Yonder Come the Blues: The Evolution of a Genre (review)

Yonder Come the Blues reprints three books (Savannah Syncopators; Blacks, Whites and Blues; and Recording the Blues) from the 1970-71 "blues series" edited by Paul Oliver and Tony Russell for Stein and Day/ Studio Vista. The series as a whole gathered and summarized what was recovered and realized in the 1960s about African American blues music. Twelve books in all were published, each containing 112 pages full of text, photographs, and notes. Hardcover and paperback editions were issued, and the latter came to be known as Blues Paperbacks. Several now-prominent American researchers had their first books published here, including John Fahey, William Ferris, Paul Garon, Bruce Bastin, and David Evans. European writers were represented by Bob Groom, Karl Gert zur Heide, Bengt Olsson, and Derrick Stewart-Baxter, as well as by Paul Oliver,Tony Russell, Robert M. W. Dixon, and John Godrich. Several titles had companion long-playing records of illustrative music examples released through CBS (England) Records and Saydisc/Matchbox labels. The books were foundational texts for their subjects in the 1970s; a few have remained definitive. All are worth seeking and collecting. A checklist of the Blues Series books with accompanying records may be found in Edward Komara, "From the Archive," Living Blues, no. 125 (January/ February 1996): 57.

In Savannah Syncopators (pp. 11-142), Paul Oliver reconsiders the African types of music described as antecedents in the jazz histories by Rudi Blesh (Shining Trumpets, 2d ed. [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975]), Marshall Stearns (The Story of Jazz [New York: Oxford University Press, 1956]), and Gunther Schuller (Early Jazz: Its Roots and Early Development [New York: Oxford University Press, 1968]). At the time, blues music was often discussed as a precursor to jazz; in response, Oliver and his American contemporary Samuel Charters began writing in 1959 of blues as distinct from jazz, with its own history and tradition. In his foray into African music, Oliver sought specific antecedents for blues that were not applicable to jazz. In his blues history The Story of the Blues (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1969; rev. ed., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), he did not discuss African antecedents, so Savannah Syncopators contains his observations and informed opinions on this subject. His reconsideration of the jazz literature regarding African antecedents in chapter 2, "Africa and the Jazz Historian," is still essential reading to beginning students of African American music. The aspects of blues Paul Oliver found lacking in the existing jazz history narratives were singing with lyrics and the use of stringed instruments such as fiddle, banjo, and guitar. Searching for antecedents, he went through the west coastal Africa regions to the inland savannah areas, especially where griots were performing in Arab-African cultures. In this report, Oliver presents firsthand observations from his years teaching in West Africa, draws on secondary written sources dating back to the 1700s, and refers to photographs and sound recordings as well (including his field recordings on Savannah Syncopators [CBS 52799, LP]). The book was too short to be a definitive statement on the subject as implied by the subtitle "African Retention in the Blues," and many of its questions remain unanswered. Still, it is a key text to which researchers should compare recent studies (as Oliver himself does in his afterword to the book [pp. 114-25]).

Blacks, Whites and Blues (pp. 143-242) is an early work by Tony Russell. He has since edited the forty-five issues of Old Time Music (1971-89), compiled and annotated more than sixty compact discs of pre-World War II country/hillbilly music for Document Records, and prepared for publication The Complete Country Music Discography 1922-1942 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). As the title of this study...