In my research I find that few, if any, books on the blues combine first-person accounts of the artists’ personal introduction to the blues with accounts of the impoverished circumstances of their youth, and also deliver their stories in tandem with the first-class photographs of a photojournalist. This is exactly what the reader of Margo Cooper’s Deep Inside the Blues: Photographs and Interviews can expect. This coffee-table-sized edition delivers all of the previously mentioned considerations, and also delves into the effects of segregation, racism, the lack of equal access to education and medical care, and other hardships that these modern blues artists experienced in their formative years.
Cooper breaks Deep Inside down into four distinct geographical sections with several autobiographical chapters presented in each section. These sections of the book are entitled Chicago Called, The Delta, Beyond the Delta, and Hill Country. Within the sections there are subsections of interviews and inspired photographs of artists important not only to these geographic areas, but also to the continuity of blues history. It should be noted that the interviews in this collection are not from an “A-list” of early blues artists such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker, but rather a more contemporary collection of artists who have deep, and occasionally familial, roots in the blues, and who continue to keep this seminal American music alive and vital to American culture even if their names may not necessarily ring out in the blues canon.
A few of the artists with extensive interviews in Cooper’s book include Calvin “Fuzz” Jones, Jimmie “Duck” Holmes, and Abe “Keg” Young. These interviews appear alongside those of artists Sam Carr, son of famed bluesman Robert Nighthawk (born Robert Lee McCollum in 1909), and Garry and Cedric Burnside, son and grandson of renowned Delta bluesman R. L. Burnside, respectively. Nevertheless, this is an essential ethnography pertaining to the status of current blues in America. The music’s essence and continued growth remain tied to the American South despite the many esteemed blues scholars situated around the world discussing the importance of this music, and a plethora of musicians worldwide who have felt and taken the draw of this music as a catalyst for their individual muses. With this understanding, Cooper’s collection further illuminates the ongoing importance of the blues within American culture.
Deep Inside the Blues is a masterfully delivered view of current American blues practices and trends. Cooper does an excellent job of including in-text references to the influences of the early blues from similar regions (and families) on the contemporary blues that are growing in these regions of modern America.
The blues is not a new musical form. Even in the earliest documented accounts of its existence, its antecedents can be traced back for centuries to the beginnings of field hollers, African American Christian spirituals, minstrel music, and an abundance of other less-researched sources such as African American children’s songs and African and Caribbean influences. In this collection, Cooper continues the timeline of this music that came from the most horrific of origins and went on to influence world culture. Cooper situates the continued importance of the blues and its growth within the American landscape. The interviews, the histories of her subjects, and the locations where this music still thrives are woven together to document a fading yet vastly important time in American history and culture.
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[Review length: 558 words • Review posted on October 25, 2024]