Whose Blues?: Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music

by Adam Gussow

Overview

Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of "Crazy Blues" set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for "race records." Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's "No black. No white. Just the blues," as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if "blues is black music," as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities?

In Whose Blues?, award-winning blues scholar and performer Adam Gussow confronts these challenging questions head-on. Using blues literature and history as a cultural anchor, Gussow defines, interprets, and makes sense of the blues for the new millennium. Drawing on the blues tradition's major writers including W. C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Amiri Baraka, and grounded in his first-person knowledge of the blues performance scene, Gussow's thought-provoking book kickstarts a long overdue conversation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469660363
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/19/2020
Pages:	332
Sales rank:	1,049,262
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Adam Gussow is professor of English and southern studies at the University of Mississippi and author of four previous books on the blues, including Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition. He is currently appearing on Netflix in Satan & Adam, an award-winning documentary about his thirty-five-year partnership with Mississippi-born bluesman Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

As a Black musician, I have often reflected on the dichotomy between Black bluesism and blues universalism.  Whose music is it? Who profits from it? How is the next generation of blues artists being mentored? In a book that is as timely as it is illuminating, Adam Gussow has given us an excellent framework for considering these questions, and along the way he offers a rich, informative, and often myth-busting history of the complex story of blues and race.—Gene Dobbs Bradford, president and CEO, Jazz St. Louis

In Whose Blues?, Adam Gussow tackles the provocative reality of the blues. He ties the music's tortured history to the current racial climate and adds chapters on blues' place in African American literature and the Black Arts Movement. This is essential reading to better understand the power of the blues.—Art Tipaldi, editor, Blues Music Magazine

In an act of fidelity to the blues itself, Adam Gussow returns us to a fundamental question that sadly is often unspoken and repressed in today's everyday blues consciousness. Gussow, a blues performer and a man of deep reflection, busts open the silence but also cautions against unnecessary fights as he supports and intensifies struggles for equality in the blues.—"Sugar Brown" Ken Kawashima, University of Toronto

Editorial Reviews

09/01/2020

Gussow (English, Southern studies, Univ. of Mississippi; Beyond the Crossroads), a white blues harmonica performer/teacher, concert promoter, and music writer, stitches together a dozen rewritten YouTube lectures and three previously published articles to understand the current dominance of the blues scene by white artists. In somewhat meandering chapters, he describes the complex emergence of the blues at the turn of the 20th century through the innovations of mostly Black and a few white musicians; the distinctive musical characteristics of blues music and lyrics; and how an African American fear of white-perpetrated violence helped give rise to the blues form. Gussow spends the last section of the book on the development of blues literature by such pioneers as W.C. Handy, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and the writers of the Sixties Black Arts Movement. VERDICT Extremely knowledgeable but a bit overly academic, Gussow ably details the African American core of the blues and the shifting racial dynamics that have made the music so compelling to white Americans and blues fans in other cultures. Blues scholars will find the book illuminating.—David P. Szatmary, formerly with Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Library Journal

2020-07-28
A blues scholar and musician navigates the muddy waters of the genre’s racial divisions.

Blues music, writes Gussow, is in the midst of a fraught debate between what he calls “Black bluesism,” the notion that only Black musicians have standing to play the music, and “blues universalism,” the idea that the music speaks to themes of heartbreak and loss everybody experiences. The former ideology denies contributions White artists have brought to the genre; the latter blithely ignores the music’s complex relationship to Black history. Gussow doesn’t pick a side, nor does he exactly synthesize the two. Rather, across 12 chapters (cannily called “bars”), he discusses the pervasive mythologies that surround blues music, its role in American literature, and the role of race in programming blues festivals. If it doesn’t quite add up to a cohesive argument, Gussow does do an intriguing job of troubling the waters. He counters ideas that the blues are rooted in Black suffering (blues songs are as much about pleasure as pain), that it was a rural form that migrated to the city (Bessie Smith’s experience suggests it was the other way around), and that W.C. Handy “invented” the blues; it’s more correct to say he established a particular version of it. The author is also insightful on how Black writers like Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston all integrated blues music in different ways—though Wright, for his part, was a terrible blues lyricist. Gussow discusses how he’s implicated in this as a White blues harmonica player who has spread the music’s word globally. Though he doesn't present a sustained grand unified theory about race and blues music, the book's range proves his point that the blues is an unsettled genre, open to a host of arguments.

An insightful work that connects contemporary culture to an old-school genre.

Kirkus Reviews

An insightful work that connects contemporary culture to an old-school genre." —Kirkus Reviews

Ably details the African American core of the blues and the shifting racial dynamics that have made the music so compelling to white Americans and blues fans in other cultures. Blues scholars will find the book illuminating." —Library Journal

Well-researched. . . . Another recommended book." —Steve Ramm, The Antique Phonograph

This thought-provoking work comes highly recommended for anyone interested in stepping beyond the music itself to gain a broader understanding of the forces that have fashioned it into a powerful musical form that transcends boundaries of all kinds." —Blues Blast Magazine

Whose Blues? is ambitious and challenging and opens up debate on a subject that must be addressed. . . . [Gussow's] literature survey and close readings are revelatory." —Robert H. Cataliotti, Living Blues

Gussow does a yeoman's job of mixing discussions of decades-long changing race relations with the emergence and development of the blues. Throughout, Gussow's reach is impressive as he incorporates discussion of the emergence of the blues into discourse on contemporary standouts . . . Essential."—CHOICE

A tour de force book not only on blues,  but also about racism as it has manifested in US politics and popular culture."—Big City Rhythm & Blues

From the Publisher