Delta Blues

The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music

by Ted Gioia

It has been 70 years since Robert Johnsons death and 25 since Muddy Waterss. It has been 16 years since the founding of the House of Blues nightclub chain and eight years since the burning of Juniors Place, in Chulahoma, Miss., one of the last of the great Delta juke joints. We are in the post-history of the blues, and at this point we might as well set some requirements, guards against benign nonsense, for new books on all blues, but especially Delta blues.

Here are some: One, no overwriting and no clichs. Two, a thorough awareness of the notion that blues fetishism, by collectors, producers and writers, has been equally damaging and helpful. Three, the newest discographical and biographical information, as much as possible. (In some cases, its all we have to rely on a man or a woman was in such a room at such a time.) Four, no pious implications that the blues always represents righteousness, truth and tradition. These were performers; grant them their artifice. (Also, as little positive use of the word simple as possible. Same for negative use. Neutral use is O.K.) Five, a sure fix on the best musicians as both extraordinary artists and ordinary subjects of history.

After that, do what you want.

On the second page of the preface to Delta Blues, his new survey, Ted Gioia explains his middle-aged transition to a deeper level of interest in the blues. My attraction to traditional blues, he writes, was no doubt fueled by my growing dissatisfaction with the overpowering commercialization and commoditization I encountered elsewhere in the music world. Traditional blues stubborn allegiance to its own guiding lights, its resistance to corporate interference, its blissful ignorance of music videos and trendy radio formats, its affirmation of its own inexpressibly rich heritage. . . .

No!

But a few pages later, the book starts to be tremendously useful. Gioia, the author of three books on jazz and two books on music as social function (Work Songs and Healing Songs), keeps jumping between several different levels. He describes the Delta blues as a critic, writing from hard listening. He traces its history through real-life issues migration, labor, audiences, record sales, nightclubs pausing every so often to delineate how different the story of this music is, in which someone who was unknown in his own time, like Johnson, can be the king of it.

And he attempts to triangulate a kind of leveled-out truth about the blues, weighing dozens of accounts from both the artists and their associates. In this book you become as familiar with researchers, historians, producers and biographers like Alan Lomax, Stephen Calt, Mack McCormick, H. C. Speir and Gayle Wardlow as you do with Son House, Tommy Johnson, Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf.