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7 Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND AESTHETIC VALUE IN DELTA BLUES JAMES BENNIGHOF The issue of aesthetic value implicitly informs most studies of the blues, as it does most studies of other musics. Fundamental decisions about which pieces are worthy of study and about the nature of their importance depend on judgments about the manner in which they are better or worse than others. Such value judgments are generally tacit, but not because they do not merit examination; indeed, we should continually examine them so as to specify assessments and criteria in the clearest possible terms.1 The degree to which such conclusions admit scrutiny and discussion depends on the analysis that supports them. Specific analytical observations should be made in the context of the piece as a whole, and the significance of these observations should be judged with reference to the range of possible musical choices in the relevant style.In fact these objectives have found a fairly natural home in the critical analysis of much Western concert music. Both the specificity with which musical events are notated and their abstract nature have lent themselves to this kind of assessment of their interrelationships.2 Less evident have been the ways that the study of aesthetic value in the blues or many other vernacular musics might incorporate such an analytical approach; this study and this approach have not commonly engaged each other in an explicit way. On the one hand, aesthetically attractive qualities of vernacular music have often been described in ways that do not readily admit discussion or debate. Observations might be either too general or too specific—the appeal of general qualities in a piece might be mentioned in a way that does not help to compare it with others, or specific features might CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND AESTHETIC VALUE IN DELTA BLUES . 259 be cited without being evaluated in the context of the whole work.Meaningful assessments of value are difficult in such cases.For example,such criticism would fail to show how many other works share the general qualities of the piece and how the particular piece compares with those others. Alternatively, as striking as a particular feature may be,one will still want to know whether it relates to the other features of the piece to create coherence,interest,beauty, elegance, or other aesthetic desiderata. For its part, the analytical approach previously outlined has not easily accommodated some of the most aesthetically compelling attributes of vernacular music. In the case of Robert Johnson’s“Rambling on My Mind,” for example, a critical analysis should somehow address the music’s oftenmentioned emotional intensity and visceral appeal,3 and it should interpret aesthetic qualities in the context of cultural, stylistic, and technical circumstances .4 But the variety and imprecision of these features,as compared with specifically musical events, have made it difficult to incorporate them into such an analysis.5 Despite these difficulties, considerable groundwork has been laid for the kind of aesthetic analysis of blues performances that I have outlined. David Evans, for example, has discussed the various aesthetic criteria that seem to have been applied to early and traditional folk blues—a sense of generally applicable “truth” (particularly as embodied in the text),6 tradition, and familiarity . He contrasts these with commercially preferred qualities of lyric originality, thematic coherence, and standardization of musical structure, and he comments on ways that folklorists have subscribed to both these approaches in various situations.7 In Early Downhome Blues, Jeff Todd Titon pursues several issues relevant to aesthetic questions; in addition to discussing the general milieu in which folk blues flourished and the singers’ perspectives on various aspects of performance and composition, Titon transcribes significant portions of forty-eight performances and uses these as a basis for developing a“song-producing system,”a compositionally oriented description of customary stylistic elements.8 These studies notwithstanding, critics of the blues seldom examine an individual piece or performance methodically to address the nature and extent of its particular aesthetic value. Unlike scholars of Western art music, they rarely ask how this piece is special—how it stands out among blues pieces or uses the resources available to blues pieces to constitute a singularly striking work of art. Greil Marcus’s comments on Johnson are instructive here.On the one hand,Marcus relates both personal and historical reactions to Johnson that suggest Johnson’s music to be singularly striking...

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