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Pioneers of the Blues Revival
Steve Cushing, the award-winning host of the nationally syndicated public radio staple Blues before Sunrise , has spent over thirty years observing and participating in the Chicago blues scene. In Pioneers of the Blues Revival , he interviews many of the prominent white researchers and enthusiasts whose advocacy spearheaded the blues' crossover into the mainstream starting in the 1960s.
Opinionated and territorial, the American, British, and French interviewees provide fascinating first-hand accounts of the era and movement. Experts including Paul Oliver, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Sam Charters, Ray Flerledge, Paul Oliver, Richard K. Spottswood, and Pete Whelan chronicle in their own words their obsessive early efforts at cataloging blues recordings and retrace lifetimes spent loving, finding, collecting, reissuing, and producing records. They and nearly a dozen others recount relationships with blues musicians, including the discoveries of prewar bluesmen Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White, and the reintroduction of these musicians and many others to new generations of listeners. The accounts describe fieldwork in the South, renew lively debates, and tell of rehearsals in Muddy Waters's basement and randomly finding Lightning Hopkins's guitar in a pawn shop.
Blues scholar Barry Lee Pearson provides a critical and historical framework for the interviews in an introduction.
Opinionated and territorial, the American, British, and French interviewees provide fascinating first-hand accounts of the era and movement. Experts including Paul Oliver, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Sam Charters, Ray Flerledge, Paul Oliver, Richard K. Spottswood, and Pete Whelan chronicle in their own words their obsessive early efforts at cataloging blues recordings and retrace lifetimes spent loving, finding, collecting, reissuing, and producing records. They and nearly a dozen others recount relationships with blues musicians, including the discoveries of prewar bluesmen Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White, and the reintroduction of these musicians and many others to new generations of listeners. The accounts describe fieldwork in the South, renew lively debates, and tell of rehearsals in Muddy Waters's basement and randomly finding Lightning Hopkins's guitar in a pawn shop.
Blues scholar Barry Lee Pearson provides a critical and historical framework for the interviews in an introduction.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 16, 2018
The Blues as a musical form, while the basis for so much that is popular, is really pretty much of a niche thing. Even within the community of Blues lovers, the work done by Blues researchers [the people who explored the delta in the 40s, 50s, & 60s looking for the voices found on ancient, scratchy 78s] is even more of a niche.
But if this interests you, this is your book. It is well written, well researched, and Cushing asks good questions of his interviewees, drawing very elaborate responses.
So for fans of this niche within a niche, it would be hard to do better.
But if this interests you, this is your book. It is well written, well researched, and Cushing asks good questions of his interviewees, drawing very elaborate responses.
So for fans of this niche within a niche, it would be hard to do better.
July 7, 2020
Fabulous interviews with early blues collectors.
Pioneers of the blues collectors/record label owners retell fascinating tales of tracking down first generation blues performers and recording classic songs reissued in the '50s and 60's. A must for all serious blues fans.
Pioneers of the blues collectors/record label owners retell fascinating tales of tracking down first generation blues performers and recording classic songs reissued in the '50s and 60's. A must for all serious blues fans.
October 2, 2014
Disappointing. Transcripts of interviews with seventeen guys who researched the blues and knew some of the first-generation singers and players. Some interesting stories and anecdotes, but I did not like wading through the dross that comes with verbatim interviews. As disparate interviews, the book suffers from the lack of continuity. Seventeen separate narratives. Twelve pages of introduction and preface give context.
The twenty-page index includes people, songs and record labels, but needs to include places, such as (moving up the river) New Orleans, Clarksdale, Memphis, St Louis, Davenport, Chicago, Milwaukee, Grafton, for example. In the case of this book, the index worked as a useful guide, taking me to stories about Paramount and Chess record labels as well as to the original blues performers.
Paramount, in Grafton, comes up three dozen times throughout the book. The label pressed about eleven hundred sides from 1929-32. Ma Rainey, Charley Patton and many others took a train to Milwaukee, then an interurban to Grafton. The studio used better recording equipment than found at a blues label in Chicago. But Paramount used less shellac and more clay in its 78 rpm records, so they split and cracked more than other labels.
When the guys in this book researched early blues, they needed to find the first generation before it died out or left the music behind. In one case, a researcher sent a telegram in the mid-60s to locate one of the originals: "If you are the Son House who recorded for Paramount in the thirties, … please call Memphis." And that's how one of them came back from obscurity.
Here's another nonfiction book that would benefit from a timeline with page numbers that discuss each event. What happened to timelines? They seem like a quick graphics that increase the usefulness of the book.
Two and a half stars. Other books may cover specific singer-songwriters and labels, but this one offers an overview from those who researched the blues.
The twenty-page index includes people, songs and record labels, but needs to include places, such as (moving up the river) New Orleans, Clarksdale, Memphis, St Louis, Davenport, Chicago, Milwaukee, Grafton, for example. In the case of this book, the index worked as a useful guide, taking me to stories about Paramount and Chess record labels as well as to the original blues performers.
Paramount, in Grafton, comes up three dozen times throughout the book. The label pressed about eleven hundred sides from 1929-32. Ma Rainey, Charley Patton and many others took a train to Milwaukee, then an interurban to Grafton. The studio used better recording equipment than found at a blues label in Chicago. But Paramount used less shellac and more clay in its 78 rpm records, so they split and cracked more than other labels.
When the guys in this book researched early blues, they needed to find the first generation before it died out or left the music behind. In one case, a researcher sent a telegram in the mid-60s to locate one of the originals: "If you are the Son House who recorded for Paramount in the thirties, … please call Memphis." And that's how one of them came back from obscurity.
Here's another nonfiction book that would benefit from a timeline with page numbers that discuss each event. What happened to timelines? They seem like a quick graphics that increase the usefulness of the book.
Two and a half stars. Other books may cover specific singer-songwriters and labels, but this one offers an overview from those who researched the blues.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews