Contents
 Introduction
 David Evans
 1 Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism in the Blues: An
 Africanist Perspective
 Gerhard Kubik
 2 "They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me": Sheet Music, Southern
 Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues
 Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
 3 Abbe Niles, Blues Advocate
 Elliott S. Hurwitt
 4 The Hands of Blues Guitarists
 Andrew M. Cohen
 5 From Bumble Bee Slim to Black Boy Shine: Nicknames of Blues
 Singers
 David Evans
 6 Preachin' the Blues: A Textual Linguistic Analysis of Son
 House's "Dry Spell Blues"
 Luigi Monge
 7 Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson's Mind: Critical Analysis
 and Aesthetic Value in Delta Blues
 James Bennighof
 8 "Guess These People Wonder What I'm Singing": Quotation and
 Reference in Ella Fitzgerald's "St. Louis Blues"
 Katharine Cartwright
 9 Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: A Decade of Disillusion in Black
 Blues and Gospel Song
 Bob Groom
 10 Houston Creoles and Zydeco: The Emergence of an African
 American Urban Popular Style
 John Minton
 Index
 Ramblin' on My Mind
 Introduction
 David Evans
 The years since the late 1950s have seen a dramatic growth in
 scholarly and popular literature about blues music. Blues was
 certainly mentioned in print before this time, but previous
 writers had almost universally viewed it as either simply a type
 of folk music, more or less anonymous and unchanging, or a "root"
 form of jazz, worthy of a chapter or two at the beginning of any
 study of that genre. While it was recognized that blues had been
 popularized and commercialized, folklorists generally viewed this
 process with alarm, equating commercialization with a decline in
 artistic quality and cultural relevance. Jazz writers were more
 favorable toward commercial blues, but few had heard enough of it
 to do more than comment on selected artists and recordings that
 came to their attention, especially those that contained good
 jazz instrumental work. What was lacking, except among musicians
 themselves and their immediate audiences, was a sense of blues as
 a distinct type of music with its own personalities, stylistic
 variety, and history of musical development.
 The modern era of blues scholarship and the significant
 growth of our knowledge of this genre began with the publication
 of Samuel B. Charters' The Country Blues (1959) and Paul Oliver's
 Blues Fell This Morning (1960), followed soon by the launching of
 the British magazine Blues Unlimited and a steady stream of
 albums featuring both reissues of historic commercial recordings
 and contemporary recordings in a full variety of styles. Blues
 artists were interviewed and profiled in magazines. New artists
 were discovered, while older recording artists were
 "rediscovered" and had second careers. Folklorists began to
 explore the relationships between folk and popular blues and
 place more emphasis on the personalities of their informants.
 Historians began to write the story of this music in particular
 cities and regions, identifying both an array and evolution of
 styles. Musicians from outside the traditional blues community
 began to learn how to perform the music and teach others, both
 directly and through instructional books and articles. There are
 now books that analyze blues as music, literature, and culture,
 that profile individual artists, producers, songwriters, and
 record companies, and that explore the relationship of blues to
 religion, philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, and
 ethnicity. The music is today more popular and widespread than
 ever, as witnessed by the growth of an international club,
 concert, and festival circuit, blues magazines in ten languages,
 thousands of available CD recordings, university courses and
 archives, radio and television programs, blues as theme music for
 advertising, blues awards programs, museums, and even blues
 tourism. One now hears increasingly of a "blues industry."
 Interest in blues has particularly increased since the early
 1990s, coinciding with the maturing of rock music and the rock
 generation, rock's fragmentation into a variety of competing
 subgenres, the rise in interest and availability of world and
 ethnic music, and the challenge that rap has presented to rock
 and older styles of African American popular music. Blues was
 able to find a niche in the spectrum of popular music and has
 been interpreted variously as a more authentic alternative to
 bloated rock music, something that preserves a spirit of
 rebellion, anarchy, or "chaos," a true ethnic expression, or
 something that generates pleasant nostalgic feelings without the
 aggression of rap or hard rock. Many new and younger fans of
 blues have emerged in this recent period, and one would expect a
 corresponding increase in blues scholarship, with new and younger
 writers and new interpretations expanding, refining, revising, or
 challenging old information and assumptions. There has been
 plenty written about blues in recent years, to be sure, including
 a number of groundbreaking works. Most of them, however, are by
 writers who were already active in blues research some twenty
 years ago or earlier. Much of the work by newer writers, on the
 other hand, has been journalistic interviews and artist profiles.
 Many are admittedly quite good, but they largely add to the
 storehouse of information about blues rather than provide new
 interpretations. Beyond this material we observe a proliferation
 of photo essays and picture books, instruction guides for
 performers, accounts of blues history that perpetuate or even
 simplify old understandings, and attempts to explain the blues as
 a whole according to some fashionable intellectual current or by
 means of a theory or methodology drawn from some other field of
 study. Sometimes it seems as if younger and newer scholars of the
 blues wish to avoid tackling the wealth of material that the
 genre has come to offer or the wealth of information and previous
 interpretation about blues, its personalities, history, social
 context, and meaning that has been compiled over the years.
 The purpose of the present collection of essays is to offer
 new perspectives on the blues by exploring previously neglected
 aspects, reinterpreting familiar material, conducting broader and
 more scientific surveys, and exploring specific blues
 performances in great depth and detail. These essays are by well-
 established blues writers, distinguished scholars in other fields
 of music, and several newly emerging writers. The authors
 represent the diversity of backgrounds that have contributed to
 blues scholarship over the years: folklorists, musicologists,
 anthropologists, musicians, fans, and collectors. Three of them
 are based outside the United States, reflecting the
 internationalization of blues music and blues research in recent
 decades. The authors' approaches to the blues include fieldwork
 and other direct encounters, analysis of recordings, and research
 in the printed literature. Each of the essays is the product of
 careful and wide-ranging scholarship, not a brainstorm dashed off
 quickly. All can serve as models for future study both of the
 blues and other types of music. These essays include a
 comparative study of the blues and African music, broad surveys
 full of detail about solo blues guitar styles, blues nicknames,
 and lyric themes of disillusion in the years following World War
 II, an in-depth portrait of an important but neglected early
 blues "advocate," detailed studies of individual performances by
 Son House, Robert Johnson, and Ella Fitzgerald from literary and
 musicological perspectives, an exploration of an early phase of
 blues in sheet music and vaudeville prior to commercial
 recording, and a reinterpretation of a particular style of blues
 known as zydeco. Four of these essays were published previously
 in the journal American Music. My experience in editing them and
 their favorable reception among scholars prompted me to gather
 this larger collection and make this scholarship more accessible
 not just to specialists in American music but to scholars in
 related disciplines and the many seriously interested lovers of
 blues music.
 There has long been an assumption that blues is somehow
 historically related to African music. At a general level, of
 course, this should be an obvious fact if only due to the African
 ancestry and cultural inheritance of the creators of the blues.
 The problem has always been to identify which specific traits are
 African and determine how these traits can be isolated from other
 traits found in the same music, and which are clearly of Western
 derivation or are original American creations. How can we discuss
 African traits in the blues when there is almost a century of
 earlier non-blues music by African Americans between the time
 when the last Africans entered America and the time when the
 blues came into being? For many years, writers wrestled with
 these problems. At first they were stymied by the diversity of
 African music and the lack of a broad knowledge of its
 characteristics. Writers would sometimes discuss the music of one
 particular region or ethnic group as if it represented all of
 sub-Saharan African music, finding similarities between it and
 the blues or jazz. Others would hear vaguely "bluesy"
 characteristics here and there in African music and point to them
 as sources or "roots" of the blues. Few blues experts, however,
 had more than a superficial knowledge of African music, and few
 African music specialists knew much about the blues. A
 breakthrough came in 1970 with Paul Oliver's Savannah
 Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues, in which the author
 identified a number of musical and contextual traits shared by
 the blues and the music of the savanna region of West Africa. In
 1999 the eminent Africanist Gerhard Kubik published Africa and
 the Blues, undoubtedly one of the most important works of blues
 scholarship in the last decade. There he refined Oliver's
 observations and gave them a musicological basis, showing how the
 blues scale was created from specific African sources. 
 InChapter 1, Kubik elaborates on some of the ideas presented
 in his book, isolating the concepts of bourdon and pentatonism as
 crucial in the formation of music with a true blues quality and
 showing that a "west-central Sudanic scalar template" is the
 likely basis for most blues scales. These scales normally contain
 "blue notes" at the third and seventh degrees. Kubik goes on,
 however, to discuss the more difficult problem of the blue note
 at the fifth degree of the scale and its likely African source in
 an extended version of the same scalar template. Mississippi
 blues artist Skip James' highly acclaimed 1931 recording of
 "Devil Got My Woman" serves as an example for discussing these
 issues. Using the same example, Kubik provides a somewhat more
 speculative analysis of possible relationships between scalar and
 textual elements in the blues. His observations stand entirely
 outside the framework of Western musicology and come from someone
 with field experience in seventeen African countries over more
 than forty years and numerous publications on many types of
 African music.
 Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff write on early blues sheet music
 and vaudeville performance in Chapter 2, an essay that should
 cause a revision in the prevailing view of blues prior to 1920,
 the year in which the first commercial blues recordings by black
 singers were made. Until recently our view of this era has been
 influenced by the reports of early folklorists, analysis of a
 small amount of sheet music, the songs and autobiographical
 writings of W. C. Handy, the man commonly known as the "Father of
 the Blues," and the later recollections of singers and musicians
 who had been active in this early period. Abbott and Seroff
 reveal a body of almost completely unexplored contemporary
 information about blues in the black vaudeville theater circuit
 drawn from black newspapers of the time, particularly the
 Indianapolis Freeman. We begin to visualize a vibrant
 professional music scene in which blues was a growing and
 controversial element, a scene not dominated by W. C. Handy but
 including many other interesting personalities, some of whom had
 already become stars and passed away before 1920. The authors
 show that popular blues was a cultural, social, and musical
 movement in the early years and not simply the creation of one or
 a few individual songwriters. They also show that blues began to
 enjoy widespread popularity in the South within a few years of
 its initial appearance as a new type of folk music, a fact that
 is not surprising, as the early participants in the popular blues
 movement were, like their audiences, little removed from a folk
 culture themselves.
 Elliott Hurwitt presents in Chapter 3 a different view of W.
 C. Handy by focusing on Handy's friend, advisor, and collaborator
 Abbe Niles. Just as Handy played an important early role in
 giving the blues an appeal to white American and international
 audiences, Niles played a parallel role in interpreting and
 explaining this music to the same audiences. In doing so, he
 became a blues advocate. In reviews, articles, and an
 introductory essay to a book-length blues collection by Handy,
 Niles expressed views and understandings that were remarkably
 perceptive at a time when blues was still in its early stages of
 development. As a fan, historian, critic, and promoter, coming to
 the music from outside its core culture, he paved the way for
 many other blues "advocates" in later years.
 In "The Hands of Blues Guitarists," Andrew M. Cohen offers a
 new treatment of an old issue. Since the 1960s one of the main
 approaches to the discussion of guitar-accompanied folk blues has
 been to categorize the material on a regional basis. Terms such
 as "Delta blues," "Piedmont blues," and "Texas blues" have become
 enshrined in the literature, indicating not only the blues of a
 particular place but also blues in a particular style. Most of
 the writing linking region and performance style has been
 superficial and impressionistic. Judgements made some thirty or
 forty years ago, when we knew much less about blues than we do
 now, have continued to be generally accepted by fans and scholars
 alike. They may, of course, prove to be essentially correct.
 Surprisingly, however, they have not been tested in a scientific
 or objective way despite the vast amount of documented musical
 material now available. Cohen, a guitarist with anthropological
 training, has taken a first step toward testing the older
 judgements and assumptions by constructing a sample of ninety-
 four blues guitarists born over a span of sixty-six years from
 all regions of the South. He restricts the discussion of style to
 a single but vital characteristic, the use of the right thumb for
 timekeeping and making melodic figures, demonstrating clear
 patterns of regional variation in the thumb's role as well as
 showing development of these patterns and roles over time. Cohen
 adds a further dimension to the discussion by correlating the
 players' hand postures with thumbing styles, regions, and changes
 over time. Ninety-four is still a relatively small segment of the
 total number of fingerpicking blues guitarists of whom there
 exist recordings or visual and biographical data. Cohen's visual
 and aural judgments need to be confirmed or revised by other
 scholars, and the sample needs to be enlarged. Whatever the final
 outcome, he has moved the discussion off the impressionistic
 level where it had stood for over thirty years, and it is likely
 that his approach will form the basis for future studies of this
 issue. One could envision the discussion of style expanded to
 include favorite keys and tunings, scales, other techniques
 besides thumbing patterns, and the vocal dimension of the music.
 The general approach could also be adapted to the study of other
 instrumental styles, particularly solo piano blues.
 My own essay on the nicknames of blues singers (Chapter 5)
 surveys a large sample of over three thousand blues artists, more
 than six times as large as any previous sample. It considers all
 artists who recorded blues between 1920 and 1970, the genre's
 peak years of development as an African American art form. The
 essay is concerned with the types of nicknames that artists have
 and the normal meanings of these nicknames in African American
 culture rather than with explanations of their origins in
 particular personal characteristics or experiences of the
 singers. It recognizes that many nicknames combine more than one
 meaning or can be understood on multiple symbolic levels. There
 are several distinct categories of nicknames and their
 percentages of use vary over time, especially before and after
 World War II. There are also significant differences in the
 types of nicknames held by male and female blues singers. Taken
 as a whole, the nicknames and their categories give a deep
 insight into the world of the blues and the meaning of this music
 within African American culture.
 "Preachin' the Blues," Luigi Monge's study of the text of
 Son House's 1930 recording of "Dry Spell Blues," is a penetrating
 look at one of the most unusual blues lyrics by one of the
 greatest artists in the genre's history. House alternated between
 being a preacher and a blues singer over his long life, and his
 personality embodied the conflict between sacred and secular
 values, between God and the devil. His blues songs were always
 serious and often deeply philosophical. He sang in a manner
 reminiscent of many later "soul" singers and often mentioned God
 in his verses, as well as another spiritual being that he called
 The Blues. His "Dry Spell Blues" was composed and recorded in the
 midst of a severe drought in his native Mississippi Delta. Monge
 relates House's text to this historical event and through a very
 precise and detailed analysis shows that it is a "blues prayer,"
 a novel type of expression that matched House's conflicted
 personality. Monge also reveals a remarkable symmetrical
 structure to the text and multiple levels of meaning encoded
 within it. It shows that Son House was one of the great composers
 of the blues as well as a great performing artist.
 Robert Johnson was inspired by Son House and he is viewed by
 many as one of the greatest figures in the blues in the period
 before World War II. This opinion has received recent support
 from the extraordinary sales success of a boxed set of Johnson's
 complete recorded works more than fifty years after his death.
 But what is it that makes his music in general and his individual
 performances great? Questions like this have been addressed for
 many years by musicologists in the study of Western art music,
 especially in respect to composers, and often in great detail. In
 recent decades ragtime and jazz composers and performers have
 begun to receive similar attention. Such detailed discussion is
 seldom given, however, to performers of blues and other simpler
 types of folk and popular music. When their individual works are
 cited for greatness, it is usually on account of one or more
 fairly obvious features, such as compositional or literary
 originality, improvisational ability, technical virtuosity, or
 emotional expression. After transcribing a partly improvised
 performance by Robert Johnson (thus making it appear more like a
 composition), musicologist James Bennighof examines these and
 other features of the piece in detail in Chapter 7, showing how
 Johnson combined them to produce a work of great complexity and
 creativity. While we may never know Johnson's ultimate intentions
 with respect to this or any other piece nor all of the forces
 that impelled his apparently tormented genius, Bennighof's
 rigorous application of musicological methodology enables us to
 understand a few moments of this highly creative
 composer/performer at work. In applying this methodology, he has
 adapted it to the blues tradition, avoiding jargon alien to the
 tradition and examining relevant aspects of Johnson's life, time
 and place, and overall musical output. More such studies of
 generally acknowledged great works in the blues would be welcome.
 Blues is not the exclusive property of those who define
 themselves as blues singers and blues musicians. In our desire to
 treat blues as a distinct and separate musical genre with its own
 characteristics, historical development, and personalities, we
 often lose sight of the fact that throughout its history blues
 has interacted with other types of folk music as well as popular
 genres such as ragtime, jazz, country and western, gospel, rock
 and roll, and rap. This interaction has been a two-way street,
 with blues drawing musical influences and personal participation
 from these other musical communities as well as contributing
 stylistic influences and specific songs to them. Many blues tunes
 are embedded in these other genres, and often they enjoy great
 popularity there, while falling outside the purview of scholars
 and commentators who deal with blues in a narrower sense. A case
 in point is the song "St. Louis Blues." Composed and published by
 W. C. Handy in 1914, it became a national, and eventually
 international, hit in mainstream popular music¿in fact, one of
 the biggest hit songs of the twentieth century. For a period of
 several years following the publication of "St. Louis Blues,"
 blues was a significant part of the spectrum of mainstream music.
 This is a fact that we easily overlook nearly a century later
 when blues once again enjoys this status. "St. Louis Blues" has
 been sung and recorded over the years by countless jazz and pop
 singers. The late Ella Fitzgerald was one such singer who
 featured this song in her repertoire. Although she is known as a
 jazz singer, even as one who never gave great emphasis to blues
 material, it would be fair to say that her versions of this song
 reached far more listeners than versions by most so-called blues
 singers. Fitzgerald's treatment of "St. Louis Blues" in one
 particular performance is analyzed here in detail by Katharine
 Cartwright in Chapter 8. The singer makes this song interesting
 by her use of the device of "quotation," that is, the
 interpolation of bits and pieces of this and other songs as
 performed and recorded by other singers. In using this device,
 Fitzgerald reveals many influences on her own style of singing.
 Cartwright explains these influences in a way that allows us to
 see Ella Fitzgerald as a truly original performer with wide
 ranging musical tastes, even when working with a song that many
 would consider to be overly familiar.
 The lyrics of blues songs have long been investigated by
 writers and commentators for the light that they can shed on
 African American community life and history. In the first half of
 the twentieth century writers tended to view these lyrics as
 expressions of "the Negro." Eventually they came to realize that
 blues represented the thought of only a segment of the African
 American community or even the thoughts of individuals. But
 whatever the case, most of the songs are shared with others and
 represent at least fairly widely held feelings and opinions. In
 "Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: A Decade of Disillusion in Black
 Blues and Gospel Song," Bob Groom, one of the pioneering British
 blues commentators of the 1960s, examines a number of blues songs
 composed in the decade following World War II to gauge feelings
 and attitudes toward contemporary events and conditions. Most
 previous research on blues lyrics has dealt with the period up to
 and including World War II, a fact that is surprising since the
 blues has experienced a longer history after the war than before
 it. Groom's article is innovative not only in exploring this more
 recent period but also in the sense that it reveals and examines
 a mood during this period, specifically a mood of disillusion. It
 does not merely relate a series of songs to specific historical
 events and trends. Writers in other fields can determine whether
 this mood in the blues is correlated with moods expressed in
 African American literature, press reports, and other vehicles of
 expression in the same period of time.
 In Chapter 10, folklorist John Minton has combined fieldwork
 with a study of recordings and literature to explore the origins
 of a regional and ethnic derivative of blues called zydeco, a
 style prevalent among musicians of Louisiana Creole background.
 In the late 1940s and early 1950s blues was bursting out from its
 geographical and cultural confines in the black Anglophone rural
 South and urban ghettos, reaching white audiences through
 recordings on independent labels, radio, migration, and
 integration. One result of this process was rock and roll, which
 became for a time a biracial mainstream popular music. Another
 group that lay in the path of blues influence at this time was
 French-speaking and bilingual Louisiana Creoles. This population
 was actually most accessible to blues influence in Texas cities,
 particularly Houston, where many Creoles had settled and come
 into contact with black Anglophone culture. Out of this contact,
 as Minton shows, zydeco was created. This music did not gain
 sigificant attention from outside the Creole community until some
 years later, by which time it had diffused back to the Creole
 homeland in South Louisiana. Its early development predominantly,
 if not exclusively, in Texas cities remained largely unknown
 outside those cities. Zydeco's advocates today associate its
 origins almost entirely with rural South Louisiana, where it
 frequently serves as a symbol of Creole ethnicity and tradition
 and as a lure to promote tourism and local pride. Minton's
 detailed examination of source material shows clearly that zydeco
 in its earliest manifestations was Louisiana music only in the
 sense that its creators had been born in Louisiana and were
 familiar with an older tradition of Louisiana Creole music. But
 to call it simply a Louisiana music without taking into
 consideration the urban Texas synthesis that it underwent would
 be like calling Chicago blues a Mississippi tradition because
 most of its chief practitioners came from that state. Minton's
 article serves as a corrective to facile assumptions and adds
 significantly to our knowledge of what zydeco is and where it
 came from.
 Taken together, these chapters contain some of the most
 innovative recent scholarship on the blues, examining it as
 literature, music, personal expression, and cultural product. It
 is hoped that they can serve as models and inspirations for
 future scholarship.
 
 I would like to thank all of the authors for their great patience
 while this collection went through the process of compilation,
 editing, revision, and final acceptance. I would also like to
 thank Judith McCulloh, Joan Catapano, Sara Luttfring, and
 Christina Walter at the University of Illinois Press for their
 editorial help and Scott L. Hines at the University of Memphis
 for help in assembling the final version and supplementing my
 meager computer skills.