BLUES PHILOSOPHY FOR EVERYONE

2014

This thesis explores the unique and pivotal life of Son House, a Mississippi bluesman from Lyon, Mississippi, who did much to change the identity and perpetuate the existence of blues music and culture. Furthermore, House was influential in shaping blues music as a medium for historical research, as they revealed a strikingly honest perception of the tumultuous and evil circumstances for African Americans in the South during the early twentieth century. Research on Son House was a unique experience, in that it called not only for academic exploration, but also human exploration. When researching the importance of blues music in the South, especially in Mississippi, one must dive into the genre to better understand the intricate characters and atmosphere that shaped them. This meant visiting the Delta, talking to peers and colleagues who share enthusiasm for the blues, and broadening the scope of academic research to include the very human aspects of blues culture which are vital to ...

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2009

Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2007

Until recently, the origins of the blues have remained unquestioned. Although they have been described by myriad authors in diverse disciplines, most have agreed on some basic facts: blues is a folk music; African-American; noncommercial; a product of segregation and plantation society, and perhaps even of an ancient oral tradition. As the writer Amiri Baraka observed, blues "[reaches] back into the tales and ballads of a developing people and even further back into other languages, pre-American." William Ferris, a Southern folklorist, similarly described the blues as having "its roots in the sacred hymns and secular work chants of slavery" which were themselves derived from "a musical tradition common to both Africa and the American South"; while Samuel Charters, whose Country Blues did so much to spark the music's revival in the 1960s, found that "the blues have been a part of the music of the Negro in America for over 150 years." Other commentators, while perhaps less expansive, have been no less certain about the traditional nature of the blues. Jeff Todd Titon, perhaps the finest analyst of the music's formal elements, saw the blues as an expression of "down home," which he described as a feeling for place rather than a specific locale or time. Titon suggested that while the blues as a distinct musical genre may have emerged in the decades after the Civil War, it developed out of traditional slave songs and spirituals. Ferris agreed that the blues form seems to have emerged in the immediate postwar period, but argued (with historians Lawrence Levine and William Barlow) that while it "appeared" shortly after slavery "as black musicians. .. celebrated their new found freedom," it remained rural and traditional in nature. For all of these authors, one thing was certain: by the turn of the century, "the blues was a familiar music in the rural south." 1 The consensus is in some ways odd because there is little overall agreement on what the blues really is. For some, the blues constitutes a

Preachin' the Blues: The Life & Times of Son House, 2011

Preachin' the Blues is a biography of the Mississippi blues musician Son House. It traces his improbable rise from his obscure beginnings in the Mississippi Delta to his recordings and tours in America, Canada and Europe. It sets his career in the context of the origins of the blues and African American history with special attention to his 'rediscovery' in the context of various social currents of the Sixties. It also describes his friendships with peers like Robert Johnson, Charley Patton and Willie Brown.

American Music

Blues songs from the folk tradition are often characterized as lacking a coherent narrative structure. 1 David Evans has analyzed in detail the construction of folk blues out of local tradition, emphasizing the oftenarbitrary character of the relation between stanzas. Folk-blues singers construct their songs in the moment, from a stock of traditional lyrics, melodies, and guitar parts, often building from what Evans terms a "blues core" to produce a song. 2 This compositional method gives rise to lyrics that seem disjointed or only loosely connected. Contrast and association often serve as logical structures or techniques that roughly organize what appear on the surface to be almost random sets of stanzas. 3 Because of the deterministic relationship between the folk tradition and the actual music produced, what constitutes a song in the folk blues differs from more stable conceptions in other musical traditions. Not only do we need to adapt our notion of creativity in the normal sense of originality or self-expression in order to allow for it to be reshaped by the relationship to the tradition, but we need to shift our conception of what constitutes a song as well. In a sense, each individual performance must be understood as a song because each performance realizes, in a concrete form, one possible combination of traditional elements from among the infinite possibilities available to the singer. Within each song-each iteration of elements of the tradition-a particular series of stanzas are selected and combined to create the performance. 4 This leads to a relatively unstable conception of a song that tends to focus on

Popular Music, 2010

Southern Cultures, 2013

It is unlikely that [the blues] will survive through the imitations of the young white college copyists, the 'urban blues singers' whose relation to the blues is that of the 'Trad' jazz band to the music of New Orleans: sterile and derivative. The bleak prospect is that the blues probably has no real future; that folk music that it is, it served its purpose and flourished whilst it had meaning in the Negro community. At the end of the century it may well be seen as an important cultural phenomenon -and someone will commence a systematic study of it, too late.

has been lauded as one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the blues. In his book, Mystery Train: Images of America in Blues Music (1975), he creates a fantasy of the origins of this music and the players themselves, not seeming to fully understand the scope or significance of his subject. In his 2013 book he argues that we "cannot know. . .the identities of most of the authors"-and that this anonymity is to be valued. Josh Garrett-Davis points out that he "leaps from this fact to the conclusions that certain songs give voice to a historically rooted yet timeless 'bedrock' of America, that the songs are "transcendent" (5). The lack of knowledge about individual authors leads Marcus to argue that "we are free to tell any story we like" regarding blues. The myth he has created around the blues changed the way we perceive this music and its restorative power. I would argue that in his assessment of the blues, he omits a time, a place, and a people. As we know them, the blues they created can transcend time to speak to us today. Now, more than ever, we need to listen. In 1959, Richard Wright declared that "The American environment which produced the blues is still with us.. .[and]still falling upon us" (Blues Fell This Morning xvii). His words ring as true in 2018 as they did in 1959-blues is "still falling upon us." As I read the words of Richard Wright, I think about what they mean today. I wonder what Americans have learned in the nearly 60 years since he

2013