Using the search power of the internet, the authors have compiled the most comprehensive and reliable encyclopedia of blues musicians to date. It includes artists working the full spectrum of the blues tradition, rhythm and blues, soul, and soul blues, and even some jazz—both major artists and side men—significantly adding to the listings commonly found in other biographical reference works. Inspired by Sheldon Harris’s Blues Who’s Who (1979), their book departs from the standard Who’s Who format in several significant ways. First, their primary goal was to track down the regional origins of as many artists as possible, as precisely as possible, with an eye toward noting specific regional elements which shaped and characterized the artists’ local tradition.
Secondly, their approach to region differs from the more simplistic Delta, Southwest, or Southeast triad, or even state-based designations. Instead, they use ecoregions based on the maps of the Environmental Protection Agency. For example, what was once commonly referred to as the Mississippi Delta or Mississippi Hill Country, is now replaced by Mississippi embayment and Mississippi loess plains. These ecoregional designations are further broken down by state in alphabetical order, as in Mississippi embayment, Arkansas up to Mississippi embayment, Tennessee. Finally, artists born in these areas are then entered chronologically by date of birth. While ecoregions take some getting used to, they help bear out the authors’ contention that blues cultures are determined or shaped by environmental factors, by geographical and historical conditions as well as by agricultural practices.
As to format, following a brief introduction, a list of abbreviations, and a chronology or time line, there are seven mini chapters: 1) “Blues as Culture,” 2) “King Cotton,” 3) “On Her Daddy’s Sugar Farm,” 4) “State of Origin,” 5) “Fleeing the Fields,” 6) “Ecoregions,” and 7) “Organizing Ecoregions.” These chapters delineate the authors’ goals and methods in a slim thirty-eight pages serving as an extended introduction broken into subsections. Chapter 8, “Artists by Ecoregion of Birth,” which runs from pages 39 to 498, including notes, presents the primary results of the authors’ research. Chapter 9 presents a separate listing for vaudeville-era artists by birth state, rationalized by the authors’ contention that these artists’ stylistic elements owe more to traditions of the stage than to the region of their birth. Finally, Chapter 10, “State Only Known,” is a seven-page list of artists for whom the authors have yet to find more detailed information. A selected artists’ discography and a selected bibliography follow, as well as an all-important forty-four page index, which provides the only way to locate any targeted entry. Unfortunately, the index does not differentiate between the artists’ biographical entry and other pages on which the artist may be mentioned. For major figures like B.B. King or Muddy Waters, this could lead to thirty or so page references and it can take a bit of patience to find the entry you are seeking.
LeBlanc and Eagle include census data from the year 1920, which happens to include information on 1919 agricultural production, the Social Security Death Index, and Ancestry.com among others. While such sources add reliability to their research, they also shape their entries. Recalling their focus on origins, each entry includes birth details down to the county level, date and place of death and burial, names of parents and siblings. After that the entries are quite uneven, from the above-mentioned minimum to a page and a half for Ray Charles. This is a trade-off of sorts: maximum number of entries for depth of biographical profile, but a choice they are willing to make. They give us an accurate place to start and we can turn to other sources for more details. Moreover, more uniform detail would call for at least a second volume of what is already a substantial work.
Eagle, an Australian, and LeBlanc, a Canadian, continue a trend dating back to the early blues revival when British researchers contributed greatly to blues scholarship. Working at a distance from their subject, they rely primarily on secondary sources. Taken altogether, their use of census data, statistics, and charts, and the more technical regional designations of the EPA, lend the work a social science cast, at least in the introductory chapters. They promote an approach to blues cultures determined by the ecoregions in which blues flourished or failed. For example, we find black cotton farmers along the Mississippi embayment and the Mississippi Valley Loess Plains key to the blues tradition; sugar farmers, less so. Their findings also support the existence of stylistic differences between Virginia Piedmont artists and those from the Mississippi Embayment, as well as the three major pathways of the Great Migration. While some of these findings might be considered common knowledge, the evidence they present is more comprehensive than prior work and not simply a repetition of earlier contentions.
This is a substantial reference work and priced as such. Not really a history nor a particularly easy read, it is a reliable tool for the serious scholar in need of credible information, and will be the “go to” resource for many years to come.
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[Review length: 852 words • Review posted on September 1, 2015]