Customer Reviews

Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition

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Adam Gussow has written an absorbing and innovative study of American "blues texts" over the past century, demonstrating that this genre permeates several media, from music and fiction to autobiography and journalism, and that a pervasive theme in the blues, even its prime initiative, is a response to the wave of race murders and lynchings that occurred in the Southern states after 1890. "Spectacle lynchings," widely-publicized acts of mob vigilance, gave rise to a rhetoric of retribution in the blues, understandably directed toward white oppressors, but also more tragically toward black bodies and souls. The complex burden of the blues, Gussow argues, is to perform rites of exorcism that re-enact violence without the comfort of catharsis or transubtantiation, the usual consequences of tragedy.

His chapters successively explore the subjects of lynchings, dismemberment, murder, riot, and knifings, each time through a central author or text, set amidst a rich array of ancillary texts and voices. The chapters are models of rigorous historical research and intelligently modulated critical discussion. This book is an accurate and eloquently argued work of cultural imagination. It raises deeply troubling questions about race and art in America, and it will endure for a long while as a very distinguished publication.

The scholarship is well documented. The book turns a bright light upon a dark, tragic period in American history. If blues music interests you, then this book is a real history of why the blues are what they are.

This was an interesting read though a bit too scholarly at times. I am a fan of Mr. Gussows work and while I enjoyed this book I don't know if it will be everyone's cup of tea. If you have an interest in the subject matter I do recommend this to you as there is nothing else out there quite like it.

Adam Gussow is something like an idiot savant. Give him a handful of texts and he'll draw more connections between and inferences from them than you could shake a stick at. Nearly none will have even the least validity, but that doesn't seem to bother Gussow. He sees nothing wrong with, for example, analogizing an electric guitar to a lynching victim on one page, then on the next, analogizing an acoustic guitar to a vagina, then on the next, analogizing "a semi-hollow-body Gibson" to, in rapid succession, a white woman and a black man.

Seems Like Murder Here is nothing more than a hail of such spitballs. Very, very few stick. One that does is Gussow's implicit equation of the word "blues" in blues lyrics with white terrorists. A song like "The First Time I Met You" (a.k.a., "The First Time I Met the Blues") does, indeed, take on added meaning if you substitute "whites" for "blues" (e.g., "The first time I met the blues, mama, they came walking through the wood/They stopped at my house first, mama, and done me all the harm they could.") Gussow also trots out Sigmund Freud--unaware, apparently, that Freud has been utterly debunked--to explain why the second line of the typical blues stanza repeats the first: "'Repetition . . . of distressing experience as a game,' according to Freud, is one way the subject may actively master, and derive pleasure from, an otherwise overpowering threat to the ego's integrity." I'll admit that I felt that there might be something to that, but of course it can't be proved, and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't buy it. Lastly, Gussow does make a strong case for the pervasiveness of violence among blues musicians and audiences (at least within the realm of the jook).

Aside from these, and maybe a couple of other lucky shots, though, Seems Like Murder Here is pure nonsense. Horribly written nonsense, at that. These are just a few typically egregious sentences from the book:

"If the white lynch mob was able to extract cathartic pleasure from the isolated black male subject . . . then the figural shadow cast by these violences shows up in the blues tradition not just as the blues subject's anxieties about his (or her) own tore-downness or incipient victimization, but as the willingness to inflict lynch-mob-like abjection on other blacks, and extract pleasure in the process" (40).

"Cutting and shooting, literal and figurative, were ways in which black blues people, male and female, claimed and reclaimed their own and each other's bodies within a self-created passional economy that was none of the white man's business" (209).

And my two (at least somewhat contradictory) favorites: "[I]t would be fatuous to argue that 'You Upset Me Baby' sketches a blues subject filled with a sexual passion so earthshaking that it symbolically uproots the dreaded lynching tree . . . " (56); "[i]f lynching inflicts soul murder on those potentially subject to it by destroying an exemplary black body, then embrace undoes soul murder by reclaiming that body with a resolute tenderness it extends toward other cherished bodies" (143).

Basically, Gussow takes his leave of Freud when it comes to cigars sometimes just being cigars (they never, ever are to Gussow). And so, in its way, Seems Like Murder Here can, actually, be a fun, even engrossing read--if only because you may remain curious to see what shamelessly nutty claim or theory or insane academese Gussow will throw at you next. I would recommend leaving it unbought, though; it's not that great an entertainment. If you need further incentive to save your money, consider that Gussow cites Michael Bellesiles's Arming America as if that book hadn't been exposed as a fraud prior to Seems Like Murder Here's going to print, conflates convict leasing with the chain gang (in fact, the latter replaced the former), and credits Keith Richards with an appearance on a John Lee Hooker album on which he did not play or sing. Ridiculous.

Adam starts out with a very difficult to support thesis, that bogs down in incredable academic leaps of faith. Not only does he not provide adequately provide support for the theme of his book; he almost abandons trying to half way through. The chapter focusing on Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" was refreshing and eye opening, but the rest of the book does not sway one to ackowledge the validity of his point. The constant use of "Blues Literature" to support his theory of real worl dblue falls short by nature, being that the blues authors quoted wrote fiction where is by its essence prone to exagerationa nd romanticism and can not convincingly back up his point about white oppression and violence being the backbone of almost all blues music and acting as a coded message universally gotten by the black blues audience. The academic nature of this book loses touch with the reality of things.