In the 1930s, as John and Alan Lomax recorded blues singers in the rural South for the Library of Congress, Harvard’s Milman Parry set forth to record the balladeers of Yugoslavia. Parry’s interest in the Balkans was limited. He went only to seek evidence for his theory that Homer’s epics were composed not by a single poet but grew from centuries of oral performance and were only written down later. He argued—successfully—that the foundation of Western literature was not just the spoken but the sung word. Hearing Homer’s Song traces Parry’s short, quirky life and his influence on how nonliterate cultures are understood and performances can be valued over written texts. (Think about how rock and hip-hop lyrics gain their force from being performed, not read) In Robert Kanigel’s astute telling, Parry embraced the world in all its strangeness. Setting his Yugoslav work alongside the Lomax Mississippi recordings, the kinship between the recurring phrases of The Iliad and Delta blues becomes apparent.
