Long Lost Blues

The Tangled Roots of American Music

Jan. 18, 2010

midnight

Anyone interested in American music knows thatthe cotton fields of Mississippi were fertile ground for the blues; as theDelta soil was carried down river to New Orleans, the blues helped shape theemergence of jazz; and when the blues traveled by rail to Chicago, it turnedelectric and became one of the roots of rock’n’roll. All this is not only truebut also crucial, and yet isn’t the entire story of the emergence of blues asthe bedrock for most of the music identified as distinctly American.

Peter C. Muir explores a little understoodchapter of this story in Long Lost Blues:Popular Blues in America,1850-1920 (University of Illinois Press).Especially in the first two decades of the last century, many Tin Pan Alley poptunes played around with blues in their song titles andsometimesin theirmusic, laying a foundation for Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith and other importanturban blues singers in the 1920s. Blues scholars have disdained most of the TinPan Alley music Muir investigates through surviving sheet music, acousticalrecordings and piano rolls as “inauthentic.” After all, the 1916 tune “I FoundSomeone to Chase the Blues Away” by the entirely obscure Murray Bloom scarcelyleaves an impression when compared to Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail.”

Muir’s study is fascinating, with implicationslarger than the history of blues in its examination of the interplay betweenorally passed-along folk music (which was where the blues stood at the dawn ofthe 20^th century) and popular music transmitted through commercialmedia. With the spread of communication and transportation networks, even folkmusicians in remote hollows of the backwoods could not remain entirely innocentof popular music, and pop tunesmiths freely borrowed from folksingers once theybecame aware of their music. Muir finds that for the nascent music called theblues, which grew from the black soil of the Southern states near the end ofthe 1800s, one principal bridge of transmission to the wider culture wasAfrican-American vaudeville and minstrel shows, which influenced their whitecounterparts. Another route was the popularity of W.C. Handy, theAfrican-American songwriter whose “Memphis Blues” became a huge and influentialhit in 1912.

Defining his subject broadly, Muir considers anysong with “Blues” in its title to be blues, a risky proposition ameliorated byhis insistence on placing each song on a spectrum from purely folk to pure pop.He finds a large amount of material, some never recorded but sold as sheetmusic, that falls somewhere in the middle, including popular songs with bluenotes or a 12-bar sequence or lyrics that echo the African-American experience.Especially fascinating is his discussion of the convergence of black bluesmusic with the currency of the word among whites. Blues was a popular way ofreferring to neurasthenia, the fashionably fin-de-siecle “psycho-physicalreaction to the excesses of modern life.” It was a middle class malady for whichthe working poor had little time, and partly explains the acceptance by white America of acathartic music called the bluesalbeit usually in whitewashed form.

LongLost Blues is part of a wider reassessment, represented byElijah Wald’s recent How the BeatlesDestroyed Rock’n’Roll, which expandsbeyond the narrow assumptions and tidy preconceptions of the original cohort ofBaby Boomer rock-blues-jazz critics. The full story of vernacular music in the20^th century was much more complicated than usually admittedamessier history with at least as many roots in the commercial market as in thefolklore of romantic bluesmen and country minstrels. Muir’s exploration of howblues found its way to Tin Pan Alley is another addition to understanding thecomplexity of what we call American music.