician performs in the town square, and young Bayard enlists a Negro band to help him serenade the unmarried women of Jefferson (560, 573-74, 638-39, 659, 664-65). Erich Nunns recent analysis of Sanctuary, meanwhile, highlights the previously unappreciated centrality of both black and white popular music in Faulkner’s most notorious novel. Finally, “That Evening Sun” famously derives its title and some ofits plot elements from that celebrated adaptation ofSouthern musical traditions, W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.”2 Although such early works established Faulkner’s enthusiasm for South­ ern—and, especially, black—popular music, references to the blues, gospel, and jazz largely disappeared from the author’s fiction after 1931. H. R. Stoneback suggests that “Pantaloon in Black” alludes to the lyrics of the blues song “Easy Rider” (241-43), and Handy’s band gets a passing mention in The Town (64), but Faulkner largely ceased portraying black singers and vernacular music after his first few novels and stories. Consequently, some readers have been more sur­ prised at “the scarcity ofblues description” in Faulkner’s work than intrigued by its presence (Evans qtd. in Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations” 54). Critics have tended to explain the disappearance of the blues and other Af­ rican American music from Faulkner’s fiction as a form of growth on the part of the author: instead of including black musicians in his stories for mere local color, the later Faulkner presents black people whose bluesiness is an inherent qualityofcharacter. In other words, ifsome ofFaulkner’s early African American characters play and sing the blues, his later black protagonists have the blues. Following Thadious M. Davis’s pioneering work, for example, Adam Gussow ‘See Adam Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations and Meaningless Strains: Faulker’s Blues Understandings,” and Thadious M. Davis for examination of these elements in Faulkners early fiction. 2For analysis of blues elements in “That Evening Sun,” see Ken Bennett, Carol B. Gartner, Charles A. Peek, and Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations.” 3 4 Tim A. Ryan Faulkners Forgotten Bluesman and the Power of Vernacular persuasively argues that the blues in Faulkners early fiction is largely “ener­ getic, repetitive, sexualized, and profitable background music made by black performers to support dramas of white self-articulation.” In later instances, however, Faulkner uses the blues to create “dramas of black self-articulation ... in which overwhelmed subjects suffer” because of the inability ofwhite people to understand black experience (“Plaintive Reiterations” 64).3 If Faulkner was generally familiar with the blues as a folk tradition and pop culture phenomenon, it is unlikely that he knew the specific artists and works of the Mississippi Delta blues that we now think of as canonical. Al­ though the mainstream adaptations of black music purveyed by the likes of Handy in the 1910s and 1920s were popular with diverse audiences, the con­ sumers of country blues records were almost exclusively African American, at least until World War II. Faulkner enjoyed Handy’s commercialized ver­ sions of the genre, listened to the singing of black farmhands on his Green­ field Farm (Gussow, “Plaintive Reiterations” 62-63), and even played records by the “Empress” of the urban blues, Bessie Smith, on an old windup Victrola at Rowan Oak (Haynes 441). Like most of the nation’s white population, how­ ever, Faulkner probably was not aware of the now-legendary recorded works of such country blues avatars as Charley Patton, Geeshie Wiley, Son House, or Robert Johnson—even though they were virtual neighbors of the Oxfordbased author. Such artists were largely...

Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (review)

Reviewed by: Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music Edward Komara Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. By Ted Gioia. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. [xiii, 449 p. ISBN-13: 9780393062588 (hardcover), $27.95; ISBN-13: 9780393337501 (paperback), $16.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Because the blues in the Delta region in the northwest corner of Mississippi is so much a part of the region’s oral culture, little about it has the appearance to historians of being known for certain. As a result, many presentations of Delta blues history have had to rely on much that some readers may take as speculation, folktale, even myth. Whatever failings as history that Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981) may have had, Palmer did attempt to “fight fire with fire,” that is, to address a few myths not with facts, but with new myths of his own. That W. W. Norton has published a book on Delta blues is not surprising, since it has published in three editions one of the key books about African American music, Eileen Southern’s Music of Black Americans (1971; 1983; 1997). But what sort of book is Gioia’s Delta Blues? His previous books include three volumes on jazz (especially The History of Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]), and his 2006 Duke University Press publications Work Songs and Healing Songs may be regarded as broadening his research scope. Studying the blues is a logical move from jazz studies, since jazz musicians use blues forms as bases of improvisation. Taking up Delta blues, despite its difficulties to historians because of its lack of written and notated documents, follows from Gioia’s study of work songs because of the work-song phrasing of many pre-1942 (“pre-war”) Delta blues singers. But his thesis that “[rock music] is the true final destination of the Delta sound” (p. 6) strikes me as out of step with his previous studies, and debatable in view of the very limited role that Delta blues played in blues overall during the early years of rock (1954–63) until British rock groups from 1964 on brought Delta styles to great prominence. While the stripped-down instrumentation (often a single guitar) lends to Delta blues a primitive-seeming sound, it does not mean necessarily that Delta blues has a primal function as the source of all blues—although it is tempting and very easy to think so. Historians have long been divided over whether blues began in the Delta and spread outward, or whether it developed across the South from Arkansas to Georgia. The first two chapters of Lawrence Cohn’s Nothing But The Blues (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993) each present the opposing viewpoints of that debate: Samuel Charters (“Working on the Building: Roots and Influences,” pp. 13–31) took the Delta-centric view, and David Evans (“Goin’ Up The Country: Blues in Texas and the Deep South,” pp. 33–85) thought blues was the result of the South as a whole. For the sake of his thesis, Gioia appears to be a Delta-centrist, on the side claiming that the blues—or at least the most influential of all blues styles—comes from the Delta. One need not be a Delta-centrist to relate the history of Delta blues; in fact, one may be better off not being one, so as to notice and discuss without bias the outside influences on Delta blues. One such example is Bessie Smith, whom Gioia mentions on pp. 40–42, but does not comment on her influence. Charlie Patton used her rendition of “Mountain Top Blues” for his 1929 Paramount record “Hammer [Hammock] Blues,” and Son House and Skip James each took lyrics from her “Work House Blues” release for their own blues. Instead of a continuous narrative, Gioia uses a series of chapter-length portraits of individual musicians to relate his history. Those he singles out are W. C. Handy, Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King. Palmer had followed a similar plan featuring...

Diatonic Developments

Page 24 American Book Review Diatonic Developments Roger Wood Ramblin’ on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues Edited by David Evans University of Illinois Press http://www.press.uillinois.edu 440 pages; cloth, $75.00; paper, $27.00 The cultural impact of American music has reverberated globally since the early 1920s, when sound recordings of popular songs first became widely available to listeners, often via radio. Ever since, certain African American singers and instrumentalists , performing a style that originated within their own uniquely hybridized subculture, have communicated the blues to myriad listeners—indeed, often to people far removed in terms of geography, race, socioeconomic circumstance, and time. Both directly (i.e., blues as unadulterated blues) and indirectly (i.e., blues as a foundational component of jazz, country, rock, and other styles), this music has informed much of the soundtrack of modernity and its aftermath. As an enduring genre (which experienced popular “revival” phases in both the 1960s and 1990s), blues music has long appealed to two sometimes overlapping yet distinct groups—one, a broad base of fans and musicians; the other, a smaller yet substantial interdisciplinary academic cohort comprising certain musicologists, historians, folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and others. With the rising number of blues-themed festivals, appreciation societies, conferences, and publications produced in recent decades, these two groups have coexisted in a necessary but occasionally uneasy symbiosis. Lately, the majority of blues books have spoken primarily (via anecdotes, interviews, biographies, and photographs ) to a general readership of enthusiasts for the music; far fewer have adopted more formalized research methodologies to address an audience of scholarly peers. In Ramblin’ on My Mind: New Perspectives on the Blues, editor David Evans and his team of veteran contributors seek to redress that imbalance by collectively approaching their multifaceted topic with impeccable academic precision . The result is a major analytical treatise that yields a bounty of fresh insights on the blues. A distinguished professor in the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music at the University of Memphis and the author of several important tomes and countless articles on the blues, Evans pens the ten-page introduction and one of the ten chapters, the latter a meticulously crafted large-scale survey, categorization, and analysis of nicknames ofAfricanAmerican blues artists who recorded between 1920 and 1970. In both cases, Evans makes clear his devaluing of casual, impressionistic writing in favor of a more rigorously scientific consideration of the blues. That undertone echoes throughout this compilation, signified in part by the abundance of supplementary data provided in the form of charts, graphs, tables of statistics, transcribed music notation (or guitar tabulation), copious endnotes , bibliographies, and other related hallmarks of serious research. As suggested by its title (which alludes to an iconic blues song), the scope of this book is wideranging —“rambling” as it does over diverse intellectual terrain. As Evans writes, These essays include a comparative study of the blues andAfrican music, broad surveys full of detail about solo blues guitar styles, blues nicknames, and lyric themes of disillusion in the years followingWorld War II, an in-depth portrait of an important but neglected early blues “advocate,” detailed studies of individual performances by Son House, Robert Johnson, and Ella Fitzgerald from literary and musicological perspectives, an exploration of an early phase of blues in sheet music and vaudeville prior to commercial recording, and a reinterpretation of a particular style of blues known as zydeco. The contributing writers, three of whom are based in Europe, likewise represent a variety of backgrounds of expertise, ranging from college professors in the field of music, musicology, or folklore to independent historians, researchers, and authors. Several of them have conducted fieldwork and written about the blues for over forty years. All of the essays in this collection reach logical conclusions but shine new light on the blues. As indicated in the book’s subtitle, the chapters present a multiplicity of “new perspectives.” Some are likely to be more readily accessible than others, even to an academic audience fairly well versed in the blues. Perhaps the most revelatory essay is “Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism in the Blues: AnAfricanist Perspective” by Gerhard Kubik, which Evans grants headliner status of sorts by making it...

Broadway and Main: Crossroads, Ghost Roads, and Paths to an American Studies Future

Broadway and Main:Crossroads, Ghost Roads, and Paths to an American Studies Future Philip J. Deloria (bio) I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy now. Save poor Bob if you please." -Robert Johnson, "Crossroad Blues" As the parent of a high school student, I often find myself contemplating the Scholastic Aptitude Test (the SAT), which means jumbling together my intellectual understanding of the test's built-in knowledge inequalities with my fascination with the aesthetic beauty of its analogy questions. I want to begin with one of these analogies: Robert Johnson is to crossroads as crossroads is to (blank). I'm going with answer C: American studies. Crossroads offers a useful trope for thinking about intersections, danger, commerce, intercourse with others, and the possibility of the new-and the figure that seems to represent these meanings best is Robert Johnson. One almost cannot hear his name without making the link to a long-lived story: It was sometime in 1929 or 1930 that Robert Johnson began showing up with a guitar at Saturday night parties in Robinsonville, Mississippi. When Son House and his partner Willie Brown went on break, Johnson would take over, supposedly "driving people nuts" with his poor playing. But then, fleeing a brutal stepfather and the hard work of the fields, Johnson ran away from home for six months. He marked his return to Robinsonville by showing up at another party, blowing the crowd away. "He was so good!" remembered Son House. "When he finished all our mouths were standing open."1 Out of such stories-generally recounted by white music critics long after Johnson's death-emerged a particular vision of "the crossroads." How had Robert Johnson gotten so good, so fast? He had made a pact with the devil, selling his midnight soul in return for musical genius. And he'd cut the deal down at the crossroads, that place of mystery, danger, and possibility conveniently [End Page 1] marked for later listeners by the tune "Cross Road Blues," recorded in 1936.2 American studies has long offered a world of possibility for those interested in escaping the strictures of the disciplines and in stretching their boundaries, in looking for insight from other interpretive traditions and social realities, in making the new. American studies might be defined by this pithy phrase: "it's not what we choose to include, but what we refuse to exclude."3 That is a powerful statement about the antipathy to boundary setting that produced American studies as we know it: capacious, expansive, and engaged. And "crossroads"-in the form of the ASA Web site, university press series, and conference themes-has often seemed the perfect figure to sum up our practice.4 As Robert Johnson is to crossroads, so crossroads is to American studies: the smaller term in each relation allows one to weave some tangibility around capaciousness. Each gestures to the real connections that are made at meetings such as the one we celebrate tonight. And, in fact, there is a need to capture such tangibility. For as one of my favorite administrators recently sniped, "If American studies is so much everything, then how can it be anything?" It's a fair question. Tonight, I want to remind us that there is in fact an anything to American studies and it is something to be contemplated at greater length. In making that contemplation, I want to walk through two issues in our field. The first of these is the question of disciplinarity and of the transformations of that thing called the "interdisciplinary." The second involves the long interchange between American studies and ethnic studies. These are hardly distinct questions, and they both have something to say to the practices of American studies. This year's conference theme, "Back Down to the Crossroads: Integrative American Studies in Theory and Practice," was meant to serve as a kind of "anti-theme," a chance to open up the meeting to a wide range of work and to challenge American studies scholars to see four recent thematic interests-in race and ethnicity studies, in...

Quintette for Piano and Strings, op. 92 (review)

Ornstein. Quintette for Piano and Strings, op. 92. Edited by Denise Von Glahn and Michael Broyles. Middleton, WI: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, Inc., c2005. (Recent Researches in American Music, 51.) (Music of the United States of America, 13.) [Frontispiece (Leo Ornstein, ca. 1920); foreword (Richard Crawford), p. vii; acknowledgments, p. ix; essay Leo and American Modernism, p. xi-xxxix; 4 plates; score, 226 p.; apparatus, p. 227-44. ISBN 0-89579-570-1. $125 (score); $42 (parts).] The name of (1893-2002) is unlikely to be familiar to most musicians and music lovers. Yet, as the editors of this new volume in Music of the United States of America (MUSA) note at the start of their introductory essay, he 1910 and 1920 . . . perhaps the most notorious musician in America. His fame rested on his skill as a pianist who played both the standard concert repertoire and the latest from Europe, as well as his own radical compositions, which shocked, bewildered, and excited audiences (p. xi). Indeed, Ornstein's case is a salutary reminder of the degree to which the path from celebrity and notoriety to anonymity and invisibility is not a phenomenon restricted solely to our own post-Warholian age of media hype and fifteen-minute fame. By the time he twenty-five, was already the subject of a full-length (by no less an author than Frederick Martens-Leo Ornstein: The Man, His Ideas, His Work [New York: Breitkopf & Hartel, 1918; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1975]) and was compared favorably to Schoenberg and Stravinsky (p. xi). Yet although Ornstein never abandoned composing, at least during his first 100 (p. xxiv), between roughly 1930 and 1975 he in effect disappeared from public view, to the extent that in 1977 Vivian Perlis had to travel to a mobile home park in Brownsville, Texas, to conduct a videotape interview with the composer. As the crew prepared for the 'shoot,' elderly people straggled out of nearby trailers, wondering whether a murder had been committed! (Perlis five years previously had conducted audio interviews with at his son's house in Boston; see Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers' Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005], 78-79.) This is not the place to conduct a postmortem on the reasons for Ornstein's descent into obscurity-indeed, a conclusive coroner's report will be readily available when Michael Broyles's and Denise Von Glahn's authoritative biography of the composer is published in the near future; but it is the place (if one were needed) to praise Broyles, Von Glahn, and the MUSA team for having the courage to shepherd into print, for the first time, Ornstein's extraordinary Quintette for Piano and Strings, op. 92, written in the mid-1920s. The work commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and first performed in Philadelphia on 1 January 1928. The concert, sponsored by the Society for Contemporary Music, also featured music by Maurice Ravel (Tzigane) and Bela Bartok (the Second Violin Sonata and String Quartet), with the latter composer, then undertaking an American tour, in attendance. Subsequently, there were further performances in New York and elsewhere through the 1930s, with on each occasion tackling the formidably difficult piano part. …

Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 (review)

Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942. By John W. Work, Lewis Wade Jones, and Samuel C. Adams, Jr.; edited by Robert Gordon and Brace Nemerov. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. [xvi, 343 p. ISBN 0-82651485-5. $34.95.] Indices, appendices, illustrations, music examples. The immediate attraction of Lost Delta Found is the inclusion of John W. Work III (1901-1967) among the authors. His American Negro Songs and Spirituals (New York: Bonanza, 1940) sold well on its initial publication and may still be found in many music libraries. It remains in print as American Negro Songs through Dover Books. That collection was the product of a talented mind with a wide interest in many kinds of southern African American music and a facile skill in music transcription. Having been raised within a distinguished African American musical family and being on the faculty of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee-home of the internationally famous Fisk Jubilee Singers-placed Work in an advantageous position to view, listen, and report on the music of his people, region, and time. Any additional research of his should be of high interest. That presented in Lost Delta Found is cause for celebration and careful, responsive study. Three studies by Work and two other Fisk African American scholars, Lewis Jones and Samuel C. Adams, are presented here. All were products of a series of field trips to Coahoma County (including its seat Clarksdale) in the Mississippi Delta in 1941-1942, undertaken in collaboration with white researcher Alan Lomax (1915-2002) of the Library of Congress (LC). The main purpose of the research was to study the rural African American residents of the Delta, recording their traditional ways and expressions, and then to assess the retention of such traditions when people moved to towns and cities. Sound recording was a means to the fieldwork, yet the blues performances captured by the field technology, especially those by Son House, Muddy Waters, and David Honeyboy Edwards, have nearly overshadowed the reasons why the Fisk/LC team came to the Delta. The Library of Congress initially issued selections of their blues during the 1940s and 1950s, and reissues of the same music on the Flyright, Biograph, MCA/Chess, and Document labels have continued through the present day. In his account of the 1942 trip in his memoir The Land Where The Blues Began (New York: Pantheon, 1993; winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), Lomax focused on the blues, to which he made cultural and musical associations with the other types of African American music he had heard. Yet the scope of the Fisk/LC recordings encompassed more than just blues, and the social classes of the recorded African American performers included not only the poor on cotton plantations but also the lower and middle classes in Clarksdale. A basic check of the listings for these field recordings, issued and unissued, in Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye's Blues and Gospel Records 1890-1943 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) shows that the number of field discs devoted to church services (including sermons and sacred music), children's game songs and chants, and women's home songs greatly exceeds that of blues. Such a broad scope suggests that the Fisk researchers (if not also Lomax) felt at the time of the field trips that there was much Mississippi Delta musical culture in general to collect, assess, and discuss. Work, Jones, and Adams prepared their individual studies of the 1941-1942 fieldwork and duly sent them to LC where they were misplaced. Plans for publication were then set aside. The location of the studies remained unknown if not uncertain for many years. As it turned out, copies of the Jones and Work text portions were kept in Lomax's archives at Hunter College, New York City. The Franklin Library at Fisk University contained Work's microfilms of his music transcriptions and indexes, and Adams's M. …

Domestic Intelligence: Newspaper Advertising and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

An advertisement published in the March 25, 1728, issue of The Daily Journal exhibits the "formal realism" for which Richardson's novels were to be so celebrated. Positioned between a notice that "a large Brick House" is "To be Lett" and an announcement that "the Principal Part of the Collection of Pictures, of Mr. Nicholas Blick, deceased" is "to be sold on Wednesday the 20th Instant, at his Son's House," it reads: