PopMatters' Mark Reynolds tackles a very interesting topic in his "Retelling the History of Black Music: Everything You Know about the Blues Is Wrong", which also weaves in a review of Elija Wald's Escaping the Delta, a new book which "explains [legendary bluesman Robert] Johnson’s genius not with mushy platitudes or hoary metaphors about trains and hellhounds, but with basic research and analysis. His digging reveals Johnson as an artist wholly of his time and place: a traveling musician in the ‘30s rural South, possessed of incredible skill and magnetism, and a keen student of what others were doing, taking in everyone from previous acoustic bluesmen Lonnie Johnson and Son House to the urban sounds of Leroy Carr.
But Wald ultimately places Johnson among his contemporaries as a “musician’s musician” whose sales and influence didn’t extend much beyond the Delta. The audience that elevated Johnson to the upper pantheon of musical titans was nowhere in evidence while he was alive, or at any point soon after his death. Escaping the Delta is less a Johnson biography than a primer on blues music between the two World Wars."
Dig in, boys and girls.
