In 1959 Sam Charters wrote The Country Blues [1], the first book to pique white America’s interest in the blues. This groundbreaking work helped spark the blues revival of the early ’60s. One of the things that was so engaging about Charters’ work was the fact that he focused on the singers of the blues, not just their songs. Earlier folklorists like Odum and Johnson and the Lomaxes had song lyrics as their primary interest. Charters, foreshadowing today’s folklorist, looked beyond just the songs for those things that tell us about the blues musicians’ personal lives and left us thirsting for more. Barry Lee Pearson follows in this tradition with his latest, excellent offering, Jook Right On: Blues Stories and Blues Storytellers.

Over the years Pearson has been one of our most consistently objective reporters of the blues world. His Sounds So Good To Me: The Bluesman’s Story and Virginia Piedmont Blues: The Lives and Art of Two Virginia Bluesmen are sensitive looks at the total context of what it is to be a bluesman. It is uncertain whether musicians of the 1920s or ’30s would have called themselves such a limiting term as “bluesman”—they had to play pop tunes, spirituals, and novelty songs, all in order to survive the competition of radio and jukeboxes. Early bluesmen such as Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, and Sylvester Weaver would probably have referred to themselves only as musicians. Yet, as Pearson points out, the majority of the musicians in his interviews purposely choose to be called blues artists because it links them to a very special cultural tradition, invented or not. Although the early artists did not want to pigeonhole themselves in a genre that would not allow sufficient flexibility to appeal to all audiences, the book’s narrators take pride in their connection with their roots. Pearson appears to be acutely aware of these factors and approaches his subjects with appropriate reverence and objectivity. His last book, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found, is truly one of the new breed of works about the blues (and about especially Johnson) that doesn’t romanticize or create a larger-than-life personage. Johnson appears as he actually was: a talented musician who drew upon older resources and injected them with his own postmodern, existential understanding of the world as it was changing around him. Perhaps Johnson was aware of the fact that his generation would be one of the last to follow in the paths of those before him, figures such as Willie Brown, Kokomo Arnold, Son House, and others. Whatever the case, Pearson treated that topic with his typically passion and objectivity.

Jook Right On: Blues Stories and Blues Storytellers continues in this vein, but pulls the reader into a deep and rewarding world. With over two hundred narratives, Jook Right On could possibly produce the same kind of blues revival in the 2000s that Charters’ work did almost fifty years earlier. Pearson defines the narratives as “blues stories” and contends they are twofold in nature: 1) they are narratives told by blues musicians, and 2) they embody qualities found in the blues (xiii). If anyone understands these elements, it is Pearson, since these stories are the result of over thirty years of work: interviewing, recording, living, traveling, and playing with the musicians. As a result, his introduction is an extremely valuable yet concise overview of what one can expect to find in both the blues and in these stories: individual concerns within a collective, shared context, proverbs and story lines containing a “characteristic attitude of affirmation” (xxxi), and humor and irony. By his own admission, Pearson’s design for Jook Right On was “a collection of stories pure and simple… intended to be valued for their own sake” (xxxi). While this may seem like a simple task, choosing the right blend of narratives to reflect what those stories tell us about blues musicians and the blues is a delicate undertaking, only achieved by someone like Pearson who is deeply acquainted with the blues.

Pearson’s chapters delineate a number of elements necessary for us to “feel” what he believes these blues artists are trying to tell us. “Blues Talk” highlights the link between spoken word and song. “Living the Blues” uses stories to us about how the blues come out of life. “Learning the Blues” traces the “live and learn” growth of a blues artist. “Working the Blues” includes some of the most poignant and touching tales in the whole text and addresses such questions as what IS a professional blues artist? and What are the trade-offs when one decides that this is the path one wants to follow as a means of making a living? Years ago the great blues pianist Roosevelt Sykes was quoted as saying that the blues musician is like a doctor: “Doctor studies medicine—‘course he ain’t sick, but he studies medicine to help them people… A blues player ain’t got no blues, but he plays for worried people.” According to Sykes, therefore, “…the doctor works from the outside of the body to the inside of the body. But the blues works on the insides of the insides” [2]. This doctoring is a tremendous responsibility that blues artists do not take lightly, as this chapter demonstrates.

The range of artists represented in the book is fascinating indeed, from contemporaries of Robert Johnson’s, such as David “Honeyboy” Edwards and Johnny Shines, to Fontella Bass whose 1965 hit, “Rescue Me,” made number five on both the R&B; and Pop Charts. The texts themselves are a delight to read. More often than not even the briefest narrative can transport the reader into another realm, another sensibility, and another mode of feeling. There are, of course, the obligatory narratives about Robert Johnson (what blues book today would be considered complete without such stories?) but even these are a joy because they eschew the typical “mystery” of Johnson to reveal him as fully human, with foibles and gentleness and joy.

There is such a variety of tales in this volume that to attempt to single out any one as being more special than the others is difficult, but there is one that struck me as particularly amusing and telling in its depiction of the hardships of being a blues musician. Joe Willie Wilkins tells how the aforementioned Roosevelt Sykes, always known as a dapper dresser, had to go to the bathroom while performing with his band. Sykes attempted to step off the back of the stage to relieve himself. The members of the band were quite high (it is unclear whether they were drunk or high on another substance) and Roosevelt, unaware of the distance between the edge of the stage and the ground, wound up lying on his back, dressed in his suit, prostrate in the mud. The band members rushed over to see how he was, and when the question was posed, “Roosevelt, what you doing down there?” he looked up calmly and answered back, “Just relaxing.” One of the most endearing elements in this book is that, for the blues musician, there is always a way to turn hardship into something worth mentioning and nurturing, medicine for those of us who can’t play the blues for ourselves.

Jook Right On is an exceptional addition to any blues library and enjoyable not only for its scholarship but simply as a good read. For anyone wanting to understand the essence of the blues, without ornamentation, with honesty as its suit of clothes, this is an excellent work, and Pearson has made another highly worthy contribution to our understanding of this genre and its context, artists, and life.

[1] Sam Charters. 1959. The Country Blues. New York: Rinehart & Company.

[2] Francis Davis. 2003. The History of the Blues, 206. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press.

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[Review length: 1295 words • Review posted on June 21, 2006]