A Blues Bibliography: The International Literature of an Afro-American Music Genre (review)

A Blues Bibliography: The International Literature of an Afro-American Music Genre. By Robert Ford. Bromley, Kent, England: Paul Pelletier, 1999. [800 p. ISBN 0-9535928-0-4. £65.]

The first major book-length bibliography devoted to blues music was The Blues: A Bibliographical Guide, by Mary L. Hart, Brenda M. Eagles, and Lisa N. Howorth (New York: Garland, 1989; hereafter, Hart). Since then, the field of blues bibliography has exploded, in part because new magazines like Blues Access, Blues Revue, and Juke Blues have been established to address the rise in fan interest. An update of Hart seems unlikely, as its authors have retired or moved to other research areas. There have been individual efforts to bring blues bibliography up to date, notably Mary Katherine Aldin's Blues Magazine Selective Index: By Artist and Subject (Hollywood, Calif.: Mary Katherine Aldin, 1996- [for information write to P.O. Box 2407, Hollywood, CA 90078]) and Görgen Antonsson's online Blues Bibliographic Database (www.hub.org/bluesnet/gorgen). Still, a new book-length bibliography incorporating publications from the nineties has been needed. Robert Ford's Blues Bibliography is a welcome volume.

Ford's intention was to produce an "'artist-based' bibliography" (p. 7) of African American blues on the scale of classic discographies like Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye's Blues and Gospel Records, 1890-1943 (4th ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997]). Twenty-one of the volume's twenty-eight sections consist of biographical entries from John Abley to Hermes Zimmerman. The remaining sections include citations for general history, instruments, record labels, reference sources, regional style variations, and lyric and music transcriptions. At the end is an author index.

As one would expect, the volume bulges with more citations than Hart or Antonsson provide. Hart's numbered citations describe 4,717 items, and Antonsson, in his remarks on his Web site, estimates to have 15,000 entries through 1999. Ford leaves his citations unnumbered, presumably to allow for growth in future editions. With an average of 35 citations per page over 770 pages of the bibliography itself, he has included an estimated 26,955 items. The increase in biographical writing since 1989 is all the more apparent: Hart lists 2,793, Ford approximately 21,560 biographical entries. Both printed bibliographies include books, articles, and record liner notes, but Ford draws many citations from biographical directories such as Sheldon Harris's Blues Who's Who: A Biographical Dictionary of Blues Singers (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1979), Robert Santelli's Big Book of Blues: A Biographical Encyclopedia (New York: Penguin, 1993), and Colin Larkin's Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music (4 vols. [Enfield, Middlesex, England: Guinness Publishing, 1992]; Ford does not cite the second or third editions [1995, 1998]) and Guinness Who's Who of Blues (2d ed. [Enfield, Middlesex, England: Guinness Publishing, 1995]).

By including a separate section citing lyric and music transcriptions, Ford calls attention to text and music as secondary sources in their own right. Hart, by contrast, lists music transcriptions together with style analyses and general commentary in a section entitled "Music of the Blues," and lyrics collections are listed alongside cultural explications in "Poetry of the Blues."

I have used this volume in the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi and found it a comprehensive resource. When I turned to Ford for a reference question regarding Robert Bradley, I located a few helpful references to articles on this little-known Detroit street musician. Yet a few improvements would aid the researcher. One is the addition of running heads for each section to help users keep their place. In addition, a potential cause of confusion is the cross-referencing of record-label owners from the biography section to the label section (for example, Lillian McMurry: see Trumpet Records). Such a cross-reference is necessary, but my first impulse is to turn to the T's in...