Plenty of reasons for singin' the blues

By: By Steve Wishnevsky | JOURNAL BOOK REVIEWER
Published: February 15, 2009

DELTA BLUES: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. By Ted Gioia. Norton. 448 pages. $25.20.

Although it has been proclaimed one of The New York Times' "100 Notable Books," and although Ted Gioia is the "critically acclaimed author of The History of Jazz," this book is little more than an overwritten rehash of the same familiar progression: W.C. Handy to Charlie Patton to Muddy Waters to those ignorant white boys.

Carolinians might add a few names to that roster -- Josh White, Clarence "Tom" Ashley, the Rev. Gary Davis, Theolonius Monk, and even Doc Watson -- but those names are strikingly absent from this work.

Rather than broaden his scope, Gioia intensifies his focus, and when in doubt, which, given the nature of the source material, is often, Gioia cranks up the rhetoric. Some might think flowery emoting suitable to such a stark subject matter; some might not.

Gioia has all the fervor of a late convert, but lacks the deep familiarity that many less credentialed musicians have gained from life-long studies of the extant recordings, the locations and mores of the South, and actual conversation with the blues survivors.

Gioia does provide numerical tempos for many familiar recordings, which is useful enough, if one depends on a metronome. And to be fair, his depiction of the white students who tracked down and "rediscovered" such icons as Son House and Skip James is most useful. But he vitiates his positive points with a total lack of appreciation of the hard-scrabble lives of rural people, white or black. Gioia constantly laments the "artistic choices" of some old blues man, when that man's choices were purely based on personal survival.

Of course, Gioia has to denigrate the contributions of the white disciples of the old masters. Mick Jagger may have assimilated a few songs from Muddy Waters, but Waters could never in his wildest imagining have written a "Sympathy for the Devil." The revitalization of the blues was due as much to sociological factors as to musical ones.

It would be more relevant to discuss what factors in 1950s English life made the obscure blues idiom so attractive to a whole generation of supposedly "privileged" Caucasians.

One need merely study the musics of Cuba, Jamaica and Brazil with open ears to hear that the blues are an American form, synthesized up from both black and white influences. If you want to know about the blues, go see Cadillac Records; don't waste time with this book.

■ Steve Wishnevsky is a writer and reviewer who lives in Winston-Salem.