In search of the blues 9780465028580, 9780786722143

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BLUES

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IN SEARCH OF THE

MARYBETH HAMILTON

H BASIC

A Member of the Perseus Books Group New York

Every effort has been made to obtain necessary permissions with reference to copyrighted material; sources are named throughout the volume. The publishers apologize if inadvertently any sources remain unacknowledged. Copyright © 2008 by Marybeth Hamilton Published by Basic Books A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 255-1514, or e-mail special. [email protected]. DESIGNED BY JEFF WILLIAMS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hamilton, Marybeth. In search of the blues / Marybeth Hamilton.

p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-465-02858-0 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-465-02858-6 (alk. paper) 1. Blues (Music)—History and criticism. 2. Field recordings—United States— History. I. Title. ML3521.H34 2008 781.64309762'4—dc22 2007034444

10987654321

For Jackson and Lukas

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~ CONTENTS *

ONE The Delta Revisited ........... 000005000] TWO Impartial Testimony... 0... 0.0.0.005 64.25 THREE On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs ........53 FOUR Sound Photographs of Negro Songs ......91

FIVE Been Here and Gone .............6.0.6.4 157

six The Real Negro Blues ................201 Acknowledgments ...............00044 247

Notes ..... eee ee ee tee ee eee es B51 Index 2... ccc ee ee ee eee ee ee ns 295

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SF one &

The Delta Revisited

(): OLD HIGHWAY 61 IN MISSISSIPPI, BETWEEN LULA and Robinsonville in the heart of the Delta, stand the re-

mains of a wooden railroad bridge partially submerged in a murky swamp. The air enveloping the bridge is sticky and fetid, thick with the smell of decayed vegetation, and the dark,

stagnant water stretches far into the distance, flooding the banks, engulfing the trees. To look at the scene is to peer at an

eerie, apparently timeless landscape, primordial and untouched by history, the world Noah might have glimpsed after the flood. I photographed this bridge in May 1999 while driving south through the Mississippi Delta, aware all the while of following a

well-worn trail. The trek through the Delta in search of the roots of the blues has been a trope of music writing since the early 1960s, the opening years of the blues revival, when white

Americans and Europeans rediscovered a music that African Americans had long left behind. My aim in coming to the Delta 1

2 IN SEARCH OF THE BLUES

was, I thought, more sophisticated: to get 'a handle on the pilgrim experience, to reconstruct the breathless hunt for the authentic origins of the blues. And yet here I was, slamming to a halt on a desolate highway, bewitched by the sight of that decaying bridge, transported into what felt like a mystical landscape, a world frozen outside the passage of time. This mythology of the Delta arose with the land itself. The

region’s first boosters, in the early twentieth century, portrayed it as a place outside history. Though it had only just been opened for agriculture—as late as 1860, 90 percent of the Delta was covered in swamps—by 1910 railroad develop-

ers had enveloped it in the romantic imagery of the Old South. “Nowhere in Mississippi have antebellum conditions

of landholding been so nearly preserved as in the Delta,” rhapsodized the owners of the Illinois Central Railroad. “The Negro is naturally gregarious in instinct, and is never so happy as when massed together in large numbers, as on the Delta plantations.” This idea of the Delta as “the Old South reincarnate,” with its nostalgic evocation of mint juleps and magnolia blossoms, took on a more sinister cast in the mid-1930s, as northern anthropologists flocked to the region. Those observers—John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, Allison Davis—painted a stark, vivid portrait of a land of unparalleled brutality, marked

by naked extremes of wealth and destitution and by caste domination in its most blatant forms.

But it was the blues revival of the 1960s that created the most luminous, enduring mythology of the Delta. The decade saw a flood of record collectors and folk music enthusiasts head south from Memphis and north from Vicksburg, armed

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