In Search of the Blues (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: sound photographs, cylinder recorder, living lore, African American, New Orleans, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"High Fidelity excepted, books about record collectors are pretty rare, but here's one, and it's brilliant...An instant classic." -- Record Collector

"In Search of the Blues renders, in shimmering prose, superb field recordings of the blues searchers themselves, revealing why they searched, what they found, and how their humble, obsessed pursuits helped change the world." -- Sean Wilentz

"Marybeth Hamilton is a detective pursuing other detectives--the motley group of characters who, over the course of the twentieth century, bit by bit uncovered the mysteries of the blues--who are, as it turns out, both so many Schliemanns at Troy and so many blind men circling the proverbial elephant. Hamilton's story is riveting, her prose is elegant and concise, and her insights about the music, race relations, and the mechanics of cultural transmission are unfailingly acute." -- Luc Sante

"Though critical, Hamilton's portraits aren't one-sided. Rich bits of context--including memorable excerpts from Lomax's love letters--insure that we sympathize with the usually well meaning enthusiasts. The result is a challenging and surprisingly timely book: In Search of the Blues serves as a reminder that even in the hip-hop era, white connoisseurship of black culture remains a complicated matter." -- Time Out New York, 2/6/08

"Wherever you happen to light in Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues you find Columbus--the discovery of America in the drama of Americans discovering each other. It's no matter that it's the twentieth century, not the fifteenth--blacks and whites are strangers, so white people turn into detectives and black people into fugitives, shadows on the wall or hiding in plain sight. In this book, you never know how any story is going to turn out, and as the story goes on the suspense builds up." -- Greil Marcus

Product Description

Who really invented the Delta blues? A historian debunks the conventional wisdom about an iconic American art form.

Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton--we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight.

In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music.

Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was effectively invented by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into America's south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption. In their quest, and in the immense popularity of the music they championed, we confront America's ongoing love affair with racial difference.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (January 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465028586
• ISBN-13: 978-0465028580
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #331,574 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars In Search of Marybeth Hamilton, June 14, 2008

By	Smilin' Jack "N/A" (Coahuila, Mexico) - See all my reviews

In this remarkably misguided book, author Marybeth Hamilton (ex-punk rocker, now professor of American History) asks why historians who write about the blues often do so romantically, without the "methodological rigor (and) unsparing eye" of true historians, like, presumably, herself. As the opening chapter makes abundantly clear, Hamilton possesses far too little knowledge or interest in blues, the Deep South, or the early recording industry to even be asking such questions, much less to be writing a book around the subject. That the author cannot discern between an orchestrated jazz disc with the word "blues" in the title (Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues") and the music of Charley Patton says a great deal about her fundamental (mis)understanding of the blues and vernacular music. In the pages that follow, we learn much more about Marybeth Hamilton than we do about the blues.

An example: The fact that the records of Delta bluesmen were not found on a Delta jukebox in 1941 supposedly tells us that "even in the heart of the Delta, the so-called Delta bluesman had limited appeal." No doubt an important point. But since none of the artists she names (Patton et al.) even had records currently in print in 1941, the jukebox actually tells us nothing -- so much for the author's "methodological rigor." We have no idea how much or how little appeal these artists actually had locally when their records were current, a crucial point Hamilton misses completely in her mad rush to dismiss the mythos of Delta blues as purely the invention of "faintly colonialist" white obsessives (a dumb epithet used to describe every single folklorist in this book).

The authors of the pioneering book Jazzmen (Charles Edward Smith and Fred Ramsey) do not belong in this book, but get bashed anyway for the crime of being fans of the music and not historians -- neatly overlooking the fact that no tenured historian would write a history of jazz until decades later (when most of the subjects that Smith and Ramsey interviewed were dead.) Ultimately, the biggest loser in this book is record collector James McKune, who began championing the completely unknown and forgotten Charley Patton and the Delta blues as early as 1944. To Hamilton, McKune was not a person with highly individual tastes who eschewed the contemporary music of his time...he was simply another "obsessive" nutjob tacitly endorsing slavery and creating his own collector fantasy world. It doesn't even occur to Hamilton that without the early enthusiasm of people like McKune, a lot of these recordings would not have even survived. But then, not being an obsessive herself, would she even care?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars History of the Blues, May 6, 2008

By	Yahmdallah "yahmdallah" (USA) - See all my reviews

I've actually read this book.

It's a good, thorough, entertaining, and well-written account of the where blues came from and where it fits into the history of music.

I found myself at the end before I realized it. There are copious end notes (a good thing), so the text itself comprises only 2/3 of the size.

There is no hidden agenda or historical revisionism; you'll find no identity politics or apologists for racism here.

Modern blues legends aren't mentioned because this covers the advent of the blues and how those in the midst of its birth wrote about it. Therefore, it does not include any of the many artists of the 60s and onward who were influenced by the original blues artists.

Of great interest to me personally was the brief history of recorded music in general, and the views of various strata of society at the time.

This book deserves to become part of the cannon for classes on music history.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Were the Blues Invented in a Brooklyn YMCA?, December 26, 2008

By	Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In her book, "Inventing the Blues" (2008), Marybeth Hamilton advances the provocative claim that the blues, more specifially tbe Delta Blues, is a form of music created in large part by the imaginations of white men. I do not find her argument compelling, to say the least. Nevertheless, I found this book worth reading for the story it tells about how various individuals pioneered in the study of the blues beginning early in the 20th Century to the revival of interest in blues music in the 1960s. Although her book is unconvincing and even infuriating in some respects, it is valuable for those readers with an interest in the blues. Hamilton, born in California, teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and has written other books on aspects of American popular culture.

Early in her book, (p.22) Hamilton says she is not going to cover the development of the Delta Blues as a musical style by analyzing the songs of Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and other bluesmen. She points to Robert Palmer's study "Deep Blues" as among the works that have explored the music. Instead, Hamilton proposed to show how her central characters, all of whom are white, "set out to find an undiluted and primal black music." Hamilton then asks what it was that drove these indivduals to think that an "undiluted and primal black" music existed and why it was important to these individuals to find it. The way Hamilton frames her question largely presupposes her result. The works of Palmer and other writers such as Ted Gioia in his excellent recent study "Delta Blues" examine the blues by looking at the blues, bluesmen and blueswomen. Hamilton will have little of this and begins with the assumption that the blues was somehow a conceptual creation of whites. Hamilton finds the need for this conceptualization in the racial attitudes and segregation prevailing in the United States up through at least the 1950's. Late in the book, Hamilton introduces another theme. She finds the Delta blues largely a sexist creation by men who were uncomfortable with their masculinity and worried about evolving ideas of gender and egalitarianism. (see pp 240-243).

Each of the five major characters Hamilton discusses is well described. Hamilton offers good insight into how the blues were found, in spite of her hyperbolic claim that the blues were invented. She describes the work of the early sociologist, Howard Odum who early in has career travelled in the byways of lumber camps and out of the way fields in the rural South to hear and record on primitive equipment the frequently obscene hollers and calls of laborers and field hands. Hamilton spends a great deal of time on pioneering work of John Lomax, who discovered Leadbelly in a Louisiana prison. She explores John Lomax's racial attitudes and offers a personal portrayal of him through love letters he wrote to a woman named Ruby Terrill. Lomax's son Alan also figures largely in the story as he tried to move away from his father's racial prejudices. Alan Lomax was instrumental in the rediscovery of Jelly Roll Morton as Hamilton points out. She underplays his role in the 1940s in recording and preserving the work of Deltabluesmen Muddy Waters and Son House.

Of Hamilton's characters, two are infrequently associated with the blues, and it was worth learning about them in the book. Dorothy Scarborough was a highly-educated woman whose parents had been active in the Confederacy. While living and teaching in New York City, she conceived the idea of studying black music. She travelled south and interviewed many people, mostly the descendants of white plantation owners but some black musicians as well. In 1925, she wrote a book "On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs". Hamilton points out that this book is little read today due to its racial stereotyping. But I think Hamilton is correct that this book has much to teach about early black music.

The fourth group of charactrs Hamilton discusses are William Russell, Frederick Ramsey, and Charles Smith who became enamored of New Orleans jazz and of the fabled Storyville district. They published an early study of jazz called "Jazzmen" in 1937 which seemed to conflate jazz and the blues and to find the heart of black music in the urban area of New Orleans rather than in the fields and rural areas that the Lomaxes, Odum, and Scarborough explored.

The final characters explored in the book are the record collectors of the 1940s. in particular a lonely and puzzling figure named James McKune. McKune lived in poverty and obscurity for 25 years in a Brooklyn YMCA amassing a collection of race records that he stored in a cardboard box under his bed. As McKune delved into what was then obscure music, he developed a passion for what we now know as the Delta bluesmen, especially for Charlie Patton. Slowly, a small group of collectors coalesced around McKune and shared his interest in this music. In the early 1960s, pioneering reissues of Delta blues music based upon McKune's collection were issued by small record labels and scholars and enthusiasts, in the United States and Britain, began to take note. McKune himself, bedeveled by problems with alcohol, sex, and mental health, was the victim of a bizarre murder in 1971, long after he had lost interest in the Delta blues. McKune, with has fantasies, loneliness and obsessions, Hamilton argues "invented" the Delta blues. Hamilton describes this "invention"

"the blues revival stands alongside the Beat movement as an opening movement of ... the 'male flight from committment' that percolated through postwar American culture. What united both movement was their almost exclusively male constituency and their romance with outsider manhood, with defiant black men who seemed to scorn the suburban breadwinner's stiffling, soul-destroying routine." (p. 241)

I don't see anything in this analysis that supports the conclusion that McKune and his fellow-collectors "invented" the Delta blues. Palmer and others have shown there was a music there to be discovered. Other scholars such as Elijah Wald in "Escaping the Delta" have shown how much other forms of black music influenced the Delta blues. But the influence of other styles of music in the Delta hardly shows that the genre was somehow conceptualized and invented by white fans.

In his book, "Delta Blues" which I mentioned earlier, Ted Gioia takes issue with Hamilton's portrayal of McKune's role. He writes:

"Perhaps it would have been better for academics such as Hamilton to take the lead on this process during these years of neglect-- although other fears and obsessions might have emerged in this case. But the issue is moot: college professors had no interest in the blues at this time. Moreover, the record collectors were the only people who had access to this music, most of which was available solely on the original 78s in which it had first been presented to the public. As such, we must temper our critcism of these enthusiasts with at least a measure of gratitude for the music they were able to track down, preserve, and share with those open-minded enought to appreciate its virtues." (Gioia p. 349)


Although her primary claim in this book lacks support, Hamilton has written a valuable account of the individuals who pursued their passion for the blues and made this music available to all Americans.

Robin Friedman