The debt of gratitude I owe to those who helped bring Whose Blues? into being begins with the nameless scribes of Rev.com, who transcribed eight hours’ worth of “Blues Talk” YouTube videos quickly and accurately. Thanks for sparing me that thankless task! Thanks, too, to Ted Ownby and Ivo Kamps, my supervisors at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the English Department, both at the University of Mississippi, who offered to pay the cost of transcription at a very early moment when more prudent administrators might have wondered whether the book I envisioned would actually emerge from such an unlikely source.
Three chapters of Whose Blues? have previously been published in slightly different form as an outgrowth of that transcription-and-development process. Heartfelt thanks to Marcus Tribett at Arkansas Review, Jimmy Thomas at Study the South, and Emma Calabrese (and Ayse Erginer) at Southern Cultures for their conscientious editorial guidance, including many suggestions for revision that strengthened the resulting articles and book. I am grateful to all three journals for extending me the right to reprint.
Bar 9 began life as a paper delivered at the 2001 “Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years” conference at the University of Pittsburgh. I was invited to Pitt at the suggestion of two early mentors, Jonathan Arac and Marcus Rediker, who encouraged my fledgling attempts at scholarly writing and dreams of an academic career and whom it gives me great pleasure to thank here. Shepherded by editor and conference cochair Ronald Judy, the revised paper later appeared in boundary 2 and has been substantially rewritten for this volume. Bar 10 was originally published in slightly different form in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and Lisa Gail Collins, my esteemed colleagues in the Africana Studies Program at Vassar College between 2000 and 2002. I first delivered Bar 11 as a keynote lecture for the Twenty-Fourth annual Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb in 2016 at the invitation of Tim Ryan, one of my favorite blues literature scholars. A revised version was published in the Journal of Popular Music Education and has been further revised for its somewhat different audience here. I extend my grateful thanks to all parties for permission to reprint, and for encouragement tendered along the way.
I’m fortunate to have blues poet Derrick Harriell as a colleague at Ole Miss; a joint interview that E. M. Tran recently conducted with him and Tyehimba Jess helped deepen my understandings of contemporary African American literary investments in the blues. I’ve also benefited greatly from supervising the doctoral work of Josh-Wade Ferguson; his focus on Africadian blues writer George Elliott Clarke as well as Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Kiese Laymon, and Jesmyn Ward has given me a keener sense of blues’ range of use-values in the modern world. (Josh-Wade’s interview with Laymon, titled “Perpetual Reckoning,” provides the epigraph for Bar 4.)
The way I think about the blues has been critically shaped at every turn by the musicians I have been lucky enough to work, talk, and share time with over the years. Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee has been a source of continuing inspiration since the day we first met on 125th Street in Harlem back in 1986; I’m delighted that the documentary Satan & Adam, twenty-three years in the making, finally saw widespread release in 2018, when both Sterling and I were still alive and kicking and ready to do our thing one last time at the Tribeca Film Festival. My thanks to filmmaker V. Scott Balcerek for having faith in our story. Since my relocation from New York City to Oxford, Mississippi in 2002, I’ve gotten to know a whole new crew of local players, most of whom I’ve jammed or gigged with, some of whom I’ve hired to teach and perform at Hill Country Harmonica and/or visit with my graduate and undergraduate blues literature classes at the university. These include Bill Abel, Terry “Harmonica” Bean, Sam Carr, Jimmy “Duck” Holmes, Bill “Watermelon Slim” Homans, Mark “Muleman” Massey, Bill “Howl-N-Madd” Perry, Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, Josh “Razorblade” Stewart, Sharde Thomas, Andrew “Shine” Turner, and Leo “Bud” Welch. Sam, Josh, and Leo have passed on; the rest are still here—making superior music, bearing witness, teaching us things we need to know. Thanks, friends. Additional thanks to Aki Kumar for permission to reprint his lyrics and to Brandon Bailey for getting me started on that foot drum adventure and trusting me to produce his first album. My current blues partner, Alan Gross, appears nowhere in Whose Blues?, but he and our Blues Doctors duo have greatly enriched the last half-dozen years of my life. Sterling Magee’s nephew Rod Patterson, a singer, dancer, and motivational speaker, recently contacted me after seeing Satan & Adam, asking to join Alan and me in a trio featuring his uncle’s songs—one more example of the unlikely story lines that percolate through contemporary blues culture. (We call ourselves Sir Rod and the Blues Doctors.) My harmonica mentor Nat Riddles, who passed in 1991, has missed the last thirty years of our collective history, but I know he’d be chuckling at where we’ve ended up. This book is dedicated to his memory.
From time to time I had a research question that needed better answers than I could come up with on my own. I was lucky to have, both in-state and within easy email reach, Greg Johnson, blues curator at the department of Archives & Special Collections here on campus, and Scott Barretta, former editor of Living Blues and coauthor with Jim O’Neal of all the Mississippi Blues Trail markers. They have my warmest thanks for their help—including Greg’s late-stage help in locating, sourcing, and scanning several photos. Clay Motley, a scholar and fan of the Mississippi blues, helped solve the mystery of an untraceable Ma Rainey quote when I put the question to my Facebook friends, for which I’m grateful. I owe special thanks the two peer reviewers retained by UNC Press for their many excellent suggestions; this book benefited greatly from their shrewd appraisal. Thanks, too, to all the photographers whose images appear herein, a richly evocative cache testifying to the beauty, majesty, and dynamism of the performers who make this music.
Finally, I’d like to thank my son, Shaun, on the cusp of fourteen as I write these words, for the continuing provocation of his expanding musical instrumentarium, which has featured, in turn, trumpet, cello, electric bass, keyboard, tuba, bass clarinet, trombone, alto sax, flute, and hi-tension marching snare drum. For the moment he has settled on trumpet, bass, and snare, and is our resident master of Guitar Hero 3. I’m proud to have taught him his first blues scale and delighted finally to be out of hock from Amro Music in Memphis, where the salesmen look at Dad with bemusement every time we walk through the door. I have no idea what sort of music will be blasting or thumping or tinkling or tooting out of Shaun’s room next, and that is a great thing.
As for Sherrie: the adventure continues. Thanks for encouraging me to hit the road when you see that gleam in my eye, and for welcoming me home with a hug and a kiss when I return.