Pioneers of the Blues Revival is a very welcome addition to what has become a considerable volume of literature on African American blues music and culture. The book consists of a series of seventeen interviews conducted by Blues Before Sunrise radio host (WDCB—Chicago Public Radio) Steve Cushing with a diverse group of individuals who for a variety of reasons fell in love in the 1950s and early 1960s with pre-war blues music. Collectively and separately, Cushing’s subjects (1) set out on a path of finding and collecting then virtually-unknown 78 rpm records of blues music from the 1920s and 1930s; (2) created the first blues discographies; (3) attempted to find the musicians who originally made these recordings in the 1920s and 1930s; (4) created the earliest and still most influential literature on pre-war blues in both book form and journal form; (5) extensively interviewed the musicians that they found, researching the lives and creative processes of those who made this music; (6) compiled some original 78s onto long play LP reissues on labels such as Folkways, Herwin, and the Origin Jazz Library (thereby making these recordings much more widely available, turning others onto the music, some of whom engaged in further research and, in the process, beginning to form a canon as to who were the most authentic and therefore the “greatest” players); (7) booked these “rediscovered” musicians into folk clubs (mainly in New York, Boston/Cambridge, Philadelphia, and Washington) and on the growing folk festival circuit (Newport, Mariposa, etc.); and (8) produced new recordings of these musicians issued occasionally on major record labels (e.g., Son House: The Legendary Son House: Father Of Folk Blues, 1965 Columbia Records) but more typically on small independents such as Piedmont, Testament, Arhoolie, etc. In the case of Bob Koester and Mike Rowe (and to some degree a few others), their efforts extended to documenting post-war electric blues (Koester’s stories about recording Junior Wells and Magic Sam are quite revealing).
The seventeen individuals that Cushing chose to interview (with the addition of a few who have passed on and perhaps one or two who were overlooked) collectively created what, for all intents and purposes, is the canonical history of what is known and understood about pre-war blues music and culture. As Barry Lee Pearson points out in his well-considered, cogent, and insightful introduction, these seventeen pioneers are all white, male, and most now are in their seventies (or older). Six are European, with the majority of the American researchers being from the North or Midwest. Virtually none of these individuals actually came of age within the culture that produced this music; rather, they came to the music through the artifacts of the commercial music industry, namely 78 rpm recordings. Tellingly, only three of them became academics (only one of those, David Evans, teaching within a music department). The majority of these pioneers conducted their research in their spare time, some of them turning their passion into a living through founding record labels (Pete Whelan—Origin Jazz Library; Bob Koester—Delmark; Chris Strachwitz—Arhoolie), managing and booking artists (Dick Waterman), or working as photographers (Ray Flerlage) or journalists (Jim O’Neal, Sam Charters). A number of these researchers at various points in time worked in more than one of these occupations (e.g., Dick Waterman now primarily makes his living selling his extraordinary cache of photographs of musicians that he shot at the height of the blues revival in the mid- and late-1960s, while Jim O’Neal, in addition to founding Living Blues in 1970, later started a record label, Rooster Blues).
The narratives that arise out of these seventeen interviews in many ways comprise a historiography as to how the history of pre-war blues, as we know it, has come to fruition. The stories are fascinating as the finding of rare records, crucial discographical information and, perhaps most importantly, the surviving musicians is fraught with passion, serendipity, dogged determination, blind luck, joy, and not a little bit of romance. None are more riveting than Phil Spiro’s unbelievable account of how he, the late Nick Perls, and Dick Waterman found Son House.
Woven into the historical narrative, the fascinating stories, the ingenious collecting, detective, and recording techniques (check out the notion of “bullet canvassing” articulated by Pete Whelan on page 52) are a number of insights that will be new to many readers. For example, Sam Charters makes the case that white singer Marion Harris was the first “Queen of the Blues,” recording “St Louis Blues” a few months before Mamie Smith waxed “Crazy Blues” in 1920. Most surprising for me were Charters’ comments about his 1959 book The Country Blues (the first book on the subject by an American author); “Country Blues was shamelessly romanticized as an attempt to open people’s eyes as to the excitement and drama and to please come out and help, and it worked very well” (42). I and many others had always interpreted Charters’ overt romanticization of his subject matter as undermining his otherwise valuable work and, frankly, to be a racist product (albeit benign in intention) of its time. It’s interesting to read here that he had a strategy and a goal in approaching his subject in this manner.
Another revelation occurs on page 112 where Gayle Dean Wardlow explains that until the late 1930s retail outlets could not return unsold records. Therefore, following the Depression retail stores wouldn’t take a chance on unknown singers. This goes a long way to explain the paucity of records pressed and the extreme rarity of various recordings from the early 1930s.
As should be clear from the above, Pioneers of the Blues Revival is essential reading for blues scholars and fans. That said, there are a number of small problems that, while not undermining the value of the material included, are annoying. There are numerous typos (or transcription errors) that should have been caught in the proof-reading stage. In addition, there are various places where the transcriptions of the interviews should have been more judiciously edited. For example, there are a number of times when a given interviewee will repeat a story twice at different points in the same interview. It would have been good if such repetition had been reduced to a minimum.
Finally, the book would certainly have been improved if each interview was preceded by an introductory few paragraphs explaining the importance of the person being interviewed. For example, it is only three-quarters of the way through the Pete Whelan interview when the reader finds out that Whelan started the hugely influential Origin Jazz Library label as well as the 78 Quarterly journal. Knowing this at the beginning of the interview would have provided a context within which to understand much of what Whelan had to say for the first fifteen pages of his chapter.
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[Review length: 1130 words • Review posted on March 25, 2015]