The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ’n’ Roll by Preston Lauderbach (review)

[Erratum]

For over a century, examinations of the blues and blues-rooted music have shaped critical discussions of African American cultural production in the United States. Scholars and writers, assuming a range of positions along the blues continuum, have explored and discussed ways that the blues connect artists and audiences to African American experiences. Sterling Brown, Daphne Duval Harrison, Sherley Anne Williams, Dwight Andrews, and Julio Finn, are among those who situate the blues within broader discussions of aesthetics and culture. Recognizing the blues’ capacity to move fluidly between expressive forms and performance modes, their work facilitates discussions that make it possible to connect poetry by Duriel E. Harris to collages by Romare Bearden, and bring Furry Lewis’ guitar stylings into conversation with the vocals of Rachelle Farell.

Preston Lauderbach’s The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ’N’ Roll (2011) contributes to this tradition in the study of Black music. In the course of his detailed narrative history, Lauderbach maps the music business in Black America and discusses developments in blues-rooted music throughout the twentieth century. Identifying the deep imprint that the blues have made upon the United States and American culture, The Chitlin’ Circuit surveys blues responses to conditions in African American life. Investigating a set of distinct social and geographic spaces during specific historical moments, Lauderbach’s study delivers an extended examination of African American life during the Great Migration–era. The Chitlin’ Circuit charts the blues’ movements into an urban, industrial North as well as its adaptations to changing circumstances in the South. The volume, thereby, connects the form and function of Black music to social conditions experienced by African Americans throughout the United States.

Pursuing these ends, The Chitlin’ Circuit engages the groundbreaking work that poet and critic Amiri Baraka performs in Blues People (1963). However, Lauderbach’s study forges this connection while making claims for a broader discussion of “American music” and working through notions of Black music and the color line that differ greatly from those espoused by Baraka in Blues People. For example, writing about the big-band era in the chapter “Swing, from Verb to Noun,” Baraka asserts that as “widespread development of the swing style [during the 1930s and 1940s] … pass[ed] into the mainstream of American culture, in fact, [it] could be seen as an integral part of that culture.” He goes on to suggest that this “Americanizing” process was responsible loss of “authentic tone” among swing bands and a movement away from what he understands as “Afro-American musical tradition.” In Chitlin’ Circuit, Lauderbach extends this point in his discussion of rock-n-roll and in post-War Black America, pointing out that “[as] creative and economic energies shifted from the nightclub to the recording studio. … black Main Street’s importance to American culture was erased from sight” (267).

Thoroughly researched, and professionally written, Lauderbach’s incorporates journalistic elements while combining methods and approaches that he draws from areas such as ethnomusicology and cultural studies. The Chitlin’ Circuit stands out as a highly accessible hybrid work, capable of appealing to a variety of readers, including students examining American popular culture and/or Black music. As it transports readers to what Lauderbach refers to as “nondescript places,” The Chitlin’ Circuit accesses sites and spaces where blues and Black America connect. From Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis to the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi, and on through a string of Elks Clubs and VFW Halls that run from Macon, Georgia, to Cincinnati, Ohio, the study highlights the nuanced relationships between African American cultural production and the economic realities of African American life in the United States. The Chitlin’ Circuit effectively chronicles conditions and circumstances experienced by African American musicians and performers working in Jim Crow America.

Lauderbach’s skillful use of personal interviews and archival sources, including a wealth of materials gathered from the Black press, illustrates the dynamic and intimate engagement between blues-rooted...