In Search of the Blues

Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton - we are all familiar with these legends 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. The prehistory begins around 1900, when a group of obsessive white men and women set out to track down those voices. For the would-be race scientist Howard Odum, this meant combing remote Mississippi's back roads with a cylinder phonograph to capture the obscene melodies of vagrants and field hands. For the plantation-bred folklorist Dorothy Scarborough, it meant finding elderly white Civil War veterans to recreate the croonings of mammies and nursemaids.
For the Texas banker turned song hunter John Lomax and his teenage son Alan, it meant prowling Southern penitentiaries and unearthing a double murderer, Leadbelly, whose rough, ragged, melancholy vocals evoked the anguish of the chain gang. Many of these early recordings turned up in a single room of a Brooklyn YMCA, in the hands of a reclusive collector named James McKune. McKune had heard something pure and primal in the voices of Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, the prized items in the collection of scratched, battered 78s that he stored in a cardboard box under his bed. When this secret stash of recordings came to light in the 1960s, collectors used them to invent the idea of the Delta blues - the "authentic" voice of black America, so unlike the impure popular black music of the time which emanated from corporate record labels. Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was created not by blacks but by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into Americas south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption.
In excavating the history of an immensely popular musical form, Hamilton reveals the extent to which American culture has been shaped by white fantasies of racial difference.

Publisher: Basic Books/Perseus