Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression

by Rich Remsberg, Nicholas Dawidoff (Foreword), Henry Sapoznik (Afterword)

Showcasing American music and music making during the Great Depression, Hard Luck Blues presents more than two hundred photographs created by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration photography program. With an appreciation for the amateur and the local, FSA photographers depicted a range of musicians sharing the regular music of everyday life, from informal songs in migrant work camps, farmers' homes, barn dances, and on street corners to organized performances at church revivals, dance halls, and community festivals. Captured across the nation from the northeast to the southwest, the images document the last generation of musicians who learned to play without the influence of recorded sound, as well as some of the pioneers of Chicago's R & B scene and the first years of amplified instruments. The best visual representation of American roots music performance during the Depression era, Hard Luck Blues features photographs by Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, and others. Photographer and image researcher Rich Remsberg breathes life into the images by providing contextual details about the persons and events captured, in some cases drawing on interviews with the photographers' subjects. Also included are a foreword by author Nicholas Dawidoff and an afterword by music historian Henry Sapoznik. Published in association with the Library of Congress.

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2010

Reviews

[Stanley Booth]

The University of Illinois Press has been publishing some top-drawer books in recent years. There's a Jeffrey Myers biography of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (one of the first women with whom I feel deeply in love, and with whom, coincidentally, the last woman with whom I expect to become utterly smitten shares a birthday). While she's writing a book-length series of poems called RAIN IN OUR DOOR: DUETS WITH ROBERT JOHNSON, liked a book titled with his name affixed to “Lost and Found” as much as she did Elijah Wald’s ESCAPING THE DELTA: ROBERT JOHNSON AND THE INVENTION OF THE BLUES, by which neither of us can see much point in tomes devoted to “debunking,” she says that the former provided further evidence for something she believes: strychnine, whether taken neat or mixed with a drink, as was apparently the case with her own current muse, but it took three days for Johnson to die, and she agrees with the authors that it was probably pneumonia that dropped Johnson to all fours and caused him to bark like a dog, not any sort of bodily possession of the devil; and, given the absence of medical attention or antibiotics, that respiratory failure and the high fevers that pneumonia can bring with it that did him in.

Other titles from Illinois: HARD LUCK BLUES, by Rich Remsberg; and while we have had various occasions on which to disagree, I concurred wholly with Marc Smirnoff’s praise of this one:

"Released for Christmas 2009 by the acclaimed and often discerning Knopf publishing house, WHO SHOT ROCK & ROLL: A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY, 1955-PRESENT is a flagrant disappointment. Want pictures you've already seen? Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire? The Who snoozing under a Union Jack? Johnny Cash giving us the finger? The Beatles in generic descent from an airplane? Wanna see, again, the covers of world-famous albums by Bob Dylan (two), Led Zeppelin (two), Carole King, U2?

"Meanwhile, a newly released small-press collection called HARD LUCK BLUES: ROOTS MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION ...is everything ROCK & ROLL is not: surprising, nuanced, memorable, universal. dooms itself by a vapid attraction to imagery of the rich and the famous. If you didn't know who John Lennon was, you'd be baffled as to why you are being made to consider the repetition of too many snapshot-like poses of this dude in the "New York City" tee.

"In contrast, HARD LUCK BLUES consists almost entirely of moments involving the anonymous and the forgotten. Meaning, these HARD LUCK photos have to appeal to something beyond any easy familiarity we may have with the subjects; to compel us inward, these photos must, in fact, strike universal chords. Which they do, with both sweet and bittersweet resonance."

Thank you, Mr. Smirnoff. I must admit I couldn't have put the book's essence of the book into better words myself.

[Diann Blakely]

Check out the OXFORD AMERICAN site for more, including a small treasury of photographs from HARD LUCK BLUES: IMAGES OF THE FORGOTTEN

"Released for Christmas 2009 by the acclaimed and often discerning Knopf publishing house, WHO SHOT ROCK & ROLL: A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY, 1955-PRESENT, is a flagrant disappointment. Want pictures you've already seen? Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar on fire? The Who snoozing under a Union Jack? Johnny Cash giving us the finger? The Beatles in generic descent from an airplane? Wanna see, again, the covers of world-famous albums by Bob Dylan (two), Led Zeppelin (two), Carole King, U2?

Meanwhile, a newly released small-press collection called HARD LUCK BLUES: ROOTS MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION by Rich Remsberg ($34.95; University of Illinois Press) is everything WHO SHOT ROCK & ROLL is not: surprising, nuanced, memorable, universal. ROCK & ROLL dooms itself by a vapid attraction to imagery of the rich and the famous. If you didn't know who John Lennon was, you'd be baffled as to why you are being made to consider the repetition of too many snapshot-like poses of this dude in the "New York City" tee.

In contrast, HARD LUCK BLUES consists almost entirely of moments involving the anonymous and the forgotten. Meaning, these HARD LUCK photos have to appeal to something beyond any easy familiarity we may have with the subjects; to compel us inward, these photos must, in fact, strike universal chords. Which they do, with both sweet and bittersweet resonance. —Marc Smirnoff

Oxford American - The Southern Magazine of Good Writing
www.oxfordamerican.org

[Tom Mueller]

See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st... for a great review of this work.