"Looking Up at Down": The Emergence of Blues Culture [Hardcover]

William Barlow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1989

More than just a history of a musical genre, "Looking Up at Down" traces the evolution of the various strands of blues music within the broader context of the culture on which it commented, and discusses its importance as a form of cultural resistance and identity for Afro-Americans. William Barlow explores the lyrics, describes the musical styles, and portrays the musicians and performers who created this uniquely American music. He describes how the blues sound with its recognizable dissonance and African musical standards and the blues text, which provided a bottom up view of American society, became bulwarks of cultural resistance. Using rare recordings, oral histories, and interviews, Barlow analyzes how the blues was sustained as a form of Afro-American cultural resistance despite attempts by the dominant culture to assimilate and commercialize the music and exploit its artists. William Barlow is Associate Professor in the Radio, Television, and Film Department of Howard University. A music programmer for alternative radio stations for more than fifteen years, he currently produces "Blue Monday" on WPFW-FM.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this encyclopedic work of interest to specialists rather than general readers, Barlow, who teaches radio, television and film at Howard University, traces the blues as music and culture from its origins on cotton plantations in the 1890s through migration to urban ghettos in the 1920s, to its commercialization in today's recording studios. Basing much of his study on interviews with blues musicians and scholars, Barlow analyzes the music and examines in depth the lives of the men and women who wrote and performed it. He devotes sections to the major blues personalities and includes numerous examples of lyrics, demonstrating that the blues, a powerful emotional outlet for an oppressed people, also tells the story of African-American resistance to white domination.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Many books have been written about the blues, but few with the depth and comprehensiveness of this one. Barlow (radio, television, and film, Howard Univ.) divides his subject into rural and urban blues. Whether exploring the Chicago Blues, the Memphis Blues, or the St. Louis Blues, he makes good use of rare recordings, oral histories, and interviews to trace the genre's powerful emergence. The book offers a fresh view of the way the blues helped Afro-Americans survive in a hostile social environment. This cultural and musical history is an important balance to the more biographical approach of books like Barry Lee Pearson's Sounds So Good to Me: The Bluesman's Story (Univ. of Pennsylvania Pr., 1984).
- Daniel J. Lombardo, Jones Lib., Inc., Amherst, Mass.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 404 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press; 1ST edition (March 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0877225834
• ISBN-13: 978-0877225836
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,731,470 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Straight Forward, Academic Treatment of Blues History, September 26, 2011

By 

S. Pactor "reader" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Looking Up At Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Paperback)

The story of the Blues is interesting on a number of levels that have nothing to do with the fact that most white rock and rollers trace large portions of their style, music and performance on the Blues. First, the Blues are interesting because it was one of the modern musical forms that emerged in tandem with the invention of phonograph. Second, Blues are interesting because there was a thirty year gap between the first artistic and cultural flourishing of the Blues and the appreciation of that flourishing by the music industry, music consumers and music intellectuals.

Looking Up At Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture is a well rounded look at the historical facts that trace the emergence of Blues as a genre. The bare facts of that emergence should be known to almost all modern music fans: After the Civil War white planters moved into the area south of Memphis and cleared huge areas for cotton plantations. Slavery was now unconstitutional, but Delta planters still used African Americans for field labor, and those laborers were kept in a state of quasi-slavery. BUT- and this was important- the economic circumstances of the Delta area meant that African American field laborers did pretty ok by the standards of the time, and there was mobility- the spread of plantation agriculture meant that labor was always in demand.

From this new found mobility and relative economic well being, musicians were able to travel between plantations and ply their art form. What is funny, and this is a fact that Barlow gives short shrift to, is that we probably wouldn't know ANYTHING about the Blues without the records that were released in the 20s and 30s. This is because of the 30 year gap between the blues recordings of the 20s and 30s and the post World War II blues revival. Basically, all Blues history consists of people listening to 30-50 year old recordings and then trying to reconstruct how it went down. Make no mistake, Blues records sold before the Great Depression laid waste to the record business, but white intellectuals didn't hail Blues as a major new art form. The records came out, black people bought most of them, and then everyone forgot about the Blues until after World War II.

After World War II academics, intellectuals and fans wrote the history of blues based on the recordings. From the recordings, these interested individuals were able to go back and locate the still living musicians and from there locate and name artists who either didn't record or whose recordings were "lost" from lack of attention.

Most of the institutions that supported the spread of blues between 1890 and 1933 were either criminally owned night clubs, gambling dens, houses of prostitution or some combination. Once the Blues became "known" outside of its historic home in the Mississippi Delta and East Texas, it spread via traveling musicians- generally moving in a band between Atlanta to Chicago, hotspots being Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago.

By the onset of the Great Depression, Blues had established itself as a down market alternative to Jazz, though with little of the white interest and critical acclaim that jazz generated. And then... nothing. No records, no books about blues- nothing- until the close of World War II.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars for a class, March 4, 2010

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V. Whitley "vsw" (Tahlequah, OK USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: "Looking Up at Down": The Emergence of Blues Culture (Hardcover)

I got this book for a class and it is a nice book that gives you a good background knowledge of the Blues.