Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide
Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide (Revised Edition, Dost Publishing, 2023)
In 1994 I decided that I just couldn't take any more of what I was doing. I had begun graduate programs in Islamic History, Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, and Modern European Intellectual History, intending to do a PhD in each field, and left each program fed up with academe. The next program was always going to be better! And yet each new program I still felt intellectually stifled and absolutely astonished at the petty and nasty department politics. Well-meaning friends would say, "All you have to do is get the PhD and then play the game until you get tenure. Then you're free to study what you want and to teach as you wish."
But I couldn't do it. That would mean more than another decade of playing games with advisors and compromising my intellectual integrity to get along. And I wasn't confident that tenure would stop the pain! So I finally decided that I would study what I wanted to study and publish what I wanted to publish--but that I would do it as an independent scholar. I left my last academic program (at the University of Chicago) in 1993 and enrolled in a professional degree that would lead to a job that would allow me to earn a living and give me time to write.
And I had a good idea what I would write about first: Blues. Blues was a real passion of mine in those days--the Blues that Sam Charters dubbed Country Blues, but people also call Downhome Blues, Folk Blues, Backwoods Blues, etc.--and I not only wanted to dig in to the history of the music, but I had a readymade topic based on the experiences of a friend of the family.
Roger Brown, who is now retired from teaching German at the University of New Hampshire, was a colleague and friend of my father's at Hiram College in the early 70s, where he also taught a course on the history of the Blues. (It was Roger's collection of Blues albums and books in the Hiram College Library that were my first deep dive.) Roger had grown up in Atlanta in the 1950s and 60s and had developed a lifelong passion for the Blues as a young man. Spinning the dial on the radio in his room as a child in the 50s, Roger came across the R&B stations that played popular music meant for a black audience, but which the waves sent out to anyone with a radio. He would have heard such musicians as Big Mama Thornton, Little Willie Littlefield, Big Joe Turner, Huey "Piano" Smith, and Ruth Brown, and Roger was immediately hooked on the energy of the music.
And what happened to Roger in high school was where I found the subject for the book I wanted to write. While Roger and his friend George Mitchell were listening to R&B every chance they got, including trips to downtown Atlanta to find R&B records by their favorite artists, they also discovered that there was a history to this music of which they had not been aware. It turned out that there had been bluesmen recording from the 1920s to the 1940s whose music was amazing, and in 1959 they discovered the book and album compiled by Samuel Charters that revealed this history to them.
Charters' album The Country Blues was released by Folkways and included songs by such masters as Sleepy John Estes, The Memphis Jug Band, Cannon's Jug Stompers, Robert Johnson, and Blind Willie McTell, all of whom had been born roughly between the 1880s and 1910. The music was acoustic, rather than electrified, and was performed by men who had played at parties and dances, on street corners and in alleys, and who had recorded a few songs when the record companies had come to town and spread the word that they would pay for "race" music. And not only was the music a revelation, but Roger and George also read something in the liner notes that astonished them: Charters had traveled through the segregated South in the 1940s and 1950s and had actually found many of the surviving musicians! He had talked to them about their music, about their lives, about the other bluesmen they had known and their lives.
Will Shade and Jennie Mae Clayton, Memphis c. 1962
And this is the subject of Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide. These young people who became enthralled by Blues in the 1950s and 1960s and who sought out the musicians who played it and the scene where it was played. I started by interviewing Roger at his home in New Hampshire in around 1995, and then went on to interview Samuel Charters (1929-2015), Bob Koester (1932-2021), and Ray Flerlage (1915-2002)--to get their stories about discovering the Blues and bluesmen. The interview with Samuel Charters is published in its entirety.
It was a wonderful experience to meet these guys and hear their stories, but the book--which is full of my youthful passion for the subject, if nothing else--fell into the bottom drawer when I moved overseas in 1999. When I returned to the States in 2011, I eventually decided to self-publish the book. After some corrections from readers I republished a revised edition in 2014. This Dost Publishing edition provides a new preface and some updates on the interviewees, but leaves the text unmodified.
Blues Discovery: Reaching Across the Divide (Revised Edition, Dost Publishing, 2023)