Peter Muir’s Long Lost Blues brings a “musicological approach” (4) to 456 notated compositions titled, or subtitled, “blues” and distributed by the popular entertainment industry on sheet music or piano rolls from 1912 through 1920. Muir conceives of this body of music—which is comprised mostly of songs scored for piano and voice—as a genre informed both by African American “folk blues” and by conventions of Tin Pan Alley pop that he calls “popular blues” (1–5). Publishing dominated the mass distribution of music commodities at this time before the rise of the phonograph and the prominent role of the blues in the growth of “race records.” Ultimately Muir aims to shift a misperception of “popular blues” as being “at best a debasement of a noble [folk] art form, and at worst an oxymoron” (2).
Muir’s study builds on his doctoral dissertation to assess hundreds of popular blues sheets authored by a number of black and white composers, emphasizing W. C. Handy, whose “compositional achievement goes far beyond that of the average Tin Pan Alley composer—or blues musician, for that matter—in both its depth and scope” (105). As Muir identifies unique features in popular blues over the course of the book’s six chapters, he focuses on melodic and rhythmic motifs, the rendering of blue notes, characteristics of chord progressions, formal characteristics extending into full twelve-bar sequences and structures of song form, and possible reasons for a composer’s choices in a given work. Throughout Muir references ninety-eight notated musical examples, which also are provided as audio files via the book’s easily accessible website. The site provides a full list of the 456 popular blues sheets and related discography.
The first chapter provides a historical overview of the popular blues industry, referencing the segregated settings of vaudeville, minstrelsy, and musical theater. Muir locates the start of popular blues in the publication of five blues copyrighted in 1912.
The second chapter, “The Identity and Idiom of Early Popular Blues,” argues that popular blues reflect conventions associated with both folk blues and the popular music industry, featuring sizable examples from Swanstrom and Morgan’s “Broadway Blues” (1920), White’s “Nigger Blues” (1912), Nash’s “Snakey Blues” (1915), and Gordon’s “Bone-Head Blues” (1917). Muir uses a genetic analogy to ascribe Tin Pan Alley song and folk blues as stylistic “parents,” each passing on “genes” to the progeny of popular blues; the genes influence song structure and thematic characteristics of lyrics. Muir separately considers instrumental compositions, identifying rhythmic references to ragtime, jazz, and social dance styles in the early twentieth century, such as the fox trot and slow drag. The chapter closes by delineating “distinctive musical and textual components whose presence helps to separate the genre from the mass of popular music” (twelve-bar form, blue notes, “a barbershop ending,” and the prominent phrase, “I got the blues”), featuring examples from many hits by W. C. Handy (66).
The third chapter, “Curing the Blues with the Blues,” explores a healing characteristic often associated with the idiom. Muir orients his discussion to the malady of neurasthenia, known as “the blues” in popular American culture near the turn of the century. A wide range of popular American songs are referenced, including the ballads of seventeenth-century English composer John Dowling, from whom Muir draws the most extensive musical example of the chapter. Muir distinguishes between “homeopathic” or “allopathic” popular blues, while asserting that homeopathic blues (those driving away blue feelings with songs describing depressing situations) were more common in folk blues than in popular blues. In the concluding discussion, a string of cultural examples clouds notions of “race” and “culture.”
The fourth and fifth chapters return to musical analysis of popular blues authored by a limited number of composers. Chapter 4 affirms W. C. Handy’s role in creatively transforming aspects of folk blues and Tin Pan Alley song, considering Handy’s works in two chronological periods: compositions written in Memphis (1909–1917) and those written after Handy moved to New York (1917–1953). The first part examines versions of “Memphis Blues” according to conventions of popular blues delineated in chapter 2. Many other well-known blues by Handy and his “Shoeboot Serenade” are considered. The second part discusses Handy’s last commercially successful blues composition, “Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” in relation to Handy’s growth as a publisher of blues and composer of varied musical styles, his move out of the South, and his increasing notoriety as a spokesperson on black culture. The fifth chapter, “The Creativity of Early Southern Published Blues,” rests on the assertion that “the most creative and original in early published blues are those written by composers based, or at any rate raised, in the South,” living in close contact with the folk blues tradition, if not performing it themselves (141). The analysis features compositions by Euday L. Bowman, George W. Thomas, and Perry Bradford.
The final chapter examines what Muir calls “proto-blues,” or sheet music published before 1912 that shows “a clear musical and/or textual relationship to blues” (181). A discussion of blues ballads considers “Frankie and Johnny” as a song family in relation to composed works by Hughie Cannon and contemporaries. The chapter argues for the value of studying popular compositions to assist in documenting transformations that occurred through oral transmission as blues music developed.
As Muir’s introduction promises, the author raises “biographical, historical, and. . . sociological discussions” when “it has seemed necessary” (4). At times, however, it seems disappointing that the book does not engage more substantially with related scholarly literature, particularly given the author’s interest in connecting musical features of popular blues sheets to social trends and cultural phenomena. The book contributes to recent musicological efforts to use the work of nineteenth-century black and white sheet music composers associated with minstrelsy, ragtime, and vaudeville to better understand the spread of black vernacular performance and musical forms into white-dominated popular entertainment in the Jim Crow era.
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[Review length: 979 words • Review posted on September 28, 2011]