Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music (review)

Because the blues in the Delta region in the northwest corner of Mississippi is so much a part of the region’s oral culture, little about it has the appearance to historians of being known for certain. As a result, many presentations of Delta blues history have had to rely on much that some readers may take as speculation, folktale, even myth. Whatever failings as history that Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues (New York: Viking, 1981) may have had, Palmer did attempt to “fight fire with fire,” that is, to address a few myths not with facts, but with new myths of his own. That W. W. Norton has published a book on Delta blues is not surprising, since it has published in three editions one of the key books about African American music, Eileen Southern’s Music of Black Americans (1971; 1983; 1997). But what sort of book is Gioia’s Delta Blues?

His previous books include three volumes on jazz (especially The History of Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997]), and his 2006 Duke University Press publications Work Songs and Healing Songs may be regarded as broadening his research scope. Studying the blues is a logical move from jazz studies, since jazz musicians use blues forms as bases of improvisation. Taking up Delta blues, despite its difficulties to historians because of its lack of written and notated documents, follows from Gioia’s study of work songs because of the work-song phrasing of many pre-1942 (“pre-war”) Delta blues singers. But his thesis that “[rock music] is the true final destination of the Delta sound” (p. 6) strikes me as out of step with his previous studies, and debatable in view of the very limited role that Delta blues played in blues overall during the early years of rock (1954–63) until British rock groups from 1964 on brought Delta styles to great prominence. While the stripped-down instrumentation (often a single guitar) lends to Delta blues a primitive-seeming sound, it does not mean necessarily that Delta blues has a primal function as the source of all blues—although it is tempting and very easy to think so. Historians have long been divided over whether blues began in the Delta and spread outward, or whether it developed across the South from Arkansas to Georgia. The first two chapters of Lawrence Cohn’s Nothing But The Blues (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993) each present the opposing viewpoints of that debate: Samuel Charters (“Working on the Building: Roots and Influences,” pp. 13–31) took the Delta-centric view, and David Evans (“Goin’ Up The Country: Blues in Texas and the Deep South,” pp. 33–85) thought blues was the result of the South as a whole. For the sake of his thesis, Gioia appears to be a Delta-centrist, on the side claiming that the blues—or at least the most influential of all blues styles—comes from the Delta. One need not be a Delta-centrist to relate the history of Delta blues; in fact, one may be better off not being one, so as to notice and discuss without bias the outside influences on Delta blues. One such example is Bessie Smith, whom Gioia mentions on pp. 40–42, but does not comment on her influence. Charlie Patton used her rendition of “Mountain Top Blues” for his 1929 Paramount record “Hammer [Hammock] Blues,” and Son House and Skip James each took lyrics from her “Work House Blues” release for their own blues.

Instead of a continuous narrative, Gioia uses a series of chapter-length portraits of individual musicians to relate his history. Those he singles out are W. C. Handy, Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and B. B. King. Palmer had followed a similar plan featuring...