Land Where the Blues Began

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Lomax, who has done more than anyone else to make black music of the South known as a glorious expression of American art, summs up sixty years of "discovering the African American musical heritage in this journey through the Mississippi Delta.

Winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, this mususical and cultural exploration of the rich, sorrow-laden birth of the blues is an intimate and respectful look at an integral part of African ...

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More About This Book

Overview

Lomax, who has done more than anyone else to make black music of the South known as a glorious expression of American art, summs up sixty years of "discovering the African American musical heritage in this journey through the Mississippi Delta.

Winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, this mususical and cultural exploration of the rich, sorrow-laden birth of the blues is an intimate and respectful look at an integral part of African American culture--a master work that has been 60 years in the making. Photos.

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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Working for the Library of Congress and other cultural institutions, legendary roots-music connoisseur Lomax ( Mister Jelly Roll ) visited the Mississippi Delta with his father, folklorist John Lomax, and black folklorist Zora Neale Hurston in the 1930s; with African American sociologists from Fiske University in the 1940s; and with a PBS film crew in the 1980s, researching the history of the blues in America. Addressing this wonderfully rich vein of scarcely acknowledged Americana, Lomax has written a marvelous appreciation of a region, its people and their music. Burdened early with now long-forgotten technology (500-pound recording machines, etc.) and encountering pronounced racial biases and cultural suspicions about black and white people mixing socially and otherwise, Lomax sought out those in the Delta who knew Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton and others acquainted with musicians once less well known, such as Doc Reese, young McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters), Dave Edwards, Eugene Powell and Sam Chatmon. Traveling across the South ``from the Brazos bottoms of Texas to the tidewater country of Virginia,'' Lomax discovers the plantations, levee camps, prisons and railroad yards where the men and women of the blues came from and the music was born. In a memoir that will take its place as an American classic, Lomax records not just his recollections but the voices of hard-working, frequently hard-drinking, spiritual people that otherwise might have been lost to readers. (Apr.)
Roland Wulbert
Half a century ago, the son of the folklorist who introduced Leadbelly to a larger public began his own recordings of African American oral traditions. If it were a novel, Alan Lomax's long-awaited account of his adventures in the Mississippi Delta would be called "sprawling" and a "must read." For although it documents black American folk life as richly as "The Journal of American Folklore", it is as delightful and hard to put down as any fictional epic. Indeed, at times many may suspect Lomax of fiction. Young readers must be forgiven for wondering whether his account of interracial proprieties under Jim Crow is factual when he reports being booked once for shaking hands with a black man in public, then again for joining a black family on its porch. More seasoned readers may be forgiven for wondering whether he collapses the intervals of time separating his adventures. But no reader will question his authentic joy in the search for such bluesmen as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, and Son House. Some years ago, Lomax was a legend in his own time. Today he is more: a national treasure.
Kirkus Reviews
Singingly well-written cornbread-and-moonshine odyssey of folk-archivist Lomax's second swing through the Mississippi Delta in search of seminal blues songs and players, this time during early WW II. In 1942, Lomax (Mister Jelly Roll, 1959, etc.)—who with his father, John Lomax, has by that date already discovered Leadbelly and introduced Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie to radio audiences—is empowered by the Library of Congress to use a new acetate recording device to gather discs made on the spot with blues singers in the Delta, where the blues were born. Lomax considers the blues as noble as Shakespeare and the greatest art form yet produced by America, and anyone who reads the many heartsick lyrics he reprints here may agree with him. His first stop is Memphis, where he records Willie B. and son House and picks up background on "Little Robert" Johnson. Moving on to Clarksdale, Mississippi, he's at once in trouble with law and is told not to address "Negroes" as "mister" or "miss" and never to shake a black hand. What's more, blacks have now reversed Jim Crow and have their own "Coloreds Only" shops and bars where whites aren't allowed. Blacks are heading north by the trainload; black draftees sullenly await conscription and shipment overseas; deep night has settled on the songsters. White-hatred embitters Lomax in a way it never has during his earlier song-recording trips in the South. Just as bad, he discovers that educated black preachers now bury spirituals under pale, four-square gospel pieces with written-out harmonies, a sentimental dilution that replaces the heroic spiritual with agonizing "I am tired, I am weak, I am worn" choirings. Bios follow, as well as talks withblues men Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and other songsters and guitar giants. A summa musicologia whose sobering humanity and thoughts about an American voice echo Whitman. The devil's own music gets its due. (Photos—16 pp. b&w—not seen.)
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780679404248
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 5/18/1993
  • Edition description: 1st ed
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 544
  • Product dimensions: 6.49 (w) x 9.55 (h) x 1.82 (d)

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