From the Publisher
Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton-we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight.
In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music.
Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was effectively invented by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into America’s south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption. In their quest, and in the immense popularity of the music they championed, we confront America’s ongoing love affair with racial difference.
Record Collector
High Fidelity excepted, books about record collectors are pretty rare, but here's one, and it's brilliant...An instant classic.
Time Out New York2
Though critical, Hamilton's portraits aren't one-sided. Rich bits of context-including memorable excerpts from Lomax's love letters-insure that we sympathize with the usually well meaning enthusiasts. The result is a challenging and surprisingly timely book: In Search of the Blues serves as a reminder that even in the hip-hop era, white connoisseurship of black culture remains a complicated matter.
Dave Szatmary
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Library Journal
Hamilton (American history, Birkbeck Coll., Univ. of London; When I'm Bad, I'm Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment) writes about several key ethnomusicologists and record fanatics who documented what they considered uncorrupted, raw blues and extolled blues singers as primitive outsiders. She begins in the early 20th century with Howard Odum and Dorothy Scarborough, who confirmed their racial stereotypes through the study of African American spirituals and blues, and she ends with James McKune and his band of record collectors, the Blues Mafia, who searched for untainted country blues discs and helped ignite the 1960s folk blues revival. Although Hamilton provides an excellent examination of the way preconceptions surfaced in her subjects' definitions of the blues, she does not fully address the motivation of these chroniclers-in part, it was the emotional intensity of the country blues that mesmerized them. She also conflates Delta blues with country blues and New Orleans jazz and doesn't place Delta blues in the larger musical context of the growth of rock 'n' roll. Recommended as a compelling if limited addition on early blues that will appeal mostly to academics and blues fanatics.
What People Are Saying
Greil Marcus
Wherever you happen to light in Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues you find Columbus-the discovery of America in the drama of Americans discovering each other. It's no matter that it's the twentieth century, not the fifteenth-blacks and whites are strangers, so white people turn into detectives and black people into fugitives, shadows on the wall or hiding in plain sight. In this book, you never know how any story is going to turn out, and as the story goes on the suspense builds up.
Sean Wilentz
In Search of the Blues renders, in shimmering prose, superb field recordings of the blues searchers themselves, revealing why they searched, what they found, and how their humble, obsessed pursuits helped change the world.
Luc Sante
Marybeth Hamilton is a detective pursuing other detectives-the motley group of characters who, over the course of the twentieth century, bit by bit uncovered the mysteries of the blues-who are, as it turns out, both so many Schliemanns at Troy and so many blind men circling the proverbial elephant. Hamilton's story is riveting, her prose is elegant and concise, and her insights about the music, race relations, and the mechanics of cultural transmission are unfailingly acute.
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