1. Harris, “Can White People Play the Blues?”
2. “Businessman Tries to End Mississippi’s Bad Rap.”
3. Upholt, “Up All Night on Farish Street.”
4. “Opening Plenary: Blues Summit on the State of the Music Today.”
5. Outrage at Iglauer within Chicago’s blues community was focused primarily on the following statement: “If I’m criticized, and I assume I am, for not signing more African-American artists, the answer is: show me an African-American artist who has got a vision for where to carry some blues into the future, who is an efficient bandleader, who has their act together businesswise enough so that I can work with them, who doesn’t have a significant drug or alcohol issue, and who has live charisma, and I will take that artist real seriously.” Qtd. in Whiteis, “At 40 Years Old, Alligator Records Continues to Evolve.”
6. For a quick overview of this scene, see “Top 30 Southern Soul, Rhythm & Blues Albums.” An equally enlightening overview recently showed up in my mailbox at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture: a distribution copy of a CD called Blues Mix 28: Dance Party Soul (2019) issued by Ecko Records of Memphis, featuring O. B. Buchana (“You’re Welcome to the Party”), KT (“Kitty Kayt Tamer”), Gerod Rayborn (“I Love My Blues”), Sweet Angel (“Don’t Let the Clean Up Woman Pick Up Your Man”), Jaye Hammer (“I Ain’t Leaving Mississippi” remix), and others.
7. One significant exception to my claim is Nellie “Tiger” Travis; a participant on at least one other panel in the “Blues and the Spirit” symposium, Travis does indeed have experience, and an audience, in both the southern soul blues scene and Chicago’s mainstream club scene.
8. “Blues Talk.”
9. For more on the possible Native American origins of the blues, see Gioia, The Guitar and the New World, esp. 83–126; and Briggs, “Exploring Native American Influence on the Blues.” Also see “ITTA BENA.”
10. In a brief but still-useful survey, Barlow divides blues scholarship circa 1989 into three broad approaches: “blues as folklore, blues as oral literature, and blues as cultural history.” Barlow, “Looking Up at Down,” 344–45.
11. Neal, “Any Day Now,” esp. 424–25, 432–33.
12. Leitch, “Blues Southwestern Style”; Grazian, Blue Chicago.
1. Freeman, “Don’t Forget the Blues.”
2. Wilson, “Preface to Three Plays.”
3. According to Google Analytics, my two YouTube channels, Modern Blues Harmonica and Gussow’s Classic Blues Harmonica Videos, had a total of 3,289,742 video views in calendar year 2018. A total of 137,247 users from 192 countries and territories visited ModernBluesHarmonica.com during that same period.
4. “Award Winners and Nominees.”
5. Kubik, Africa and the Blues, 93–95.
6. Gussow, “Blues Heard ’Round the World,” 9–12. For a photo of the Guam Blues Scholars, see Gussow, Journeyman’s Road, xv.
7. I am using scare quotes around the word “white” to acknowledge both the occulted African and African American contribution to bluegrass—the banjo and black fiddling traditions in old-time string bands—and the occasional presence of African American players (such as mandolinist Richie Brown) in otherwise all-white settings. See Durman, “African American Old-Time String Band Music.”
8. Wilson, “Preface to Three Plays,” 564–65.
9. Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 57–58.
10. For a discussion of this historical dynamic, see Lemann, The Promised Land; and Dittmer, Local People, esp. 384–88.
11. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 49.
12. Qtd. in Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 237. LeRoi Jones argues both sides of the equation in the space of three paragraphs in Blues People. “It is impossible to say simply, ‘Slavery created blues,’ and be done with it,” he writes, “or at least it seems almost impossible to make such a statement and sound intelligent saying it” (50). But he also writes, “Blues did begin in slavery, and it is from that ‘peculiar institution,’ as it was known euphemistically, that blues did find its particular form” (50).
13. Salaam, What Is Life?, 7.
14. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 47.
15. Edwards, 49.
16. This figure is drawn from the U.S. Census of 1860. See “Selected Statistics on Slavery in the United States.”
17. Johnson, Soul by Soul, esp. 78–116.
18. Ferris, Blues from the Delta, 19.
19. Haralambos, Soul Music, 72.
20. Harris, Untitled referee’s report.
21. Murray, Stomping the Blues, 6, 10, 45, 68–69.
1. Gussow, “Teaching the Blues.”
2. Rowe, Chicago Blues, 165–68; Goins, Blues All Day Long, 112–15.
3. Berlin’s song, made famous by Ruth Etting in the 1927 Ziegfeld Follies, was recorded by Etting and many other artists. “Ruth Etting.”
4. Rogin, Blackface, White Noise, 111.
5. Keil sketches the “moldy fig” syndrome among blues commentators in Urban Blues, 34–39.
6. King, Blues All around Me, 242.
7. Gussow, “‘If Bessie Smith Had Killed Some White People,’” 239–40.
8. Jahn, Muntu, xxi.
9. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 45, 47.
10. Edwards, 47.
11. Baker, Turning South Again, 93.
12. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 121.
13. Ferris, Blues from the Delta, 19. The saying appears in many versions; Ferris collected his from Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown, a resident of Leland, Mississippi, he interviewed in the late 1960s who had run a juke joint for more than thirty years.
14. Foster, ’Til Death or Distance Do Us Part, 22, 36.
15. Salaam, “the blues aesthetic,” 14.
16. Handy, Father of the Blues, 145–47.
17. Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 359.
18. Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 68. All subsequent citations of this work in this chapter are included parenthetically in the text.
1. For an extended discussion of enactments of beloved community in contemporary blues culture, see Gussow, “Where Is the Love?” Also see Barlow, “Looking Up at Down,” 346. “An unusual cross-section of people are currently engaged in blues culture. Their race, class, and generational differences have made it one of those rare, eclectic, and in many ways utopian social experiments that can take place only on the fringes of the dominant culture. … This proclivity to break down cultural barriers and to refashion race and social relations along more egalitarian lines gives the blues culture its utopian potential.”
2. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 142.
3. For a critique of “colorblind” thinking in a blues context, see Herrick, “Performing Blues and Navigating Race in Transcultural Contexts,” 6.
4. The world of rock offers an important parallel for recent black bluesist critiques of the mainstream blues scene. The BRC (Black Rock Coalition) Manifesto (1985), a statement around which that insurgent cohort of African American rock musicians organized, insisted that “rock and roll is Black music and we are its heirs. … BRC members assert cultural ownership, stressing that African American innovators made central contributions to the development of rock.” The BRC was particularly angered by two issues: the way in which rock music (as opposed to 1950s rock and roll) had been defined as white by rock journalists and historians, and the way in which white radio programmers and record labels had effectively conspired to exclude black rockers from radio playlists and deny them recording contracts. See Mahon, Right to Rock, esp. 86–103.
5. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, 100.
6. The two entries read as follows: “(1930) N.Y. Times 5 Jan. VIII. 2 x/4 Riverside—Ted Lewis, the moaning blues man, is the week’s big item in this house; (1953) Zanesville (Ohio) Signal 3 July 4/3 Mez Mezzrow, the Big Blues Man, was arrested in Paris for peddling merrywanna.” “bluesman,” Oxford English Dictionary.
7. Clar, “Sammelreferat,” 225; Wilgus, “From the Record Review Editor,” 284.
8. Wilgus, “The Blues,” 185.
9. See, for example, Love, “Down and Dirty with G. Love”: “When I think about Mississippi John Hurt, I think of adjectives like gentle, soft-spoken, soothing, sly, charming and personable.”
10. Davis, “Charley Patton.”
11. Wald, Escaping the Delta, 58.
12. Wald, 60.
13. Wald, 118.
14. Wald, 118.
15. Wald, 7.
16. Recent scholarship has eroded the claim made by both Wald and McGinley that the classic blueswomen were the first stars of the blues. In Bar 5, I discuss Butler “String Beans” May, a black male vaudevillian who never recorded but who rose to prominence in the decade before the blues craze, working in a duo with his wife, Sweetie. Abbott and Seroff make a convincing case that he, not the blueswomen, was the first widely known blues star. See Abbott and Seroff, The Original Blues, 67–123.
17. Wald, Escaping the Delta, xv, xxiv.
18. “Publishers Weekly List of Bestselling Novels.”
19. Abbott and Seroff, Ragged but Right, 217.
20. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, esp. 119–27.
21. Wald, Escaping the Delta, 3.
22. Reich, “Sugar Blue a Soaring Voice for the Blues.”
23. Tran, “Obsession, Desperation, and Curiosity,” n.p.
24. Tran, n.p.
25. Lomax, Blues in the Mississippi Night, n.p.
26. Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 11–12, 45–59.
27. King, Blues All around Me, 56–57.
28. King, 55–56.
29. Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 22, 45, 57–59.
30. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 47.
31. Ferris, Give My Poor Heart Ease, 114.
32. “Five Stages of Grief.”
33. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 121.
34. O’Neal and van Singel, The Voice of the Blues, 235.
35. Gussow, Journeyman’s Road, 113–14.
36. Tate writes, for example, of how his mother “once wrote a poem of the same name [i.e., “Everything but the Burden”] to decry the long-standing, ongoing, and unarrested theft of African-American cultural properties by thieving, flavorless whitefolk. A jeremiad against the ways Our music, Our fashion, Our hairstyles, Our dances, Our anatomical traits, Our bodies, Our Soul continue to be considered ever ripe for the plucking and the biting by the same crafty devils who brought you the African slave trade and the Middle Passage.” Tate, Everything but the Burden, 2.
37. zur Heide, Deep South Piano, 36–37.
1. “Examined Life—Cornell West.”
2. Hughes, “Bad Luck Card.”
3. Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 90.
4. Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil, 34–38.
5. Kubik, Africa and the Blues, 42–46; Ottenheimer, “Comoro Crossroads,” 34.
6. Handy, Father of the Blues, 79.
7. Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’.
8. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues.
9. Hurston, Mules and Men, 143.
10. DeSalvo, The Language of the Blues, xiv.
11. See Steptoe, “Big Mama Thornton, Little Richard, and the Queer Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” 61.
12. Qtd. in Oliver, Screening the Blues, 166.
13. Qtd. in Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 85.
14. Berlin, “If You Don’t Want My Peaches.” Also see Cartwright, “Guess These People Wonder What I’m Singing,” 288–91; Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 72; and McGinley, Staging the Blues, 31–79, esp. 36–37.
15. McGinley, Staging the Blues, 31–79, esp. 36–37.
16. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 4.
17. Murray, Stomping the Blues, 10.
18. Salaam, “the blues aesthetic,” 13–14.
19. Langston Hughes to Carl Van Vechten, qtd. in Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 111.
1. Jones, Dutchman, 30.
2. “Bridging the Blues”; “Clarksdale, Mississippi.”
3. “The Blues Were Born.”
4. Albertson, Bessie, 12.
5. Work, American Negro Songs and Spirituals, 32–33.
6. Abbott and Seroff, The Original Blues, 170.
7. Abbott and Seroff, 287.
8. Reich, “Sugar Blue a Soaring Voice for the Blues.”
9. Brackett, Categorizing Sound, 84.
10. Handy, Father of the Blues, 199–200.
11. Muir, Long Lost Blues, 83–85, 182.
12. Abbott and Seroff, The Original Blues, 67–123, esp. 70, 74–76, 104, 106, 115, 116–20; 125, 127, 136, 144.
13. Keil, Urban Blues, 233.
14. Abbott and Seroff, The Original Blues, 262–63, 275–76. “When [Houston-based blues pianist] Sammy Price traveled with the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA) in the 1920s, he performed for a ‘white only’ audience during ‘Midnight Rambles’ on the weekend and for African Americans on other nights.” Steptoe, Houston Bound, 173.
15. The phrase appears in Neal’s essay “The Black Arts Movement” (1968): “The motive behind the black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas and white ways of looking at the world.”
16. For histories of the blues that example this paragraph’s claims, see Palmer, Deep Blues, 23–25, 43–46, 48–57; Barlow, “Looking Up at Down,” 25–40; and Davis, The History of the Blues, 23–29.
17. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth; Wald, Escaping the Delta, 85.
18. Ottenheimer, “Blues in the Heartland,” 16, 36.
19. Ottenheimer, 36.
20. Kubik, Africa and the Blues, 94.
21. Morton, “I Created Jazz in 1902, Not W. C. Handy.”
22. Robertson, W. C. Handy, 30.
23. Handy, Father of the Blues, 10. All subsequent citations of this work in this chapter are included parenthetically in the text.
24. For more on this development, see Toll, Blacking Up, 195–233.
25. I write at length about this idea in Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 81–93.
26. Tracy, Langston Hughes and the Blues, 115.
27. Qtd. in Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 194.
28. Hughes, “Songs Called the Blues.”
29. Handy, Blues: An Anthology, 85.
30. Robertson, W. C. Handy, 97.
31. Blues histories that quote this passage include Oakley, The Devil’s Music, 9; Barlow, “Looking Up at Down,” 31; and Davis, The History of the Blues, 25.
32. Troutman, Kika Kila, 156–59.
33. Kubik, Africa and the Blues, 16–20; Powell, “The Diddley Bow.”
34. Du Bois, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” 264; Murphy, “The Survival of African Music in America.”
35. Wagner, Disturbing the Peace, 27, 37.
36. “Prince McCoy.”
37. See, for example, Evans, “Charley Patton,” 152, 158–59; and Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 60, 62.
1. Peabody, “Notes on Negro Music,” 148–49.
2. Odum, “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry,” 137.
3. Odum, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, 470.
4. Brown, “The Blues as Folk Poetry,” 540–41.
5. Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 66.
6. Hurston, 66.
7. Hughes, “Note on Commercial Theatre,” 190.
8. Thanks to Elijah Wald and David Hall for clarifying this point.
9. Salaam, “the blues aesthetic,” 14.
10. Charters and Kunstadt, Jazz, 96.
11. Thanks to Greg Johnson for answering my question about Mississippi-born blues singers other than Bogan who recorded during this period.
12. Shaw, The Jazz Age, 76–77.
13. “I’ve Got the Yes, We Have No Bananas Blues!”
14. Laird, Moanin’ Low, 533.
15. Qtd. in Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues, 169–70.
16. Qtd. in Dickerson, Goin’ Back to Memphis, 24.
17. Hughes, “Ma Man,” 66–67.
18. Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 694.
19. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 30.
20. Hughes, The Big Sea, 40.
21. Rampersad, introduction, xxii.
22. Hughes, The Big Sea, 206–7.
23. Hughes, 208–9.
24. Tracy, Langston Hughes and the Blues, 113.
25. Hughes, The Big Sea, 217.
26. Hughes, “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” 206.
27. Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 140.
28. Rampersad, 141.
29. Hughes, “The Weary Blues.”
30. Hughes, The Big Sea, 215.
31. Qtd. in Tracy, Langston Hughes and the Blues, 155.
32. Williams, “The Blues Roots,” 448.
1. Handy, Father of the Blues, 176.
2. Hughes, The Collected Poems, 82, 249.
3. See Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 219, 241.
4. Handy, Father of the Blues, 54.
5. Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, 20, 46.
6. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 262.
7. Hurston, 260.
8. Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History,” 266.
9. Gates, “Why Richard Wright Hated Zora Neale Hurston.”
10. Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 10–11. All subsequent citations of this work (TE) in this chapter are included parenthetically in the text.
11. Gates, “Why Richard Wright Hated Zora Neale Hurston.”
12. Qtd. in Gates.
13. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 58.
14. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 69.
15. Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 90.
16. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 4. All subsequent citations of this work (DT) in this chapter are included parenthetically in the text.
17. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 45.
18. Hurston, “The Ocoee Riot.”
19. Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”
20. Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 151.
21. Boyd, 151.
22. Hurston, Mules and Men, 57. All subsequent citations of this work (MAM) in this chapter are included parenthetically in the text.
23. Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 235–52.
24. See “The ‘Get-Down’ Quality: Descending Direction in Melody, Sculpture, Dance,” in Thompson, African Art in Motion, 13–14.
25. Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston, 113.
26. Hurston, 122.
27. Hughes, The Collected Poems, 112.
28. See Johnson, “‘The World in a Jug,’” 401–15.
29. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 4, 8–9.
30. Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston, 131–32.
31. For a reading of young Joe Starks as the embodiment of the “Jody” figure in black folk culture, a well-dressed, seductive “back-door man” who steals Janie away from hardworking but unglamorous Logan Killicks, see Steptoe, “‘Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone,’” esp. 253, 258–59.
1. Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” 90. All subsequent citations of this work in this chapter are included parenthetically in the text.
2. Wright, Black Boy, 161. All subsequent citations of this work in this chapter are included parenthetically in the text.
3. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 4–5.
4. Rowley, Richard Wright, 43.
5. Ellison, “‘My Strength Comes from Louis Armstrong,’” 283.
6. See Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 237; and Rowley, Richard Wright, 256–57.
7. For brief mentions of Wright’s blues poetry and liner notes, see Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 516; Rowley, Richard Wright, 227; and Werner, “Bigger’s Blues,” 143. Folklorist William Ferris, invoking commonalities between Wright and his black Mississippi contemporary, blues bassist and lyricist Willie Dixon (1915–92), offers a notably more generous assessment of Wright as a blues writer, someone who “saw a clear parallel between his work and the lyrics of the blues performer.” Ferris, “Richard Wright and the Blues.”
8. For “spatial mobility,” see Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature; and Murray, Train Whistle Guitar. For “mass blues audience” and “technologies of reproduction,” see Titon, Early Downhome Blues; and Harrison, Black Pearls. For “new sexual freedom,” see Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism.
9. Qtd. in Sackheim, The Blues Line, 391.
10. “Stackolee.”
11. Murray, Train Whistle Guitar, 13.
12. Townsend, A Blues Life, 6–7.
13. Harris, “No Outlet for the Blues,” 58.
14. Cone, “The Blues,” 236.
15. Ellison, “Remembering Richard Wright,” 199.
16. Ellison, “A Party Down at the Square,” 3–11.
17. Ellison, Invisible Man, 141.
18. Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter,” 167, 180.
19. Ellison, Invisible Man, 28.
20. Ellison, 4–5.
21. Garon, Woman with Guitar, 69–70.
22. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 199.
1. Sharpe, In the Wake, 5.
2. Blues Foundation, “2019 Blues and Race Panel, Part 1.”
3. Robinson, “Listening for the Country.”
4. Tran, “Obsession, Desperation, and Curiosity.”
5. Tran.
6. See Benston, “Renovating Blackness.”
7. Gates, “Black Creativity,” 74–75.
8. This list includes panelists Sugar Blue and Billy Branch at the “State of the Blues Today” at the Dominican University symposium discussed in Bar 1, along with Guy Davis and Corey Harris. For Davis, see Matheis, “Favored Son.” For Harris, see Frede, “Words Sound Power,” 31. “You know,” Harris told Living Blues, “one time this guy took my picture after I told him not to. I was on the street. He had one of those little disposable cameras. I said, ‘Why’d you take my picture?’ He said, ‘Well, my son said, ‘I just want a picture of this big fucking black guy playing a guitar.’ He was talking about me. I said, ‘You’re a real idiot, you know that. You sit here and say that to me, how do you think I’m going to react.’ I said, ‘Give me your camera.’ I took his camera and I threw it in the sewer.’”
9. Jones, Dutchman, 34–35.
10. “BluesFirst.” This source shows the Blues Foundation’s web-based pitch for the previous year’s event in February 2001. Much of the language is identical or similar to that used to promote the 2002 event, but the latter event was expanded to three days.
11. Salaam, What Is Life?, 19.
12. The phrase is from Jones, “The Changing Same.”
13. Wood, “Are Negroes Ashamed of the Blues?” See also “Why I’ll Always Sing the Blues, 95” “Although B. B. considers the type of songs he plays and sings America’s greatest contribution to the music world, he realizes ‘a lot of people don’t like to be associated with the blues because the songs embarrass them. … It’s a drag. You know why? Because it is Negro music and they are afraid of anything Negro while we’re going through this integration business.’… B. B. realizes that the blues are still going through their period of disgrace as did ragtime, jazz and swing.”
14. King, Blues All around Me, 213.
15. Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 37.
16. Karenga, “Black Art,” 9.
17. Madhubuti, Don’t Cry, Scream.
18. Sanchez, “liberation / poem.”
19. Haralambos, Soul Music, 118.
20. Jones, Blues People, 95.
21. Neal, “The Ethos of the Blues,” 42.
22. Knight, “Haiku.”
23. Neal, “For Our Women” and “Can You Dig It?,” 55, 71–72; Ferdinand (Kalamu ya Salaam), “The Blues (in two parts),” 375–77; Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues; Cortez, “Lead,” “Dinah’s Back in Town,” and “You Know”; Crouch, “The Big Feeling” and “Howlin’ Wolf”; Dent, “For Walter Washington,” 372–73; Dumas, “Keep the Faith Blues,” 370; Giovanni, “Poem For Aretha,” “Master Charge Blues”; Henderson, “Blues, Soul, and Black Identity”; 348; Redmond, “Double Clutch Lover”; Troupe, “Impressions / of Chicago; for Howlin Wolf”; Young, “A Dance for Ma Rainey,” 366.
24. Ferdinand (Kalamu ya Salaam), “The Blues (in two parts),” 378–79.
25. Crouch, “The Big Feeling,” 45.
26. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, 122.
27. Cone, 105.
28. Jones, “The Changing Same,” 180.
29. Madhubuti, We Walk the Way of the New World, 5.
30. See Beaumont, Preachin’ the Blues, esp. 9–25.
31. Henderson, “Blues, Soul, and Black Identity,” 36.
32. Groom, The Blues Revival.
33. Welburn, “The Black Aesthetic Imperative,” 147.
34. Henderson, “Blues, Soul, and Black Identity,” 14.
35. “Down Home and Dirty.”
36. Bims, “Blues City.”
37. Qtd. in Haralambos, Soul Music, 91.
38. Haralambos, 91.
39. Hernton, “Dynamite Growing Out of Their Skulls.”
40. Husock, untitled essay, n.p.
41. Madhubuti, We Walk the Way of the New World, 19.
42. An advertisement for the 1999 Santa Cruz (Calif.) Blues Festival featured headliners Jimmie Vaughan (Saturday) and Gregg Allman (Sunday), with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Rod Piazza and the Mighty Flyers, the BoneShakers, Nina Storey, Ronnie Earl, and W. C. Clark. The BoneShakers are a “mixed” band; W. C. Clark is African American. Blues Revue 47 (May 1999): 61.
43. Welburn, “The Black Aesthetic Imperative,” 132.
44. Henderson, “Blues, Soul, and Black Identity,” 38.
45. Goldman, “Why Do Whites Sing Black?”
46. Goldman.
47. Neal, “The Black Arts Movement.”
48. Rowell, “An Interview with Larry Neal,” 29.
49. Thompson, “Media Means.”
50. Qtd. in Amini, “Books Noted,” 51.
51. Neal, “The Black Arts Movement.”
52. Garon, “White Blues.”
53. Neal, “The Sound of Soul,” 43–47.
54. Baker, “Critical Change and Blues Continuity,” 82.
55. Qtd. in Harrison, “Larry Neal,” 173.
56. Ann Arbor Blues Festival program, 1969, n.p.
57. Ann Arbor Blues Festival program, 1970, n.p.
58. Haralambos, Soul Music, 169.
59. Gilmore, “Washington Blues Festival ’70.”
60. “Don L. Lee Interviews Stokely Carmichael,” 72.
61. Gilmore, “Washington Blues Festival ’70.”
62. Baraka, foreword, 9.
1. In September 2015, responding to the fact that my Dirty-South Blues Harp channel (currently the Modern Blues Harmonica channel) had been permanently disabled from monetization, I created a new channel, Gussow’s Classic Blues Harmonica Videos, monetized it from the outset, and obeyed YouTube’s guidelines. It now has 6.6 million lifetime views and 100,000 subscribers.
2. Komson Blues, “Blues Harmonica”; Antic, “Predrag Antic Testimonial for Modern Blues Harmonica.”
3. Haralambos, Soul Music, 90.
4. King, Blues All around Me, 242.
5. Reich, “Sugar Blue a Soaring Voice for the Blues.”
6. Reich.
7. “Postmodern globalization for the blues,” according to Vincent Leitch in his study of the contemporary Oklahoma City blues scene, “has meant becoming multiracial, decentralized, international, and heterogeneous.” Leitch, “Blues Southwestern Style,” 140.
8. Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 42, 44.
9. O’Neal, “Junior Wells,” 11.
10. Field, Harps, Harmonicas, and Heavy Breathers, 229. When he was a teenager in Memphis, Charlie Musselwhite, seven years older than Wilson, spent time at the homes of Noah Lewis and Will Shade. “Musicians regularly gathered [there] and often ‘were very willing to show me things on the guitar,’” Musselwhite remembered, “at a time when ‘black kids my age weren’t interested in their music.’” Herrick, “Performing Blues and Navigating Race in Transcultural Contexts,” 14.
11. King, “The American Dream,” 22.
12. Glover, Blues Harp.
13. I write at length about my apprenticeship with Nat Riddles in Gussow, Mister Satan’s Apprentice.
14. Barrett, “About David Barrett.”
15. Gindick, “Jon’s Mail Order Store.”
16. Advertising first appeared on YouTube on August 22, 2007, six months after I uploaded my first video. Sweney, “First Ads Appear on YouTube Clips.”
17. Gussow, “Modern Blues Harmonica”; Hyde, The Gift.
18. I am exaggerating slightly. Of course blues harmonica instructional books and the occasional instructional CDs and DVDs continue to be released, sold, and shipped; you can find most of them on Amazon. But in the past decade, a number of blues harmonica teachers have begun to offer downloadable and/or paywall-protected video instructionals, including Ronnie Shellist, David Barrett, Jason Ricci, Sandy Weltman, and, in the United Kingdom, Tomlin Leckie and Ben Hewlett.
19. Aldin, review of Weeds Like Us, 78–79.
20. Hill Country Harmonica is merely one of several contemporary workshop environments in which African American blues elders teach groups of students in face-to-face settings. Other significant examples include the Port Townsend (Wash.) Acoustic Blues Workshop; Blues & Swing Week at the Augusta Heritage Center at Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, W.Va.; Traditions Weeks at Common Ground on the Hill in Westminster, Md.; Fernando Jones’s Blues Camp in Chicago; and, in the United Kingdom Blues Week at the University of Northampton.
21. “Harmonica Blues with a ‘Brand’ New Beat.”
22. Bailey and Gussow, “Superstition.”
1. Sometimes the eleventh and twelfth bar together are called the turnaround; a few people even refer to bars nine through twelve as the turnaround.
2. As of 2018, only 13 out of more than 170 performers in the BHOF were white (7.5 percent). This calculation is derived from the list of inductees (1980–2018) provided in the Wikipedia entry “Blues Hall of Fame.”
3. For other examples of Japanese / African American collaboration in the contemporary Chicago blues scene, see Herrick, “Performing Blues and Navigating Race in Transcultural Contexts,” 4 (on the partnership of Shunsuke “Shun” Kikuta and J. W. Williams); and Lee, Sugar Brown: The Shade of Blues (the blues journey of Dr. Ken Kawashima, PhD, including his time with Tail Dragger Jones).
4. This biographical portrait draws on information found on the bio page and elsewhere on Naito’s personal website, www.shojinaito.com, along with my personal knowledge, based on several visits to Filisko’s Monday-night class at the Old Town School of Folk Music and a longtime subscription to You Missed Monday, Filisko’s weekly newsletter.
5. McTurk, Tokyo Blues.
6. Garon, “White Blues.”
7. “Blind Lemon Brothers.”
8. “M1 The Call Performed by Monster.”
9. Lee, “Sugar Brown.” This portrait of Kawashima was assembled from Lee’s documentary and the following online sources: “About Sugar Brown,” “Samm Bennett Interviews Sugar Brown,” and “Sugar Brown, blues singer_songwriter.”
10. Whiteis, “At 40 Years Old, Alligator Records Continues to Evolve.”
11. See, for example, “The Mississippi Blues Fest.”
12. The festival’s programming over three days was assembled from the following sources: “Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival”; “Edmonton’s Labatt Blues Festival 2011”; Levesque, “Blues Festival Cooks Up Tasty Combos”; Levesque, “Guitar Shorty Stands Tall at Blues Fest.”
13. Semuels, “The Racist History of Portland.”
14. “Mahindra Blues Festival 2018.”
15. “Award Winners and Nominees.”
16. Rollins, “Festival to Celebrate Blues Roots.”
17. In his important new study, Blues Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Chicago (2019), Whiteis perfectly illustrates the tensions and paradoxes of our contemporary blues moment. He argues that his book’s “multigenerational, multisubgenre perspective” emphasizes Chicago’s “living [blues] tradition as a dynamic and flexible one, capable of maintaining both its cultural specificity and its universal humanistic appeal as it continues to widen its scope and its range among musicians and audiences, both locally and on the national and international levels” (257). Although the contemporary Chicago blues scene has produced a number of significant non–African American performers in recent years, including Sumito “Ariyo” Ariyoshi, Barrelhouse Chuck, Rockin’ Johnny Burgin, Joanna Connor, Bob Corritore, Joe Filisko, Billy Flynn, Steve Freund, Pierre Lacocque, Tad Robinson, Matthew Skoller, and Dave Specter, and although some of those musicians are mentioned and even praised by the performers profiled in Blues Legacy—as peers, bandmates, fellow recording artists—all forty-nine of the blues performers listed in the table of contents are African American. There’s a disjunction, in other words, between the actual transracial texture of contemporary Chicago blues culture, a texture evoked by Whiteis’s informants, and the all-black cast of that city’s “living tradition” as configured by Whiteis’s larger structural decision about who deserves profiling.
18. A page on guitarist Joe Bonamassa’s website proclaiming “The Best Modern Female Blues Musicians” lists seven white women, most of whom play electric guitar (in the order he ranks them: Ana Popovic, Samantha Fish, Joane Shaw Taylor, the Larkin Poe duo, Heather Gillis, Susan Tedeschi, Danielle Nicole) followed by three African American women (Ruthie Foster, Shemekia Copeland, Southern Avenue fronted by Tierinii Jackson). Macaluso, “The Best Modern Female Blues Musicians.”
19. “The Enlightenment of W. C. Handy.”
20. Here it is worth noting two different ways blues music lives on in contemporary hip hop: sampling and father/son duos. In “They Just Don’t Know” (2009), to cite a representative example, the Memphis-based rapper Gyft samples the opening bars of “Come On (Let the Good Times Roll)” (1960), a widely covered hit for New Orleans blues singer Earl King. Recordings by Albert King, B. B. King, and Howlin’ Wolf have all been sampled in this way. In a pair of father/son duos, “Bridging the Gap” (2004) by Olu Dara and Nas and “Uncle Tom Is Dead” (2004) by Guy and Martial Davis, the sonic and attitudinal difference between blues and hip hop, along with underlying continuities, is dramatized as a call-and-response dialogue between a blues-voiced father and a rap-voiced son—a dialogue that, in the case of the Davises, becomes a dozens-style exchange of insults.
21. “The blues community,” Neff argues, “preserves culture on its own terms … ; instead of fading away, the blues defies the strains of time by updating and strengthening itself, remaining relevant to the community’s contemporary needs. … The dynamic nature of Black Atlantic music defies genre labels and historical definitions, which in turn frustrates a dominant market that relies on the branding of an ‘authentic’ product. … Cultural practice in the Mississippi Delta resists, at its deepest levels, efforts to dictate the boundaries of its creativity according to the rhetoric of blues authenticity.” Neff, Let the World Listen Right, 13.
22. Eagle, untitled video. Transcription by the author.
23. Komson Blues, “Blues Harmonica.”
24. Gussow, “Sterling Magee and Adam Gussow.”
25. Komson, “How to Sing Blues Songs.”
26. “Komson Blues.”
27. “About Hindi Man Blues.”
28. Levesque, “Software Engineer Turned Bluesman.”
29. Kumar, “Dilruba by Aki Kumar.”
30. Kumar, “All Bark No Bite.” I have modified these published lyrics slightly to reflect the way that Kumar actually sings them on the recording.