The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music, and: Nothing but the Blues: The Music and the Musicians (review)

The collections of articles edited by Allan F. Moore and Laurence Cohn represent two of the finest books on the blues currently available in English, an assessment only altered by the more recent publication of the comprehensive Routledge Encyclopedia of the Bluesedited by Edward Komara (2006). Both give a fine overall study of the music, the artists, the record industry, and the various ways their histories have been told. The first collection mostly represents the work of British scholars, while the second gathers U.S. authors.

Moore is a professor of popular music at the University of Surrey (UK). His Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Musicbrings together eleven scholarly chapters, giving an extensive introduction to the academic study of the blues and gospel music from many points of entry. In the opening chapter, “Surveying the Field: Our Knowledge of Blues and Gospel Music,” Moore explains that while the first blues to be published in the United States date from 1908, gospel music seems to be much older, although that genre was often known in the nineteenth century (and possibly before) as “sacred music” or “sacred songs” and later as “Holy roller hymns.” The author begins by acknowledging the vital musical contributions of pioneers like Charley Patton, Son House, and Skip James (p. 7), and he also highlights the work of scholars who have analyzed their music. He emphasizes the early research by English folklorist Paul Oliver and film documentarian Giles Oakley (p. 7). Also highlighted are more recent publications that connect blues and gospel with their African roots; in a true Atlantic studies approach, Moore discusses John Storm Roberts’s concept of “African retentions” and Samuel Floyd’s use of the call-and-response techniques that are common to cultural expressions on both continents (p. 10). Of course, other chapters also mention the essential research of U.S. folklorists like Sam Charters and John and Alan Lomax.

Written by Jeff Todd Titon, the second chapter is on “labels” and refers not to recording companies but to musical styles. Closely examining the genres of blues and gospel and their many subgenres (“East Coast blues,” “Classic blues,” “Urban blues,” and “Southern blues”), the chapter presents information that will be valuable for anyone learning about this topic. The short chapter usefully includes hints and testimonies from the artists themselves about the histories of these genres, and Titon acknowledges that “bluesmen, like scholars, can be stupefyingly wrong in their theories” of generic origins (p. 19).

The third chapter focuses on the important 1890–1920 period, which marks the emergence of the blues as we know it today. David Evans’s essay covers the whole twentieth century and describes the evolution of the blues, which has now become an international form, although it is mainly appreciated by white audiences. Evans sees the blues revival of the 1960s as a turning point for the diffusion (and reappropriation) of this music (p. 42). In chapter four, Don Cusic offers a similarly synthetic treatment of the genesis and evolution of gospel music, connecting developments as seemingly disparate as seventeenth- century psalm singing in New Jersey and New England, the early recordings (on 78 rpm discs) of classic gospel songs (probably from nineteenth century) such as “Amazing Grace” and “Go Down, Moses” (p. 52), and the later contributions of twentieth-century legends like Mahalia Jackson and Sam Cooke (p. 55). We learn much about the origins of Black gospel standards like “Peace in the Valley” (p. 55) and the Orioles’ “Crying in the Chapel” and “You Send Me” (p...