In Search of the Blues, by Marybeth Hamilton
(Jonathan Cape, £12.99)
In Search of the Blues is a wrong-headed and silly book, but nonetheless a well-researched and interesting one—for blues buffs at least. In its curious petulance, it raises interesting questions about cultural conflicts and misunderstandings between white and black, rural and urban, sophisticate and primitive, male and female.
The blues is today part of our cultural wallpaper; but it was not ever thus. A small band of obsessive white collectors—men like James McKune, Alan Lomax and Sam Charters—were the first to notice, in the 1940s and 1950s, that many 78 rpm records marketed to poor rural southern blacks from the 1920s onwards were sublime works of art. Marybeth Hamilton draws vivid portraits of this group of eccentric loners—the so-called “blues mafia”—who first “discovered” Skip James, Son House, Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson. She brings to life their Meccas, such as Injun Joe’s tiny shop on West 47th St in New York (to which I made frequent pilgrimages as a teenager).
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