Customer Reviews

Blues and the Poetic Spirit (Roots of Jazz)

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Recently, while working on editing a soon to be published Autonomedia anthology under the title "Surrealist Subversion," I had the opportunity to revisit Paul Garon's classic American surrealist volume, "Blues and the Poetic Spirit," now in a second (1996) edition thanks to City Lights Publishers. This latest edition includes a new Introduction by Garon updating and expanding upon his original 1975 blues treatise and an always insightful Afterward by fellow surrealist Franklin Rosemont. As Rosemont puts it in the course of his discussion of the inherently subversive core of the blues, "Notwithstanding the whimpering objections of a few tired skeptics, this revolt cannot be 'assimilated' into the abject mainstream of American bourgeois/Christian culture except by way of dilution and/or outright falsification. The 'dark truth' of Afro American music remains unquestionably 'oppositional'." Lately, a leader in the ever growing call and response chorus of praise for the book has been African American cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelley, author of "Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional" (Beacon Press), who calls the Garon work, "absolutely the best book on blues music." And in her new volume, "Blues Legacies and Black Feminism" (Pantheon), noted black scholar and activist Angela Davis singles out Garon's tome for favorable mention while freely dissing the bulk of the blues literary canon. These two plaudits must be particularly gratifying to Garon since he has always insisted that the blues must be discussed first and foremost as a black poetry of resistance to racist oppression and Eurocentric notions of white supremacy. As Garon says in his book, "Poetry, kindled by desire, is the light that can dispel the pallor of bourgeois civilization. It does this through its use of 'images', 'convulsive' images, images of the fantastic and the marvelous, images of 'desire'." In exploring the fertile crossroads between art and the politics of desire that has shaped the popular cultural form known as the blues, no other book even comes close.

Essential reading. One of the top five blues books, unique in the field. This is easily the best analysis of blues lyrics, treating black music as black power (beware pale imitations). To say it lacks feeling is to miss the point by a solid mile.

This is an interesting book: a psycho-poetic analysis of the Blues from a Surrealist perspective. The title lured me in, I admit (as did the "City Lights" logo by the bar code). I began reading and was at first quite pleased with my find. The author's main sources are Freud, Artaud, and Peetie Wheatstraw (in no particular order), and he writes with an earnest love for the Blues and the absurd poetic humor in so many Blues lyrics. I would, indeed, call him a blues purist. So much of a purist, in fact, that he becomes a hater. He speaks of "white blues" with disdain (and always in quotations), can't stand "soul" music (also always in quotations), and seems to think that white enthusiasts of the Blues are just as bad as the white musicians who rip it off. His trash-talking of the white man in relation to Blues music is extreme and uncomfortable enough that I'm pretty sure he must be a white guy.

If you skip the chapter "Whites versus Blacks", you ought to be able to skirt most of the uncomfortable race talk and get to the actual meat of the book, which is the phycho-poetic analysis of the Blues from a Surrealist perspective. This part is actually pretty interesting, and fun to read. Garon walks the reader through a number of common psychological themes, gives plenty of brilliant quotes from old Blues songs (and, thankfully, let's them mostly speak for themselves - some signifyin' is best left unexplained), and ties it all up with the Surrealist idea of the poet as a culture-maker/culture-breaker/rebel/trickster type. Overall an enjoyable read, even if its handling of race issues is a little meh...

This book failed to achieve the answers I was looking for. It also failed to conjure up any new questions. The book is unemotional, and steril in explaining, exploring, and examining the "...subconscious power of the blues...and illuminating the blues' deepest creative sources and exploring its far reaching influence and appeal" (from the back cover). The book barely scratched the surface of all the issues it presented such as "eros, aggression travel, night, animals" and other topics. Every bluesman in the world will tell you "blues is a feeling", and this book lacks it. There are many references to Peetie Wheatstraw and his lyrics as well as from others, and pictures through out the book. I mistakenly judged this book by its cover and paid the price. I suggest reading 1) The world Don't Owe Me Nothing the life and times of Honeyboy Edwards, 2) I say me for a parable autobiography of Mance Lipscomb,3) The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax, 4)Blues and Evil by Jon Michael Spencer. These are all excellent.