Whose blues is it anyway? On his first trip to the Mississippi Delta, Elijah Wald found himself performing a Robert Johnson song at the Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church. He reckoned that the members wouldn't care for the old blues sound, much less have heard of his idol. But he didn't expect their response: unmitigated glee. Taking for granted the musical strategies that Wald had spent years mastering, they attended instead to Johnson's hilarious double-entendres in "Terraplane Blues":
Motors in a bad condition
You gotta have these batteries charged
But I'm cryin please
Please don't do me wrong
Who been drivin' my Terraplane now for you
Since I've been gone
Instead of a blasted prophet, they heard a vivacious entertainer. Where Wald gleaned tragedy, they spied fun.
In "Escaping the Delta," Wald places Johnson in his proper context, allowing us to hear him as he would have been heard in 1936. More bravely, he confronts the generations of White Blues Boys (most of them boys, most of them white, including everyone from Eric Clapton to the street-corner slide guitarist) who commandeered and reconfigured the blues.
In the process, they upturned hierarchies and banished to invisibility artists they deemed frivolous, artists who had frequently been the African American audience's favorites. In their place, the new fans anointed singers like Johnson, who would come to personify the blues, with millions of albums sold and even a postage stamp bearing his image. The blues audience of his time barely knew him. The pop audience today hardly knows anyone else.
A professional musician and the author of "Josh White: Society Blues," Wald wrote this book largely because a "more polished, professional approach has been disrespected by generations of blues writers in search of wild Delta primitivism." Yet he shares these writers' enthusiasm, and his book also challenges himself: How could he have missed so much splendor? In transforming "a music notable for its professionalism and humor" into an existential lament, had the blues fans gotten everything wrong? Were they guilty, terrible to admit, of provincial bad taste?
Wald's view of American culture is wonderfully bold and bracing. He celebrates a time before there were categories, when sounds had yet to be codified, when everybody heard everything. Did you know, for instance, that country fiddling was largely based on jigs and reels mastered in slavery (and originally associated with the Irish, who, like their musical fellow travelers the Jews, were not considered much whiter than slaves)? Or that B.B. King loved hillbilly star Jimmie Rodgers, while Muddy Waters grew up listening to Gene Autry?
That's not all Wald presents. Did you also know that Robert Johnson, when not dodging hellhounds, liked to sing "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby"? That a decade before Elvis crash-landed on all the charts, Louis Jordan's jump blues were No. 1 on the Country Hit Parade? Or that Johnny Shines, Johnson's singing partner, boasted of their skill at playing "the better type of stuff"?
The first blues recording, one learns, was made by a white man; the first Queen of the Blues was a white woman. In the 1920s, the earliest black blues stars were robust divas who had apprenticed in vaudeville or the circus. Country blues, the sound identified with Johnson and with Wald's favorite, Skip James, was recorded later and never matched the popularity of the other forms. Nobody is quite willing to say which came first, country blues or city blues. Simply because guitar (country) blues sounds more primitive doesn't mean that it preceded city blues, which employed instruments like piano, cornet and saxophone. My own guess is that the development of the country blues in the 1930s parallels what was going on in black churches, where old forms of religious music were updated to conform to new aesthetic demands. Except in the case of country blues, the updated form actually involved a return to the roots of holler and moan.
Though blues scholars have canonized the field holler, I'm not sure of its influence. It wasn't widely sung, even in the workplace, and the example cited by Wald, a 1947 jailhouse lament by a man named Tangle-Eye, is a secular adaptation of the old hymn "I Wonder Will We Ever Meet Again," sung with the byzantine melisma universally identified with a church moan. That moan usually takes the form of a hum, though it can also be an "ooh," "ah," "oh" and "hey," and it can be expressed in guttural tones or high falsetto. When slurred moans are introduced into spoken and sung words, the result is a hallowing of language, a transcendent state. As with the donning of a scarf or yarmulke, everything becomes solemn, sacred.
