August 15, 2020
A blues scholar and musician navigates the muddy waters of the genre's racial divisions. Blues music, writes Gussow, is in the midst of a fraught debate between what he calls "Black bluesism," the notion that only Black musicians have standing to play the music, and "blues universalism," the idea that the music speaks to themes of heartbreak and loss everybody experiences. The former ideology denies contributions White artists have brought to the genre; the latter blithely ignores the music's complex relationship to Black history. Gussow doesn't pick a side, nor does he exactly synthesize the two. Rather, across 12 chapters (cannily called "bars"), he discusses the pervasive mythologies that surround blues music, its role in American literature, and the role of race in programming blues festivals. If it doesn't quite add up to a cohesive argument, Gussow does do an intriguing job of troubling the waters. He counters ideas that the blues are rooted in Black suffering (blues songs are as much about pleasure as pain), that it was a rural form that migrated to the city (Bessie Smith's experience suggests it was the other way around), and that W.C. Handy "invented" the blues; it's more correct to say he established a particular version of it. The author is also insightful on how Black writers like Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston all integrated blues music in different ways--though Wright, for his part, was a terrible blues lyricist. Gussow discusses how he's implicated in this as a White blues harmonica player who has spread the music's word globally. Though he doesn't present a sustained grand unified theory about race and blues music, the book's range proves his point that the blues is an unsettled genre, open to a host of arguments. An insightful work that connects contemporary culture to an old-school genre.
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September 1, 2020
Gussow (English, Southern studies, Univ. of Mississippi; Beyond the Crossroads), a white blues harmonica performer/teacher, concert promoter, and music writer, stitches together a dozen rewritten YouTube lectures and three previously published articles to understand the current dominance of the blues scene by white artists. In somewhat meandering chapters, he describes the complex emergence of the blues at the turn of the 20th century through the innovations of mostly Black and a few white musicians; the distinctive musical characteristics of blues music and lyrics; and how an African American fear of white-perpetrated violence helped give rise to the blues form. Gussow spends the last section of the book on the development of blues literature by such pioneers as W.C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and the writers of the Sixties Black Arts Movement. VERDICT Extremely knowledgeable but a bit overly academic, Gussow ably details the African American core of the blues and the shifting racial dynamics that have made the music so compelling to white Americans and blues fans in other cultures. Blues scholars will find the book illuminating.--David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle
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