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In Search of the Blues
Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton-we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight. In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music. Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was effectively invented by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into America's south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption. In their quest, and in the immense popularity of the music they championed, we confront America's ongoing love affair with racial difference.
328 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 23, 2007
17 people are currently reading
205 people want to read
About the author
Marybeth Hamilton
15 books2 followersMarybeth Hamilton was born in California and teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London.
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
January 4, 2022
This short brilliant book does for early African American music what Janet Malcolm’s great book The Invisible Woman does for Sylvia Plath. Just as JM was writing about Sylvia Plath’s biographers, the gatekeepers of the Plath legend, Marybeth Hamilton is examining the way black music has been preserved and transmitted, so this is all about the gatekeepers as well – who all turn out to be white guys. All white, all guys.
So this is a perfect companion to Escaping the Delta : Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald and Do Not Sell at Any Price by Amanda Petrusich, both great books.
When histories of music are written there is always discrimination. Marybeth wants to know WHO decided that THIS black music was great and THAT black music was contemptibly commercial.
It seems reasonable that every black entertainer was trying to make a living and therefore trying to please his audience and so would often be playing the hits of the day, Jimmie Rodgers, Bing Crosby, whatever. But the white guys who recorded, collected, rediscovered and managed them didn’t want any of that crowd pleasing stuff, no. Who wants to hear Skip James singing When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along? Nobody. So in general the more anguished sounding and low selling a record the better it was for them.
Racism of one sort or another plagues this complicated narrative. Here’s one example – around 1900 a couple of white intellectuals got interested in “negro folk song”. This was something that wasn’t minstrel music or spirituals, but a whole body of songs that had been ignored. Where did they go to hear these old genuine Negro folk songs? Old black people, maybe? No – they found some old white people who remembered what their house servants used to sing to them when they were kids on the plantation.
You might ask why this obsession for the preservation of old black music was a white thing – it’s a good question. Throughout the 20th century it’s obvious that from ragtime to jazz to r&b to rap music African Americans have been very creative and very fast-moving, and once a new style becomes the rage the old styles are ditched. The white obsessives turn up ten years later and appoint themselves as connoisseurs and historians. They then write all the books of the history of blues and jazz, they reissue the records, they promote certain names and ignore others. Mainly they like to ignore the artists black people themselves loved the most, a nice irony.
Then there’s a whole other parallel subject here as well : white men thinking about black men. These particular blues and jazz-obsessed white men were all liberals, so they were the good guys, I guess, but still they managed to find ways of setting your teeth on edge. All of them dismissed the first wave of blues records as trash – you know, the ones that were made by Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, Ma Rainey – yeah, by women. All trash, according to these gatekeeper-collectors. The real blues was always by a lone tortured male drifter. Marybeth neatly connects this very 1940s/50s romantic nonsense with the Beats, who were just at the same time marginalising women and lionising fast-living hard-drinking outsider men.
One of those books that fizzes the synapses in my brain and immediately connects with so many other books. For anyone interested in black American music – essential.
So this is a perfect companion to Escaping the Delta : Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald and Do Not Sell at Any Price by Amanda Petrusich, both great books.
When histories of music are written there is always discrimination. Marybeth wants to know WHO decided that THIS black music was great and THAT black music was contemptibly commercial.
It seems reasonable that every black entertainer was trying to make a living and therefore trying to please his audience and so would often be playing the hits of the day, Jimmie Rodgers, Bing Crosby, whatever. But the white guys who recorded, collected, rediscovered and managed them didn’t want any of that crowd pleasing stuff, no. Who wants to hear Skip James singing When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along? Nobody. So in general the more anguished sounding and low selling a record the better it was for them.
Racism of one sort or another plagues this complicated narrative. Here’s one example – around 1900 a couple of white intellectuals got interested in “negro folk song”. This was something that wasn’t minstrel music or spirituals, but a whole body of songs that had been ignored. Where did they go to hear these old genuine Negro folk songs? Old black people, maybe? No – they found some old white people who remembered what their house servants used to sing to them when they were kids on the plantation.
You might ask why this obsession for the preservation of old black music was a white thing – it’s a good question. Throughout the 20th century it’s obvious that from ragtime to jazz to r&b to rap music African Americans have been very creative and very fast-moving, and once a new style becomes the rage the old styles are ditched. The white obsessives turn up ten years later and appoint themselves as connoisseurs and historians. They then write all the books of the history of blues and jazz, they reissue the records, they promote certain names and ignore others. Mainly they like to ignore the artists black people themselves loved the most, a nice irony.
Then there’s a whole other parallel subject here as well : white men thinking about black men. These particular blues and jazz-obsessed white men were all liberals, so they were the good guys, I guess, but still they managed to find ways of setting your teeth on edge. All of them dismissed the first wave of blues records as trash – you know, the ones that were made by Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, Ma Rainey – yeah, by women. All trash, according to these gatekeeper-collectors. The real blues was always by a lone tortured male drifter. Marybeth neatly connects this very 1940s/50s romantic nonsense with the Beats, who were just at the same time marginalising women and lionising fast-living hard-drinking outsider men.
One of those books that fizzes the synapses in my brain and immediately connects with so many other books. For anyone interested in black American music – essential.
March 7, 2024
Were The Blues Invented In A Brooklyn YMCA?
In her book, "Inventing the Blues" (2008), Marybeth Hamilton advances the provocative claim that the blues, more specifically the Delta Blues, is a form of music created in large part by the imaginations of white men. I do not find her argument compelling, to say the least. Nevertheless, I found this book worth reading for the story it tells about how various individuals pioneered in the study of the blues beginning early in the 20th Century to the revival of interest in blues music in the 1960s. Although her book is unconvincing and even infuriating in some respects, it is valuable for those readers with an interest in the blues. Hamilton, born in California, teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and has written other books on aspects of American popular culture.
Early in her book, Hamilton says she is not going to cover the development of the Delta Blues as a musical style by analyzing the songs of Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and other bluesmen. She points to Robert Palmer's study "Deep Blues" as among the works that have explored the music. Instead, Hamilton proposed to show how her central characters, all of whom are white, "set out to find an undiluted and primal black music." Hamilton then asks what it was that drove these individuals to think that an "undiluted and primal black" music existed and why it was important to these individuals to find it. The way Hamilton frames her question largely presupposes her result. The works of Palmer and other writers such as Ted Gioia in his excellent recent study "Delta Blues" examine the blues by looking at the blues, bluesmen and blueswomen. Hamilton will have little of this and begins with the assumption that the blues was somehow a conceptual creation of whites. Hamilton finds the need for this conceptualization in the racial attitudes and segregation prevailing in the United States up through at least the 1950's. Late in the book, Hamilton introduces another theme. She finds the Delta blues largely a sexist creation by men who were uncomfortable with their masculinity and worried about evolving ideas of gender and egalitarianism.
Each of the five major characters Hamilton discusses is well described. Hamilton offers good insight into how the blues were found, in spite of her hyperbolic claim that the blues were invented. She describes the work of the early sociologist, Howard Odum who early in has career traveled in the byways of lumber camps and out of the way fields in the rural South to hear and record on primitive equipment the frequently obscene hollers and calls of laborers and field hands. Hamilton spends a great deal of time on pioneering work of John Lomax, who discovered Leadbelly in a Louisiana prison. She explores John Lomax's racial attitudes and offers a personal portrayal of him through love letters he wrote to a woman named Ruby Terrill. Lomax's son Alan also figures largely in the story as he tried to move away from his father's racial prejudices. Alan Lomax was instrumental in the rediscovery of Jelly Roll Morton as Hamilton points out. She underplays his role in the 1940s in recording and preserving the work of Delta bluesmen Muddy Waters and Son House.
Of Hamilton's characters, two are infrequently associated with the blues, and it was worth learning about them in the book. Dorothy Scarborough was a highly-educated woman whose parents had been active in the Confederacy. While living and teaching in New York City, she conceived the idea of studying black music. She traveled south and interviewed many people, mostly the descendants of white plantation owners but some black musicians as well. In 1925, she wrote a book "On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs". Hamilton points out that this book is little read today due to its racial stereotyping. But I think Hamilton is correct that this book has much to teach about early black music.
The fourth group of characters Hamilton discusses are William Russell, Frederick Ramsey, and Charles Smith who became enamored of New Orleans jazz and of the fabled Storyville district. They published an early study of jazz called "Jazzmen" in 1937 which seemed to conflate jazz and the blues and to find the heart of black music in the urban area of New Orleans rather than in the fields and rural areas that the Lomaxes, Odum, and Scarborough explored.
The final characters explored in the book are the record collectors of the 1940s. in particular a lonely and puzzling figure named James McKune. McKune lived in poverty and obscurity for 25 years in a Brooklyn YMCA amassing a collection of race records that he stored in a cardboard box under his bed. As McKune delved into what was then obscure music, he developed a passion for what we now know as the Delta bluesmen, especially for Charlie Patton. Slowly, a small group of collectors coalesced around McKune and shared his interest in this music. In the early 1960s, pioneering reissues of Delta blues music based upon McKune's collection were issued by small record labels and scholars and enthusiasts, in the United States and Britain, began to take note. McKune himself, bedeviled by problems with alcohol, sex, and mental health, was the victim of a bizarre murder in 1971, long after he had lost interest in the Delta blues. McKune, with has fantasies, loneliness and obsessions, Hamilton argues "invented" the Delta blues. Hamilton describes this "invention"
"the blues revival stands alongside the Beat movement as an opening movement of ... the 'male flight from commitment' that percolated through postwar American culture. What united both movement was their almost exclusively male constituency and their romance with outsider manhood, with defiant black men who seemed to scorn the suburban breadwinner's stiffling, soul-destroying routine."
I don't see anything in this analysis that supports the conclusion that McKune and his fellow-collectors "invented" the Delta blues. Palmer and others have shown there was a music there to be discovered. Other scholars such as Elijah Wald in "Escaping the Delta" have shown how much other forms of black music influenced the Delta blues. But the influence of other styles of music in the Delta hardly shows that the genre was somehow conceptualized and invented by white fans.
In his book, "Delta Blues" which I mentioned earlier, Ted Gioia takes issue with Hamilton's portrayal of McKune's role. He writes:
"Perhaps it would have been better for academics such as Hamilton to take the lead on this process during these years of neglect-- although other fears and obsessions might have emerged in this case. But the issue is moot: college professors had no interest in the blues at this time. Moreover, the record collectors were the only people who had access to this music, most of which was available solely on the original 78s in which it had first been presented to the public. As such, we must temper our criticism of these enthusiasts with at least a measure of gratitude for the music they were able to track down, preserve, and share with those open-minded enough to appreciate its virtues." (Gioia p. 349)
Although her primary claim in this book lacks support, Hamilton has written a valuable account of the individuals who pursued their passion for the blues and made this music available to all Americans.
Robin Friedman
In her book, "Inventing the Blues" (2008), Marybeth Hamilton advances the provocative claim that the blues, more specifically the Delta Blues, is a form of music created in large part by the imaginations of white men. I do not find her argument compelling, to say the least. Nevertheless, I found this book worth reading for the story it tells about how various individuals pioneered in the study of the blues beginning early in the 20th Century to the revival of interest in blues music in the 1960s. Although her book is unconvincing and even infuriating in some respects, it is valuable for those readers with an interest in the blues. Hamilton, born in California, teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and has written other books on aspects of American popular culture.
Early in her book, Hamilton says she is not going to cover the development of the Delta Blues as a musical style by analyzing the songs of Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and other bluesmen. She points to Robert Palmer's study "Deep Blues" as among the works that have explored the music. Instead, Hamilton proposed to show how her central characters, all of whom are white, "set out to find an undiluted and primal black music." Hamilton then asks what it was that drove these individuals to think that an "undiluted and primal black" music existed and why it was important to these individuals to find it. The way Hamilton frames her question largely presupposes her result. The works of Palmer and other writers such as Ted Gioia in his excellent recent study "Delta Blues" examine the blues by looking at the blues, bluesmen and blueswomen. Hamilton will have little of this and begins with the assumption that the blues was somehow a conceptual creation of whites. Hamilton finds the need for this conceptualization in the racial attitudes and segregation prevailing in the United States up through at least the 1950's. Late in the book, Hamilton introduces another theme. She finds the Delta blues largely a sexist creation by men who were uncomfortable with their masculinity and worried about evolving ideas of gender and egalitarianism.
Each of the five major characters Hamilton discusses is well described. Hamilton offers good insight into how the blues were found, in spite of her hyperbolic claim that the blues were invented. She describes the work of the early sociologist, Howard Odum who early in has career traveled in the byways of lumber camps and out of the way fields in the rural South to hear and record on primitive equipment the frequently obscene hollers and calls of laborers and field hands. Hamilton spends a great deal of time on pioneering work of John Lomax, who discovered Leadbelly in a Louisiana prison. She explores John Lomax's racial attitudes and offers a personal portrayal of him through love letters he wrote to a woman named Ruby Terrill. Lomax's son Alan also figures largely in the story as he tried to move away from his father's racial prejudices. Alan Lomax was instrumental in the rediscovery of Jelly Roll Morton as Hamilton points out. She underplays his role in the 1940s in recording and preserving the work of Delta bluesmen Muddy Waters and Son House.
Of Hamilton's characters, two are infrequently associated with the blues, and it was worth learning about them in the book. Dorothy Scarborough was a highly-educated woman whose parents had been active in the Confederacy. While living and teaching in New York City, she conceived the idea of studying black music. She traveled south and interviewed many people, mostly the descendants of white plantation owners but some black musicians as well. In 1925, she wrote a book "On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs". Hamilton points out that this book is little read today due to its racial stereotyping. But I think Hamilton is correct that this book has much to teach about early black music.
The fourth group of characters Hamilton discusses are William Russell, Frederick Ramsey, and Charles Smith who became enamored of New Orleans jazz and of the fabled Storyville district. They published an early study of jazz called "Jazzmen" in 1937 which seemed to conflate jazz and the blues and to find the heart of black music in the urban area of New Orleans rather than in the fields and rural areas that the Lomaxes, Odum, and Scarborough explored.
The final characters explored in the book are the record collectors of the 1940s. in particular a lonely and puzzling figure named James McKune. McKune lived in poverty and obscurity for 25 years in a Brooklyn YMCA amassing a collection of race records that he stored in a cardboard box under his bed. As McKune delved into what was then obscure music, he developed a passion for what we now know as the Delta bluesmen, especially for Charlie Patton. Slowly, a small group of collectors coalesced around McKune and shared his interest in this music. In the early 1960s, pioneering reissues of Delta blues music based upon McKune's collection were issued by small record labels and scholars and enthusiasts, in the United States and Britain, began to take note. McKune himself, bedeviled by problems with alcohol, sex, and mental health, was the victim of a bizarre murder in 1971, long after he had lost interest in the Delta blues. McKune, with has fantasies, loneliness and obsessions, Hamilton argues "invented" the Delta blues. Hamilton describes this "invention"
"the blues revival stands alongside the Beat movement as an opening movement of ... the 'male flight from commitment' that percolated through postwar American culture. What united both movement was their almost exclusively male constituency and their romance with outsider manhood, with defiant black men who seemed to scorn the suburban breadwinner's stiffling, soul-destroying routine."
I don't see anything in this analysis that supports the conclusion that McKune and his fellow-collectors "invented" the Delta blues. Palmer and others have shown there was a music there to be discovered. Other scholars such as Elijah Wald in "Escaping the Delta" have shown how much other forms of black music influenced the Delta blues. But the influence of other styles of music in the Delta hardly shows that the genre was somehow conceptualized and invented by white fans.
In his book, "Delta Blues" which I mentioned earlier, Ted Gioia takes issue with Hamilton's portrayal of McKune's role. He writes:
"Perhaps it would have been better for academics such as Hamilton to take the lead on this process during these years of neglect-- although other fears and obsessions might have emerged in this case. But the issue is moot: college professors had no interest in the blues at this time. Moreover, the record collectors were the only people who had access to this music, most of which was available solely on the original 78s in which it had first been presented to the public. As such, we must temper our criticism of these enthusiasts with at least a measure of gratitude for the music they were able to track down, preserve, and share with those open-minded enough to appreciate its virtues." (Gioia p. 349)
Although her primary claim in this book lacks support, Hamilton has written a valuable account of the individuals who pursued their passion for the blues and made this music available to all Americans.
Robin Friedman
June 16, 2013
This is not a reconstruction of the blues, this is a reconstruction of the history of the blues as conventionally understood. Marybeth Hamilton chose to write a fairly compelling book about several different white researchers/song collectors throughout the 20th century who set out to find something meaningful (to them) in the rots of the music of African Americans. What they found is open to interpretation, as well as is their motivations for searching in the first place. Hamilton implies that these people were looking for something that really only existed in their own sense of nostalgia or longing for purity, that whatever they were looking for they 'found' because it was a fiction of their own making, a fiction they themselves believed.
A book about white folks interpreting black folks' culture cannot avoid discussing the implicit and explicit racism of the researchers. Alan Lomax and Frederic Ramsey come off better than the others in this book, at least in terms of racial views. Still, you get the idea that these researchers felt they were preserving something that African Americans didn't fully understand or appreciate. A kind of appropriation of even the abstract feelings about cultural representations.
I particularly liked how Hamilton wrote about these researchers relationships to technology. For example, Howard Odum, who collected songs in the first decade of the 20th century, and Dorothy Scarborough in the second, both used recording devices. Tellingly, neither emphasized the fact because, Hamilton seems to say, they were searching for vestiges of a nostalgic, pre-industrial culture. To bring technology into the discussion would have tainted what they were doing. Contrast that attitude with John Lomax who took great pride in the recording equipment he used. John Lomax was also looking for pure examples of culture, unadulterated by popular culture, but his technology wouldn't be a factor because he felt he could find subjects who were living in cultural isolation. His belief (which seems ludicrous now) was that prisoners had no opportunity to be affected by pop culture; which is why he spent so much time searching for subjects in Southern prisons.
In the chapter on James McKune (whose outsized influence is one of the major reasons the conventional history of the Blues mistakenly places its origins in the Mississippi Delta--and, probably incorrectly, places Rock and Roll as its direct descendent)Hamilton writes, after a short, imaginary vignette of the man is his room, listening to records, "Telling the story of his life means making a virtue of his unknowability and imagining him as best we can..." (p 212) What I found interesting about this is that Hamilton does do that a lot in the book: imagining her subjects as best she can. She has no problems saying that this person would have certainly agreed with this or that or that this person felt this way about something. She gets into her subjects and tells us what they felt or thought, but remember, this is a book about people who searched for something that may not have existed, so they imagined it as best they could. What was Hamilton looking for?
A book about white folks interpreting black folks' culture cannot avoid discussing the implicit and explicit racism of the researchers. Alan Lomax and Frederic Ramsey come off better than the others in this book, at least in terms of racial views. Still, you get the idea that these researchers felt they were preserving something that African Americans didn't fully understand or appreciate. A kind of appropriation of even the abstract feelings about cultural representations.
I particularly liked how Hamilton wrote about these researchers relationships to technology. For example, Howard Odum, who collected songs in the first decade of the 20th century, and Dorothy Scarborough in the second, both used recording devices. Tellingly, neither emphasized the fact because, Hamilton seems to say, they were searching for vestiges of a nostalgic, pre-industrial culture. To bring technology into the discussion would have tainted what they were doing. Contrast that attitude with John Lomax who took great pride in the recording equipment he used. John Lomax was also looking for pure examples of culture, unadulterated by popular culture, but his technology wouldn't be a factor because he felt he could find subjects who were living in cultural isolation. His belief (which seems ludicrous now) was that prisoners had no opportunity to be affected by pop culture; which is why he spent so much time searching for subjects in Southern prisons.
In the chapter on James McKune (whose outsized influence is one of the major reasons the conventional history of the Blues mistakenly places its origins in the Mississippi Delta--and, probably incorrectly, places Rock and Roll as its direct descendent)Hamilton writes, after a short, imaginary vignette of the man is his room, listening to records, "Telling the story of his life means making a virtue of his unknowability and imagining him as best we can..." (p 212) What I found interesting about this is that Hamilton does do that a lot in the book: imagining her subjects as best she can. She has no problems saying that this person would have certainly agreed with this or that or that this person felt this way about something. She gets into her subjects and tells us what they felt or thought, but remember, this is a book about people who searched for something that may not have existed, so they imagined it as best they could. What was Hamilton looking for?
March 14, 2012
Marybeth Hamilton threw me a curve. I assumed that "In Search of the Blues" was going to be an account of the discovering and uncovering of the root sources of the Blues. But instead of focusing on all of the old time Blues players, it focused on the people who tracked down all the old time Blues players: Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough, John and Alan Lomax, Charles Edward Smith, William Russell, Frederic Ramsay, Sam Charters and James McKune. Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and many others played their parts in the narrative, but the real story was about mindset and preconceived notions of these white people producing their own "authoritative" versions of the mysteries of black music. With varying degrees of obsession and fascination each of the trackers had his or her own set of assumptions, presumptions, prejudices and biases. Each also had his or her own ideas about what constituted "purity" in the Blues. Hamilton has done a masterful job of sorting through the fantasies and establishing a new perspective on the development of one of America's greatest music genres.
June 15, 2015
Raises interesting questions re: blues and the importance of critics in shaping our understanding of music history and what music is important. Also, interesting discussion of how racism plays into the white appreciation of African American music.
2nd half of the book is definitely more interesting than the first half.
2nd half of the book is definitely more interesting than the first half.
February 16, 2023
One of the best books about music I’ve ever read, and it’s really very little about the music itself. I think a lot of the bad reviews this has got are by people who seem somehow offended that Hamilton isn’t talking about the music or the musicians in question. Her aim is to make us think about the term authenticity and ask some important questions about what that means as an aesthetic form of appreciation
One of things that most fascinates me about silent film is that most people, if they have any opinion at all about the era, think it was slapdash and primitive and messy. And really that’s just not how it actually was - that preconception comes from seeing badly degraded, slightly sped up and horribly decaying and jumpy prints of films that are removed from the context of their actual speed of projection, musical accompaniment and original gleaming photography. Harold Lloyd was not an innovator like Keaton or Chaplin, but he kept the rights to his films so they’re in far better condition than the dregs that were left over when sound turned up. We still only have about 10% of the first years of cinema, and so much of that is in perilous condition
I ramble about this because I know silent cinema a bit more than I do the blues, but there is a similar fetishisation of elements of these art forms that really aren’t intentional. To many, the crackle and hiss of a blues record speaks of the primitive nature of the recording, a way of reminding us of the poverty of these musicians and, by extension, the power of this art that they felt driven to perform. And Hamilton dares to make us think that maybe, just maybe, thinking along these lines of authenticity and primitiveness might just be… more than a little racist?
There’s a famous trope in literature, TV and film of the Magical Black Man - Wikipedia defines this as “a supporting stock character who comes to the aid of white protagonists in a film… who often possess special insight or mystical powers”. And Hamilton makes us think about when we talk about blues musicians in terms of their “uncorrupted” genius we are essentially seeing them as a rolling collection of Magical Black Bluesmen
Hamilton does this by telling the stories of song collectors, the dogged field recording pursuers and record collectors and, through their own records, shows that a great deal of them were either wildly patronising (at best) or incredibly racist (depressingly common). Alan Lomax’s (who comes out very well, mostly) dad, John, is particularly egregious, endlessly wanging on about how these uneducated musicians genius comes from their earthy, savant ways (and being what I think I can categorically call being a COMPLETE SHIT to Leadbelly). Even the record collectors are mostly white and middle class, fetishising these musicians in the same way that white middle class kids would fetishise gangster rap (because of a perverse sense that they were somehow being “dangerous”)
It’s not a perfect book, but it clearly doesn’t set out to be that - what Hamilton wants to do is annoy people long enough for them to think about their preconceptions properly and question what’s attracting them to the country blues. Even the fascination with “the high lonesome sound” of white folk musicians such as Roscoe Holcomb has more than a smidgeon of class snobbery about it. Hamilton wisely decides that her’s is not the book to replace these narratives with new ones, but hopefully everyone who reads it will do some significant inner reflection to question those narratives themselves
One of things that most fascinates me about silent film is that most people, if they have any opinion at all about the era, think it was slapdash and primitive and messy. And really that’s just not how it actually was - that preconception comes from seeing badly degraded, slightly sped up and horribly decaying and jumpy prints of films that are removed from the context of their actual speed of projection, musical accompaniment and original gleaming photography. Harold Lloyd was not an innovator like Keaton or Chaplin, but he kept the rights to his films so they’re in far better condition than the dregs that were left over when sound turned up. We still only have about 10% of the first years of cinema, and so much of that is in perilous condition
I ramble about this because I know silent cinema a bit more than I do the blues, but there is a similar fetishisation of elements of these art forms that really aren’t intentional. To many, the crackle and hiss of a blues record speaks of the primitive nature of the recording, a way of reminding us of the poverty of these musicians and, by extension, the power of this art that they felt driven to perform. And Hamilton dares to make us think that maybe, just maybe, thinking along these lines of authenticity and primitiveness might just be… more than a little racist?
There’s a famous trope in literature, TV and film of the Magical Black Man - Wikipedia defines this as “a supporting stock character who comes to the aid of white protagonists in a film… who often possess special insight or mystical powers”. And Hamilton makes us think about when we talk about blues musicians in terms of their “uncorrupted” genius we are essentially seeing them as a rolling collection of Magical Black Bluesmen
Hamilton does this by telling the stories of song collectors, the dogged field recording pursuers and record collectors and, through their own records, shows that a great deal of them were either wildly patronising (at best) or incredibly racist (depressingly common). Alan Lomax’s (who comes out very well, mostly) dad, John, is particularly egregious, endlessly wanging on about how these uneducated musicians genius comes from their earthy, savant ways (and being what I think I can categorically call being a COMPLETE SHIT to Leadbelly). Even the record collectors are mostly white and middle class, fetishising these musicians in the same way that white middle class kids would fetishise gangster rap (because of a perverse sense that they were somehow being “dangerous”)
It’s not a perfect book, but it clearly doesn’t set out to be that - what Hamilton wants to do is annoy people long enough for them to think about their preconceptions properly and question what’s attracting them to the country blues. Even the fascination with “the high lonesome sound” of white folk musicians such as Roscoe Holcomb has more than a smidgeon of class snobbery about it. Hamilton wisely decides that her’s is not the book to replace these narratives with new ones, but hopefully everyone who reads it will do some significant inner reflection to question those narratives themselves
July 15, 2025
A lovely, generous, and lyrical exploration of the hopes/dreams/fantasies of the first generations of white record hounds of Black music, whether New Orleans jazz or what they decided to call country blues, from Howard Odum in the 1920s through John and then Alan Lomax (John was a lot worse than I knew) and through James McKune, whom I'd never heard of but who was instrumental in the final separation and reification of that "genre" as true, honest, unrefined, real--as she notes figures as central as Lawrence Levine, Greil Marcus, and Robert Palmer all listened to, and in best Marcus fashion, were fundamentally altered by what they heard on McKune's circle's Original Jazz Library releases. It's more a social/literary history of what these people (not all, though most, of them male) sought, how they sought it (a fascinating sub-thread is the varying degrees to which they felt technological reproduction got them closer or farther from the "real essence" of the music), how they related to one another, and even where and why these records were available. I particularly enjoyed that embodied aspect of collecting--made me think about the notion of a Nuggets social history.
There's a WHOLLLLE lot of fantasizing here, all the way from Odum probably collating the earthy, folkloric bluesman he profiled out of impressions and encounters to Lomax deciding that Leadbelly could play only the music HE found unspoiled and primitive, not any of that pop stuff or folk songs that Leadbelly wanted to use to diversify his repertoire and make himself some money. (Apparently they spent only two weeks in NYC, where Leadbelly was "spoiling" his pristine music by consorting with other Black people and having actual fun, whereupon Lomax spirited him off to Connecticut. And that's not to mention how Lomax, a Texan, kept visiting horrific prisons to collect inmates' songs and saying, nope, nothing to see here.) And then we have a lot of Popular-Front romanticism wherein this is a music of class struggle, postwar rejection/repudiation of which for reasons good and bad produced the modern cult of the country bluesman that got us where we are today. (Reminds me of Elijah Wald's Robert Johnson book, which came out before this one, which I don't think is mentioned in the notes.)
The tone is gentler than you might expect, given how much of this involves, er, highly problematic white fantasies of a simpler, earthier, more sexual, preliterate Black culture whose value accrues exactly and only from its distance from modernity and its essential timelessness: revivalists, "at their most positive...enriched understanding and broadened white horizons. At their worst, they fed on a faintly colonialist romance with Black suffering, an eroticization of African American despair."
There's a WHOLLLLE lot of fantasizing here, all the way from Odum probably collating the earthy, folkloric bluesman he profiled out of impressions and encounters to Lomax deciding that Leadbelly could play only the music HE found unspoiled and primitive, not any of that pop stuff or folk songs that Leadbelly wanted to use to diversify his repertoire and make himself some money. (Apparently they spent only two weeks in NYC, where Leadbelly was "spoiling" his pristine music by consorting with other Black people and having actual fun, whereupon Lomax spirited him off to Connecticut. And that's not to mention how Lomax, a Texan, kept visiting horrific prisons to collect inmates' songs and saying, nope, nothing to see here.) And then we have a lot of Popular-Front romanticism wherein this is a music of class struggle, postwar rejection/repudiation of which for reasons good and bad produced the modern cult of the country bluesman that got us where we are today. (Reminds me of Elijah Wald's Robert Johnson book, which came out before this one, which I don't think is mentioned in the notes.)
The tone is gentler than you might expect, given how much of this involves, er, highly problematic white fantasies of a simpler, earthier, more sexual, preliterate Black culture whose value accrues exactly and only from its distance from modernity and its essential timelessness: revivalists, "at their most positive...enriched understanding and broadened white horizons. At their worst, they fed on a faintly colonialist romance with Black suffering, an eroticization of African American despair."
August 21, 2023
The author adds to the historical re-analysis of blues history, characterizing it as part fiction, created by a number of interested parties.
Marybeth Hamilton centers her work around the collectors, folklorists, music aficionados/analyzers who influenced the storylines, geographical emphasis, stereotypes, and marketing of the blues in the first half of the20th Century.
While she does "create" some anecdotes on pieced-together sources, this is another interesting addition to looking at blues" history, in addition to Chris Thomas King's "The Blues," Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta," Barry Lee Pearson & Jim McCulloch's "Robert Johnson Lost and Found," and Tony Russell's "Blacks Whites and the Blues," other books revising the same history.
Marybeth Hamilton centers her work around the collectors, folklorists, music aficionados/analyzers who influenced the storylines, geographical emphasis, stereotypes, and marketing of the blues in the first half of the20th Century.
While she does "create" some anecdotes on pieced-together sources, this is another interesting addition to looking at blues" history, in addition to Chris Thomas King's "The Blues," Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta," Barry Lee Pearson & Jim McCulloch's "Robert Johnson Lost and Found," and Tony Russell's "Blacks Whites and the Blues," other books revising the same history.
February 2, 2017
An astonishing book on the white fetish for authentic blues and sound of black suffering. This book does a fantastic job of showing how white music fans, drawn to the "otherness" of black music, started hammering out a narrative and seeking out rare and "pure" examples, eventually coveting records that were both exceedingly rare and recorded in poor conditions. This is an essential book about blues fandom, though if you are looking for a history of performers such as Son House and Charlie Patton, you'll have to look elsewhere.
June 18, 2020
Hamilton challenges conventional perceptions of the blues by reconstructing the origins of the Delta blues to that the prevailing story is largely a myth. The concept of Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, a culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music. Well-researched and provocative.
April 8, 2022
Much better than anticipated. Offers challenges to more popular history and as a result, is thought-provoking. Good stuff, well written and researched. Really came on strong in last two chapters
June 23, 2013
The title is somewhat misleading--it's not a book that attempts to uncover the origins and genealogy of the blues, it contains portraits of some of the people who went out in search of the blues back in the 20th century.
It was a real mixed bag of a book--i thought some parts were interesting and worthy, disliked some sections, and don't think the book came close to accomplishing what it sets out to do. The scope of it's ambitions would require a much larger volume or volumes, imo. Still, the interesting sections were definitely interesting.
Hamilton focusses on five people/groups who tried to collect recorded examples of the blues. Each of the five people/groups has a section devoted to them and the book is arranged chronologically, the earliest collector is first, etc. One of the interesting things about the book is how the evolution of recording technology changed both how the collectors approached their searches, but also how that evolution changed the very music that they were attempting to capture. The only one i was familiar with, and then only slightly, was john and allen lomax.
Each of the portraits is interesting, but especially the last three--the lomax saga, the three guys who wrote Jazzmen, and James McKune. Besides the lomaxs, i guess I had heard a bit about the book the Jazzmen and the whole Bunk Johnson fiasco, but I really didn't know much about these folks.
One of the things that Hamilton does, though is fabricate these imaginary scenes about these people. As I was reading these parts, I assumed that these sections were based on letters, interviews or something, but it wasn't until I went through the notes that I learned that she was basically making up these scenes. I really did not like that.
While the portraits had interesting info, one of the ways that the book did not meet its ambition had to do with why did hamilton just focus on these particular people. All of these collectors were white--why does hamilton not cover John Wesley Work, an african american, and his father? Why not a broader overview of who exactly was going out and collecting this music at this time? How many other scholars were doing this at this time? What about the people working for the record companies?
I think the questions about a search for musical authenticity are interesting and are not confined to the mythology of the blues--its a more fundamental yearning the plays out in all sorts of ways, imo. Still, in order to really get at the mythology of the blues, one would need a much larger book--a book that would have to include actual musical geneology as well as cultural anthropology, the history of record sales, and who knows what else.
This book attempts to cover similar territory to Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta, but Wald's book is much better. If you have a specific interest in this topic, though, in search of the blues is worth checking out, but it's not a great book.
It was a real mixed bag of a book--i thought some parts were interesting and worthy, disliked some sections, and don't think the book came close to accomplishing what it sets out to do. The scope of it's ambitions would require a much larger volume or volumes, imo. Still, the interesting sections were definitely interesting.
Hamilton focusses on five people/groups who tried to collect recorded examples of the blues. Each of the five people/groups has a section devoted to them and the book is arranged chronologically, the earliest collector is first, etc. One of the interesting things about the book is how the evolution of recording technology changed both how the collectors approached their searches, but also how that evolution changed the very music that they were attempting to capture. The only one i was familiar with, and then only slightly, was john and allen lomax.
Each of the portraits is interesting, but especially the last three--the lomax saga, the three guys who wrote Jazzmen, and James McKune. Besides the lomaxs, i guess I had heard a bit about the book the Jazzmen and the whole Bunk Johnson fiasco, but I really didn't know much about these folks.
One of the things that Hamilton does, though is fabricate these imaginary scenes about these people. As I was reading these parts, I assumed that these sections were based on letters, interviews or something, but it wasn't until I went through the notes that I learned that she was basically making up these scenes. I really did not like that.
While the portraits had interesting info, one of the ways that the book did not meet its ambition had to do with why did hamilton just focus on these particular people. All of these collectors were white--why does hamilton not cover John Wesley Work, an african american, and his father? Why not a broader overview of who exactly was going out and collecting this music at this time? How many other scholars were doing this at this time? What about the people working for the record companies?
I think the questions about a search for musical authenticity are interesting and are not confined to the mythology of the blues--its a more fundamental yearning the plays out in all sorts of ways, imo. Still, in order to really get at the mythology of the blues, one would need a much larger book--a book that would have to include actual musical geneology as well as cultural anthropology, the history of record sales, and who knows what else.
This book attempts to cover similar territory to Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta, but Wald's book is much better. If you have a specific interest in this topic, though, in search of the blues is worth checking out, but it's not a great book.
November 8, 2024
Eschews the traditional historical view of the origin of the blues by offering an modernist alternative, and argues that the delta blues was a concept invented by whites in an attempt to own, authenticate and purify the notion of the lonesome, poor black blues singer - the white-man thus becomes the expert and connoisseur. Hamilton presents an enthralling argument to challenge the universally held historical perceptions of the blues man, the origin of the blues and the racial stereotyping that underpinned its 'discovery' and subsequent success.
An excellent companion piece to Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta(not that Robert Palmer) and Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell -In Search of the Blues discards with the usual historical cliches and platitudes to instead highlight the overwhelming systematic racism that informed the views and approaches of the (predominantly white) scholars, historians and folklorists who came to document and then define the music they heard and recorded in the deep south of America, during the early part of the 20th Century. It has been said that so much of the 20th century was a mistake, we didn't do it properly and arsed up modernity by allowing for fascism and materialism - but the blues remained one of the truly real expressions of humanity, and all in the face of appalling treatment and miserable futures.
An excellent companion piece to Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta(not that Robert Palmer) and Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell -In Search of the Blues discards with the usual historical cliches and platitudes to instead highlight the overwhelming systematic racism that informed the views and approaches of the (predominantly white) scholars, historians and folklorists who came to document and then define the music they heard and recorded in the deep south of America, during the early part of the 20th Century. It has been said that so much of the 20th century was a mistake, we didn't do it properly and arsed up modernity by allowing for fascism and materialism - but the blues remained one of the truly real expressions of humanity, and all in the face of appalling treatment and miserable futures.
February 28, 2008
The negative review in the NY Times Book Review section in February 2008 misrepresents in some ways the arguments made in this book and does not seem to understand that much of what she writes is not so much inaccurate as incomplete and derivative. Hamilton's work is very much derivative of other scholarship, such as Benjamin Filene's 2000 book Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music, and David Grazian's 2003 Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs. These and other books are more sophisticated theoretically and historically than Hamilton's work and their work is insufficiently cited in her book. These books document in detail the ways in which white music collectors, folklorists, and the listening public constructed representations of black music in general and blues in particular, congruent with problematic racial assumptions. This is the gist of Hamilton's book but she goes about the task with very narrow blinders. She focuses on only a few white scholars and collectors and exhibits a very narrow and often deficient understanding of their work and perspectives. Her critical voice is blunted by her slight engagement with other important recent scholarly work and by a superficial engagement with the writings and work of the authors/collectors she surveys. And the NY Times reviewer is entirely right in one respect: there is virtually no engagement whatsoever here with the music itself. How can the reader assess, for example, the difference between the collector McKune and the folklorist Samuel Charters (which is given much attention in the final chapter) without some reflection on the differences or similarities in the music of the bluesmen they favored. A very disappointing book.
Read
August 1, 2019Pithy look at blues (and early jazz) focusing not so much on the mostly black musicians who created the music, but on the primarily white writers and collectors who "created" it as a concept. Hamilton points out, for instance, that the idea of "Delta blues" was invented by Northern whites, while black Mississippi Delta residents preferred Louis Jordan to Robert Johnson and considered themselves more "modern" than denizens of the state's "hill country." The life of James McKune, the eccentric collector featured in one chapter of the book, makes for fascinating reading. This provocative work offers plenty of insights for jazz and blues fans to ponder, while providing useful historical information.
September 21, 2011
This book has a lot of information about early blues artists and folklore, all told from the perspective that the Delta blues are an invention of white promoters (of varied and sometimes insidious intent). The book includes vignettes on the rise and eventual commodification of artists like Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Leadbelly, and focuses on the role of white ethnographers, promoters like the Lomaxes, and taste makers in promoting and exploiting the blues and the larger black experience in America.
June 30, 2013
Fascinating history, especially of the Lomaxes and how they "discovered" some major blues artists, and the underlying racial assumptions they made. I'm still not sure exactly where the author thinks the blues originated. I can believe that there's more myth than history in the Delta crossroads thing. But the blues as know it today comes from Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and other Chicago artists, almost all of whom did come to Chicago from the Delta.
August 9, 2008
Hamilton takes a novel approach to the study of the blues, focusing not on the musicians but the white academics who tried to make a case for the music and expose it to a wider audience. In the end, she's only partially successful--its a bit tough to tell exactly what point she's trying to make, although there are some nice stories interspersed along the way.
November 11, 2008
An intersting perspective to approach a topic that has been covered often: the people who collected these recordings and what their motivations were. It is not another profile of the musicians themselves. Some of these collectors are quite eccentric, and if the author's hypothesis is to be believed, helped to shape who would become the legends of the early blues.
January 17, 2013
Throws a very different light on the story of the blues. Having come to the music quite late and being generally ignorant of the social history, I found it fascinating. I gather it's not been universally well-received; nevertheless the view of history and much of the information was new to me. And I found it very readable.
March 30, 2008
Not as fascinating and insightful as Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta, but along similar lines, and goes into more depth on collectors of 78 rpm records and how they influenced the construction of what we now call the blues. Well worth reading for anyone who enjoys this music . . .
Want to read
November 2, 2008Adam P. had me read Jeremiah Sullivan's "Unknown Bards" in this month's Harper's. Great article about some of my favorite music- Geechie Wiley's "Last Kind Word Blues", Revenant Records, John Fahey, etc...He talks alot about this Hamilton book. Enough so to peak my interest.
February 23, 2009
The New York Times blasted it; clearly they're just not as smart as I am...
April 30, 2011
This book asserts that the myth of the lone bluesman was a romanticization of black music created by white people. Interesting hypothesis. Now I need to read "Blues People" by Amiri Baraka.
Want to read
January 23, 2013From "Pulphead"
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