In Search of the Blues (Hardcover)

by Marybeth Hamilton (Author)
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: #515,804 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 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:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and well written . . . , May 17, 2008

By	Lee C. Grady (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is not a history of blues music. It does not include detailed biographical sketches of prominent blues musicians. Rather, it is a historical study of a series of white foklorists and record collectors who sought to interpret and/or promote African-American "folk" music from about 1900 through the early 1960s. Thus, you will find biographical sketches of Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough, John Lomax, Alan Lomax, Frederic Ramsey and James McKune. Each of these individuals had a different take on the music and its meaning. Some had backward racial views and others had political agendas. To varying degrees they were influential in shaping how we view the music today.

As a long-time fan (and yes, record collector) of blues and jazz music from the 1920s through the 1960s, I found this book to be fascinating. It adds another dimension to the history of African-American "folk" music (rather broadly defined to include artists like Jelly Roll Morton) - not so much the history of the music itself, but the way it has been defined and packaged by white "experts" and connoisseurs. Well written, well documented and highly recommended.

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.