Land Where the Blues Began, The [Hardcover]

Alan Lomax (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 1993

Lomax, who has done more than anyone else to make black music of the South known as a glorious expression of American art, summs up sixty years of "discovering the African American musical heritage in this journey through the Mississippi Delta.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Co-founder--with folklorist father John A. Lomax--of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress, Alan Lomax traveled the South "from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia" in search of the wellspring of American blues. Previously the author of Mister Jelly Roll, Lomax stalks the ghosts of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy and Charlie Patton, among many other blues pioneers. This winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction is more than just another profile of a musical genre. It's an intimate diary of a purely American art form born of a powerful mix of despair and hope.

From Publishers Weekly

Working for the Library of Congress and other cultural institutions, legendary roots-music connoisseur Lomax ( Mister Jelly Roll ) visited the Mississippi Delta with his father, folklorist John Lomax, and black folklorist Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s; with African American sociologists from Fiske University in the 1940s; and with a PBS film crew in the 1980s, researching the history of the blues in America. Addressing this wonderfully rich vein of scarcely acknowledged Americana, Lomax has written a marvelous appreciation of a region, its people and their music. Burdened early with now long-forgotten technology (500-pound recording machines, etc.) and encountering pronounced racial biases and cultural suspicions about black and white people mixing socially and otherwise, Lomax sought out those in the Delta who knew Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton and others acquainted with musicians once less well known, such as Doc Reese, young McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), Dave Edwards, Eugene Powell and Sam Chatmon. Traveling across the South "from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia," Lomax discovers the plantations, levee camps, prisons and railroad yards where the men and women of the blues came from and the music was born. In a memoir that will take its place as an American classic, Lomax records not just his recollections but the voices of hard-working, frequently hard-drinking, spiritual people that otherwise might have been lost to readers.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 539 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (May 18, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679404244
• ISBN-13: 978-0679404248
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #437,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book, Savor it, Treasure it, June 14, 2001

By 

First Things First "captainreflection" (Burbank, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Land Where Blues Began (Paperback)

The Land Where the Blues Began is one of the finest books on any subject I've ever read in my life. Every magical benefit of reading came poring forth from its pages, including deep and fascinating discovery, chills, outrage, tears, joy, laughter, amazement and finally, understanding and awe. Alan Lomax embarked on a personal odyssey to the Mississippi Delta serving up one of the great vicarious thrill rides any reader with a hankering to learn where rock and roll, and rhythm and blues came from. Armed with primitive recording equipment and a lifetime's experience researching the folk and popular music of the world (following in his father's distinguished footsteps in this endeavor), Lomax plunges us directly into the redneck towns and the plantations, where the Blues emerged from a fascinating combination of African musical roots, Folk...Popular...and Church Music, and the hollers which slaves, prisoners, levee workers, rail gangs, mule drivers, sharecroppers and roustabouts would sing out to express their rage, pain, heartsickness, loneliness, hopelessness and frustrations. Finding giants of the blues in dilapidated shacks in the middle of nowhere, Lomax coaxed many into performing for his acetate machines. Also haunting the bars, with names such as the Dipsy Doodle, in the black sectors of heavily segregated towns, Lomax (who is white) repeatedly puts his personal safety in jeopardy as he defies the redneck deputies' orders and ends up swigging homemade whiskey and eating fresh barbecue while recording legendary performances. If all this weren't enough, the book weaves the evolution of the Blues in with poignant memoirs of impoverished childhoods, family life, prison life, farm labor, Jim Crow, unthinkable mistreatment, murder, and devastation. Fashioning musical instruments out of pieces of wire and wooden boxes, tree branches or anything available, these masters created, nurtured and passed down their knowledge to subsequent generations until it flowered in the hands of a young and inspired new crop of Blues giants. Eventually blacks seeking a better way of life were able to move North into the urban areas of Chicago, New York, Kansas City and other places, and the adventurous among the Blues musicians followed them there, where the Blues kept people in touch with their roots and linked them emotionally to their Southern heritage. Here, the musicians were horribly exploited by white recording executives who invited them to record their music, and robbed them blind when a recording did well on the radio and/or in the stores. Eventually the mature Blues style inspired the world's greatest pop and rock musicians from the Rolling Stones and The Beatles to Eric Clapton, all of whom were British and discovered American Blues music at its commercial inception. Later, they introduced it back to the American masses who had for the most part not yet been exposed to it. As I finished the book, I was awestruck that these impoverished yet heroic people who lived in the shacks, shouting their laments to the cotton fields and the sky above, had a massive and magnificent influence on the world which few human beings will ever achieve. Hats off to Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Fred McDowell, Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters and so many others, especially the now-forgotten faceless progenitors of the style, without whom today's popular music would have an entirely different and far less rich character. And three cheers for Alan Lomax whose passion and love for the people and music he documents, coupled with his original and rich writing style leaves us in an emotional heap at the end of our journey.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read, Then Listen Again And Really "Hear" The Blues, October 1, 2003

By 

D. Sean Brickell (gorgeous Virginia Beach, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Land Where the Blues Began (Paperback)

Think you know the blues? Yeah, well so did I. But after reading this book, coupled with the current PBS series on The Blues, I'm diving back into stuff I've listened to for decades, but never really "heard." Quite possibly the best book ever written on the subject and one that I'll be re-reading for a long time.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't heed calumnies of Lomax. His chapters on the Mississippi levee and the great flood of 1927 resonate especially now, August 31, 2005

By 

H. Kirkpatrick - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Land Where the Blues Began (Paperback)

Land Where The Blues Began is an especially timely read now when the levees have once again broken on the Mississippi river, since a significant part of the book deals with the experiences and perceptions of the levee workers. Lomax also talks about how blues, re-named "rhythm and blues" became the America's national music. The book is a personal memoir, illustrated with transcripts of recorded interviews, not a scholarly tract.

That Alan Lomax didn't acknowledge colleagues, specifically composer John Work is an unscrupulous Swift-Boat-like smear that has lately been perpetrated to hype a recent edition of Coahoma study material.

In LWTBB Lomax wrote: "I have many people to thank for contributions on fieldwork data -- Samuel Adams, John Work, and mainly Lewis Jones, who collaborated on the whole Coahoma County Survey. The Library of Congress Folk Song Archive of which I was then in charge, furnished recording instruments and other equipment, and the records of the songs are now in the Archive. John Faulk and, especially, Elizabeth Harold contributed important interview material. . . [and so on for the rest of the page.] " p. 481

And on p. 496: Much of the sociological material in this chapter was gathered by Lewis Jones and his Fisk University associates, and summed up by him in two unpublished monographs, "The Mississippi Delta" and "An Ecology of Counties," edited by Lewis Jones in the 1940s. These sources, as well as conversations with Jones, are cited and paraphrased here."

There are eighteen references (most highly complementary) to Lewis Jones in Lomax's index, some for entries of multiple pages. The book has numerous complementary references the works of other scholars, as well.

It is lucky that Lomax preserved Work's field recordings in the Library of Congress (don't know if others survived independently) and kept a copy Work's and Jones's unpublished manuscript "stuffed" in a file in his open-to-the public archives, because the material that Work kept at home was lost after his death.

"Stuffed" in the files of the LOC are letters from Work in the 1940s requesting Botkin to send him copies of his Coahoma essay because he has lost them, and a reply from Botkin that he had done so "along with a couple of mimeographed copies."

In 1958 Work wrote the Library again, asking permission to publish his Coahoma material and the Library wrote back saying go ahead, if it was all right with Fisk. More correspondence about the Coahoma study can be viewed on the LOC website.

The copy of Work's essay found in Alan Lomax's archive (not his private papers) was a mimeographed one that the Fisk Librarian said probably went out on interlibrary loan.

According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, John Work III was indeed a prolific composer of classical music, mostly of choral but also instrumental. He composed 70 arrangements of folk material in which rich textures and use of dynamics added interest to the repetition of the stanza form. His large-scale choral works were not based on folk music. They are strictly diatonic. Work's cantata "The Singers" (text by Longfellow) won a national composers' prize in 1946. Work was also an acknowledged authority on black folk music and published several books on the topic. In the 1950s, he toured Europe conducting the Fisk Jubilee chorus.

As a classical music composer and educator in a school with a mission to "uplift" its pupils, Work had strict standards of what constituted "good" and "bad" folk performance. He prized through-composed dynamic variation, "correct" diatonic intonation (no expressive shifts of half or quarter tones), and felt that songs should always end on the tonic -- all essentially bel canto rather than folk criteria.

Lomax himself tells us that he decided to bypass conventional musical notation altogether and instead spent years developing descriptive parameters he called Cantometrics.