Pioneers of the Blues Revival

by Steve Cushing, Barry Lee Peterson (Introduction)

Steve Cushing, the award-winning host of the nationally syndicated public radio staple Blues Before Sunrise , has spent more than thirty years observing and participating in the Chicago blues scene. In the expanded second edition of Pioneers of the Blues Revival , Cushing adds new interviewees to the roster of prominent white researchers and enthusiasts whose advocacy spearheaded the blues' crossover into the mainstream starting in the 1960s. Rare interview material with experts like Mack McCormick supplements dialogues with Paul Garon, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Paul Oliver, Sam Charters, and others in renewing lively debates and providing first-hand accounts of the era and movement. Throughout, the participants chronicle lifetimes spent loving, finding, collecting, reissuing, and producing records. They also recount relationships with essential blues musicians like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White—connections that allowed the two races to learn how to talk to each other in a still-segregated world.

Genres: Music, History

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Ronn · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[jboyg · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Art · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.