In this book, Minton champions the premise that record listening is a culturally defined activity that can vary significantly in nature over time and from community to community. “It only stands to reason,” he writes, “that anyone coming to records from [live] folk music would think about them very differently from someone raised on post-Beatles rock” (21). To penetrate those differences, Minton turns his ear to the “hillbilly” and “race” records made by Southern musicians from the mid-1920s through World War II, listening for elements that invoke a particular relationship between traditional musical events and the medium of recorded sound. “People, my good girl has left me, that’s the reason why I’m gonna sing you this song” (80), for instance, suggests a relationship between event and record listener quite different from “Well, boys, when we get through playing this here tune, let’s go out to the barn, I wanna show you my pigs” (64). Based on evidence of this sort, Minton concludes that Southerners of the early twentieth century imagined records as related to traditional music in four distinct (though not mutually exclusive) ways: as dramatizations of traditional musical events, as full-fledged equivalents of those events, as self-sufficient events of their own kind, and as paradoxes that invited playful exploration. Each of these four possibilities receives full treatment in a chapter of its own, replete with a wealth of illustrations: among others, a sermon record in which a congregant offers “a special prayer on the man that’s a-catching the record for you” (95); true-to-life depictions of rent parties and Prohibition-era bootlegging as contexts for music-making; and the lyrics “Now I got to do some recording, and I ought to be recording right now,” ironically encountered on a record (125). The body of the book concludes with a chapter-length analysis of the records of Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers centered on their fourteen-side tour de force, “A Corn Licker Still in Georgia.” Finally, the end of chapter 6 and a closing “coda” treat developments since World War II, in which Minton finds recorded music has grown increasingly autonomous and self-referential--witness songs about jukeboxes--and has ultimately become a point of reference for live musical performance rather than the other way around.
Overall, 78 Blues furnishes an eminently accessible account of a key meeting between traditional culture and new media that should be of interest to anyone who cares about either (or both). It invites us to hear an important corpus of recorded American folk music from a new vantage point, one in which we can recognize the cultural specificity of our own ways of listening and probe beyond the surface content to appreciate the wonderfully complex ways in which the performers conceptualized recorded music itself. A few specific formulations may invite quibbling, among them the author’s claims that records simply “are events” (16) and that the word “listening” can comfortably include what performers do in the recording studio (231, n. 8), but for the most part such nuances are handled with due reflection and relative clarity.
Minton does waver at points between interpreting the simulation of traditional performance contexts as something musicians needed to do in order to feel comfortable with the phonograph and something they chose to do so as a display of creative artistry, two alternatives that may be hard to tell apart in practice but nevertheless have somewhat different implications. Further complicating this distinction is the fact that similar devices had actually turned up on phonograph records made by and for white urban populations since the 1890s, especially in cases where the performers were imitating blacks or back-country “rubes.” Given the acknowledged role of corporate handlers in crafting sketches by the Skillet Lickers, one wonders whether the basic form these took might have owed as much to prior industry expectations about how such content ought to be packaged as to the performers’ own sensibilities. The precedent of the ballad broadside as a folksong medium receives thorough and illuminating attention here, but the specific framing devices Southern musicians introduced in various live venues (as well as their radio broadcasts, for that matter) might reward further scrutiny as an influence on record-making strategies: such debts are hinted at but not fleshed out except when a medicine show--for instance--is itself explicitly depicted as the subject matter of a record. Minton is wary of media studies in the Marshall McLuhan mold, but Bolter and Grusin’s more recent concept of “remediation” would mesh nicely with his work and could furnish another useful framework for mapping these tangled interrelationships.
78 Blues should disabuse anyone of the notion that old-time music records, as mere things, have nothing to offer the student of performance contexts and social relationships, or that commercially recorded folksongs have by definition “lost their personal bearings” (34). To the contrary, many of them wear their connections to traditional social environments on their sleeves--or, to be technically precise, in their grooves--and Minton does an admirable job of laying these out for us to consider. Beyond the subject matter of the present book, Minton’s four analytical categories seem to hold much promise for further studies of the ways in which performers and audiences have striven to assimilate recording media of all kinds to their preexisting traditions.
Work Cited
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000.
--------
[Review length: 891 words • Review posted on September 10, 2008]