Following a well-written and insightful forward by musician, actor, writer, and researcher Stephen Wade, and a brief preface by David Evans, the book under review can be divided into four sections: how to read the book, the authors’ lives prior to their adventures, the actual adventures, and their post-1960’s fieldwork lives.
The third section, chapters 8-10, derives from each authors’ fieldnotes, which they diligently wrote every day of their 1966 and 1967 summer trips to the deep South, as well as their California fieldwork with southern blues artists and their families and friends who had relocated to California. These notes, which the authors consider the core of the book, provide the crucial documents upon which the book is based. The notes, edited by Marina Bokelman some fifty years after the mid-1960s fieldwork, essentially tell what they did each day on the road: whom they met, whom they interviewed (but not the interview), whom they recorded (but not the transcription), and their various trials and tribulations such as how they felt, what they had for dinner, and how they spent their free time collecting phonograph recordings. The book also includes an appendix that provides examples of their notes for April 29 and 30, 1966, notes, bibliography, discography, archival materials, a list of the photographs, and an index.
The authors met as graduate students in 1965 at UCLA’s Mythology and Folklore Program, Evans bringing a B.A. in Classics from Harvard, Bokelman a B.A. in Anthropology from UCLA. Both were also accomplished musicians interested in researching as well as performing African American traditional music. However, neither had any real experience in the deep South, the region where the music and musicians they loved originated. As Evans put it, they knew blues from an outsider’s perspective, meeting it on their own turf in the Northeast or California. The fieldnotes describe their ventures into blues territory to meet blues on its own ground rather theirs.
The book’s real storyline is more about cross-cultural negotiations underscoring the vast cultural differences between the authors’ world and the daily lived world of the artists whom the authors admired. The authors’ day-to-day experiences read as a litany of complaints: inconvenience, missed appointments, heat, bugs, bad food, and unsanitary conditions, which they are able to leave behind when the “adventure” ends. Their informants, however, remain in these same conditions, which define their lives, perhaps to be revisited by one of the authors during later post-adventures research.
Since we are relying on fifty-year-old notes and what they evoke in the authors’ memories, we have no way to check their accuracy, but that really doesn’t matter because the book is their story of their adventures. Bokelman, however, describes her editorial process and format as taking the separate, but parallel, daily notes and editing them into a single account of each day while maintaining alternating voices. She claims: “I have not changed anything – all the words you read are original words we wrote back then.” But then she adds: “All I have done is edit, interweaving our narratives, sometimes rearranging paragraphs or moving a sentence. I did a lot of pruning as on some days the two sets of field notes were redundant or a chaotic stream of consciousness, rendering every little thing that was done, seen, heard, thought or felt” (14). One could argue that the extent of her pruning remains rather vague. But for this reader, it suits the overall purpose of this project quite well.
As the authors point out up-front, the book is their take on their experiences shaped by their notes, so it’s not really about blues or blues artists, except perhaps themselves. Moreover, it’s not a how-to fieldwork manual. In fact, in some cases it may provide a lesson in what not to do. As I see it, the book’s unusual format does two things that set it apart from most blues-related studies. First, it more overtly concentrates on the collectors than on what they collected or on the artists who were the targets of their project. Secondly, by detailing their own lives before and after the 1966-67 fieldwork, they provide a useful context revealing the skills and baggage that they brought to their adventures.
Thus, we have a clearer picture of how their biases, limitations, assumptions, and health affected how they worked and what they brought back from the field, despite their best intentions. Keeping the spotlight on themselves serves to remind us that they too are storytellers and quite good ones as well. But this book is not only for folklorists and blues scholars. It’s fun rather than academic, and along the way we get to meet some great artists including Robert Pete Williams, Fred McDowell, John Henry "Bubba" Brown, K.C. Douglas, Rube Lacy, Woodrow Adams, Houston Stackhouse, Nathan “Dick” Bankston, Jack Owens, Mott Willis, and Babe Stovall; and not only musicians but others including children, neighbors, and even rock stars. As Evans is quick to point out, this book doesn’t contain the results of their fieldwork, but it does include a copious bibliography and discography in the back of the book.
I commend the authors on their honest, straightforward presentation of their “coming-of-age” experiences, which were indeed adventures in that time and place. They may have been rookies then but became major players in their chosen fields. Fieldworkers often attempt to play down their part in the complex fieldwork equation, while here the authors take the opposite approach, not just as collectors but as storytellers without apology. We should remember, however, that the fieldnotes they rely on have been filtered through fifty years of memory and further work with the blues business, which tempers the ways the authors look at the blues world today and can’t help but affect their presentation and interpretation of their notes.
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[Review length: 959 words • Review posted on December 6, 2024]