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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
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.
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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
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.
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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
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.
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