Jook Right On: Blues Stories and Blues Storytellers (review)

According to many blues performers and their audiences, the metaphoric relationship between blues performance and storytelling is definitive of the musical genre, its proximity to oral literature, and its cultural meanings. In Jook Right On, Barry Lee Pearson assembles a collection of "blues stories" to echo the narrative qualities evident in blues songs and the "values central to the blues tradition" (p. xiii). Claiming that the thematically arranged stories "speak for themselves," Pearson aims to illuminate "blues from the insider's perspective, focusing on personal relationships and the deep ties between artist and community" (p. xiii). Over two hundred brief excerpts from personal narratives of ninety-eight notable African American blues artists, or "blues experts," illustrate Pearson's claim (p. xxxii). The engaging stories are excerpts from interviews that the author conducted over the past thirty years with artists known for a broad swath of twentieth-century blues styles. Among these are artists who have appeared in prominent folk and blues festivals, dominated local or regional blues scenes, and headlined in tours and recording projects with international reach. Readers may contextualize the stories by consulting a twenty-one page appendix of brief biographical sketches for each contributor that also provides the dates of the Pearson interview.

In the fashion of a folktale collection, Pearson selects stories to illustrate variations on themes rather than to provide an encyclopedic rendering of artists' careers. The first chapter, "Blues Talk," provides a "blues primer"; here, artists discuss their definitions of the genre and their view of the links between word and song (pp. xxii-iii). "Living the Blues" then broadens the frame to discuss the social context of the workday and weekend life of southern African American communities during racial segregation and integration. Next, Pearson narrows the focus to the art and business of learning the blues and working the blues. He concludes with "The Last Word," a coda of five stories that are supposed to model the ending of many blues songs (p. xxviii). Within these five chapters, each story appears below a title and the teller's name; sometimes a snapshot of the teller appears nearby. The stories offer an oral history of the social contexts of blues music and musicians in rural and urban settings, and they show how the blues was shaped by the rhythms of work; church; weekend house parties; music nightclubs; and the music media of records, radio, and jukeboxes. This format reflects the tradition of interview-based documentation of the music and contexts of blues begun by John Work, Alan Lomax, and Paul Oliver and continued by many others over the past four decades. Pearson's contribution expands the historical perspective, including artists who have worked in the broader performance contexts that developed since the 1950s.

The author's analogy likens the book to a quilt, but one might say that the only stitching that binds together the stories in the text are the thematic implications of its subheadings or chapter titles. The author notes that the pieces selected for the book collectively illustrate themes of transformation, transgression, improvisation, and the use of repetition as a signifier—themes he convincingly asserts are shared among blues music and these "blues stories" (pp. xiv-xv). However, as readers begin to encounter the stories, no prefaces or head notes cue them about particular narrative qualities that may align with specific features of the blues idiom. Rather, the reader must do this expository work without the author's guidance; unfortunately, the author's commentary within each chapter is confined to an occasional endnote and the photograph captions. Readers must leave the quilt of stories and investigate the end matter to identify the historical and musical context of the speakers; they must find links to an artist's repertoire, musical compositions, and performance scenes on their own. This is in contrast to Pearson's Virginia Piedmont Blues (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), an...