Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come from: Lyrics and History (review)

Since its origins in the late fifties blues studies have predominantly focused on lyrics, rather than music, to trace influences and patterns of transmission, as they tend to be more distinct and easier to describe. This approach was pioneered by Paul Oliver, whose seminal works demonstrated that many blues songs share lyric formulas and themes that contain valuable data about the black experience in the United States in the early twentieth century.

The merits and flexibility of this approach are demonstrated in this volume, the byproduct of a conference at the University of Metz, France in 2002. Methodology forms the common link between the essays, though at least half are further unified by their exploration of links between blues and historical events.

A striking number of blues are commentaries on events that affected African American communities, and thus function as important repositories of oral history. In “High Water Everywhere” David Evans surveys African American songs about the catastrophic flood of the Mississippi River in 1927. Evans ties a number of songs to contemporary news accounts and also reveals a heretofore unnoticed market for musical accounts of the flood. Luigi Monge’s “Death by Fire” explores the similar case of the Nachez Rhythm Club fire of 1940, which likewise generated a flurry of recordings; perhaps because of the visceral nature of the event, the theme endured into the 1990s. Paul Oliver’s contribution chronicles the similar longevity of “The Bully of the Town” theme; though its origins are unclear, it shares characteristics with songs documenting violent incidents in turn-of-the-century St. Louis. Guido van Rijn, who in recent years has produced monographs on blues dealing with the policies of presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, continues the series with a look back to the administration of Calvin Coolidge. Finally, Tom Freeland and Chris Smith tie a song recorded by John and Alan at the Parcham prison farm to a white feud in northern Mississippi.

The remaining three essays are of equally high quality, though less thematically linked. Editor Robert Springer provides a brilliant essay on song family groupings, tracing some of the most endemic couplets of the blues to their earliest recorded sources. John Cowley has labored for decades to bring the music of the Caribbean into the field of African American musical studies, and here establishes concrete links between early American blues and songs from Trinidad, Jamaica, and the West Indies. The volume concludes with an essay on Ethel Waters by Randall Cherry, which amplifies recent claims of her importance as an artist but seems ill-placed in this collection.

All of the essays are well-written and assiduously researched and documented, yet completely accessible to those with no musical background. It is highly recommended as a glimpse into the rich anthropological, folkloric, and historical information early American popular music has to offer.