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.
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