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Bailey's Bundles
Delta Blues & the Birth (and Death) of the Cool: Two definitive Ted Gioia Histories
C. Michael Bailey
...wants to know if Gene Harris is playing "Summertime" in Heaven...Does the music world need one more history of Delta blues music? Does a survey of a spongy concept like "cool" have any relevance in a post-9/11 world? Considering Robert Palmer authored a definitive narrative on depression-era Mississippi Delta music in Deep Blues (Viking, 1981) almost 30 years ago, and that Martin Williams and David Rosenthal, among many others, have already tried, with anemic success, to define other amorphous musical concepts like "Swing" and "Bad," do we really need to suffer more writing in this vein?
Can anything new be revealed, either about the music or the way we hear it, by recapitulation? Well, yes when the projects are in the hands of a crack historian like Ted Gioia. Gioia's previous works: The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (Oxford University Press, 1990), West Coast Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1992), The History of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1997), Work Songs (Duke University Press, 2006) and Healing Songs (Duke University Press, 2006) show a sharp musico-centric focus governed by a historian's discipline. With this bibliography, Gioia proves the premise of The Birth (and Death) of the Cool with a sleek historicism informed by warm empathy: in the light of day, everything looks better.
Delta Blues
Ted Gioia
Hardcover; 448 pages
ISBN: 0393062589
WW Norton
2008
Ted Gioia stands on the shoulders of giants; giants he credits in his expansive and excellent historical survey Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. These predecessors include Paul Oliver, Samuel Charters, Alan Lomax, Dick Waterman, Dean Gayle Wardlow, Jim O'Neal, Robert Palmer, Nick Perls, Mack McCormick, Steve LaVere, Peter Guralnick and Elijah Wald. It is to both his good fortune and ours that Gioia came along to produce this history. Trained rigorously at Stanford University, he brings a discriminating eye to topics long shrouded in mystery, romanticism and myth.
Robert Palmer's Deep Blues is a superb narrative on the history of the delta blues. It is to blues music what Shelby Foote's trilogy was to the American Civil War: a brilliantly presented information vehicle to light the fire of interest in its readers. But it lacks both the expanse and analyses of later expositions on the subject. In steps Gioia, like Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra two hundred years after Beethoven, to present there respective topics properly for the first time.
Gioia provides major focus on an intelligently selected handful of artists over eleven well-crafted chapters: Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King. Gioia presents these artists in roughly chronological order. An additional subtext of relationships also exists among these artists. For the purposes of this discussion, and regarding their respective influences and those influenced by them, these artists can be grouped into underlying descriptive categories: "The Originators" (Patton, House), "Children of the Phonograph" (Johnson, King), "The Migrant Boogie" (Waters, Hooker), and "Like No Others" (James, Wolf).
When presenting the principles, Gioia includes brief discussions of secondary players. Retrospectively, Gioia discusses both Blind Lemon Jefferson and W.C. Handy when introducing Charlie Patton and Son House as the genesis of recorded Delta blues. Prospectively from these "Originators," the author discusses Tommy Johnson, whose brief career touches all ahead, from Robert Johnson to Howlin' Wolf. Also discussed is Ishmon Bracey and the elusive "Poor" Willie Brown.
McKinley Morganfield (aka Muddy Waters) and John Lee Hooker are cast as the migrants from the delta whose entire careers were well documented and both of whom electrified the blues in northern metropolitan areas (Chicago and Detroit). Where Waters' blues became more sophisticated, Hooker's remained cast in the primordial vernacular of the single-chord delta drone. Blues scholarship is introduced with Alan Lomax and his famous field recordings made as the Assistant in Charge of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress between 1937 and 1942. Lomax recorded House, Waters and James as part of his Library of Congress Recordings.
Robert Johnson receives a much needed critical and historical updating in the chapter "Hell Hound on My Trail." Gioia casts Johnson as the first blues musician to move from the cultural oddity to commercial capital. He notes that while Johnson may have seen Son House perform, the singer was far more influenced by the Victrola, the records of Skip James in particular. A careful analysis of Johnson's songs readily reveals their origins in earlier recorded blues artists.
