AllenLowe

once again the point is being missed - I ENCOURAGE re-interpretation; listen to my own music. But that re-interpretation either has to give us a new and interesting perspective, or it has to somehow capture the spirit of the music in a parallel way. As for Sonny, well, bad bands are bad bands. Clearly in the Milestone years he saw his chance to establish a commercial beachhead, which he did; fine, it is his right. But that doesn't mean we as listeners have to accept everything he did. It's called critical judgement; though it is funny, here you are arguing for Jason's right to play whatever he wants, but telling those of us who were not fond of the Sonny Milestone era that we have no right to our opinion. What's wrong with this picture? thank you for taking the time to tell me my multiple and very-specific posts on what is wrong with Moran's interpretation lack "insight" and are pejorative.

it's been a little while, I will go back and check them out.

I have sent him emails - not contentious ones, but about other subjects - that he doesn't respond to, which is ok and expected, though I do consider myself to be a peer. But my larger assumption is based on dealing - and trying to deal - with people at that level of fame. I think it breeds a certain sense of un-touchability, a desire not to have to deal with unpleasant disagreements, and an ability to avoid those disagreements just because you can. And honestly, I don't have the energy to make any more futile efforts; it's next to impossible to get in touch with famous people and I am too old and have enough pride (not a lot but enough) to not want to face predictable rejection.

I am sorry but I feel that this completely misses the point. Of course Jason can play it any way he wants, but that doesn't free him from any judgement that someone may make that he is misunderstanding the music and the idiom. Yes, if he gave an alternative that made sense, that would be a good thing, but he has turned a very free and liberated music into one that is walled in by muddle-class inhibition and a snowflake-like over-sensitivity to racial style and context. I am NOT arguing that it is un-idiomatic; I am arguing that it is dull and denatured and has lost the feeling and essence of the original - which he was trying to preserve in what I think is a very misguided way. You disagree, fine, but you cannot deflect criticism by saying that the artist has the right to do the material his or her own way. No one is arguing for censorship. And I wasn't comparing the musical choices to MAGA - I was simply saying we have this double standard. We hold people's political decisions to certain principled standards based on information and historical perspective, and that is what I am doing musically here. If anyone is put off by my way of arguing - and I have attacked no one here personally - then they can counter my argument. I give my opinion and then I outline my reasons for having that opinion. If you are put off by that, well....you just don't, in my opinion, have a real sense of the necessity of intellectual give-and-take. It's not personal; I think that when someone pretends to be delving into history by merely reproducing a very middle class and "respectable" interpretation of something that was, actually, quite respectable and even middle class - but the middle class of 1913 and not the middle class of 2023 - then there is a problem and I feel like someone needs to speak for these musicians who cannot speak for themselves. Yes, that's my opinion. I am not advocating that anyone be forced to accept it (btw I am about to teach a 16 part course on this for Lincoln Center, and it's free, so anyone who wants to get a better understanding of my perspective is welcome to attend by Zoom). he will never go public with this kind of discussion, which I would love to have. The reason is that he doesn't have to. I am a mere fly spec on the ass of the universe for people like him, who, at that level, do not need to engage with anyine to justify their own positions. All they have to do is give a monologue.

My point with the Trump comparison is that when it comes to politics, we are critical of people who make judgements with insufficient evidence or information. To me there are particular kinds of music, historically based, that require a certain level of knowledge in order to understand how they sound and why they sound that way. I’m sorry if I offended people who liked Moran’s recent things, but the James Reese Europe stuff in particular is so musically misguided that it just needs to be said. Just as I wouldn’t try to judge a classical performance, these old black forms require a more comprehensive understanding of how music was made in those days and why it was made the way it was made And this is not some kind of abstract intellectual point of view, because the original music is still there, still available, and not to listen to it is like preferring Pat Boone to little Richard. The difference is that dramatic.

So it’s a bad idea for me to offer a strong opinion, but it’s OK for you? Attacking what you think is my narrow little world? Well, it’s not really that narrow. I’ve sold a lot of books and my work has been circulated pretty widely, more widely than your post. If you don’t know the music, you shouldn’t talk about it. It’s the Trumpies version of political opinions. Lots of ideas with no information. that older musical world is complicated and ingenious. It’s like all of Jazz, you can’t just listen to a little snippet, and then become an expert. It’s the irony of it all… In the name of African-American heritage, we present watered down versions of that heritage. It’s like a fear of facing the real music, which is just nasty and complicated.

I also note how sterile the recording sounds - basically everything sounds completely isolated, which is probably the way it was done. There is no real space, no harmonic interaction between the instruments, like it was phoned in. Honestly, and this goes counter to some other things I have said, but white audiences of a certain kind love this kind of b.s, think it's socially edifying.

but for reasons that have nothing to do with race; this is an art music. And in the years since it faded from the pop charts even more so.

I found it edifying. Since I've listened to it I have become a MAGA person, since the recording fits the persona of people who are deathly afraid of real blackness.

I am going to say something self-promotional here; Jason is a great pianist, but that album to me represents the worst kind of pseudo-interpretation of older materials. It sounds like just another stiff white version of old-timey music (in spite of some "contemporary" sounding soloists who end up just sounding like they are at the wrong session). Musicians who do these kinds of projects tend to expose themselves as having not really listened to that old sound - black and white - and have ended up with these awful, polite examinations of what should be unruly music. Now the self-promotional aspect of this post - on our new release I do a JR Europe reference of sorts with a thing we did called Castles in Sand, which is miles above anything on that Moran album. It's frustrating to hear people flocking to fame, when the music is what should be essential.

I think it's a cultural sea change - well, it's been going on for a long time - and black writers seem, for the most part, to have moved on. As for you statement about white audiences - I should have spoken up before, but it is an absolute truism, based on my experience of attending jazz events for about 55 years. This is not to say that there are not black audiences for jazz, but the music would have died a slow death years ago without the support of white folks.

Dan and I disagree about a lot of politics, but I know him well enough by now that when it comes to race and music he is only about the music, and doesn't get stuck in pseudo-woke poses. As for white fragility, you've got it backwards - to me the fragility is white folks who just bend to any opposite argument about race, who deny their own personal opinions because they are afraid of causing political offense. They are too fragile to risk dealing with heavy issues in which they might hold an unpopular opinion.

I really take offense at this; I have been teaching, playing, and advocating for this music for about 50 years, at great personal sacrifice; I have recorded over 20 CDs, most of which are related to an examination of jazz's complex history; I have helped numerous musicians, gig-wise and financially; I have given up that career for a period of 20 years to help my son and basically had to, from a professional standpoint, start over again; I have written books on the subject - including all of American music - which are more comprehensive on the subject than that of virtually any other writer, white or black. At this point jazz and black vernacular music is so far from its roots that the music is an art form accessible to anyone, regardless of blood line or racial hierarchy (which strikes me as Nazi-like in its dependence on genetic continuity); some of the worst writing I have read of late on jazz or black culture has been from African American writers, one of whom, in a recent, book informed us that white writers were hopeless insufficient from a racial standpoint and could not understand the music like black writers (and then proceeded to write articles that were completely devoid of any historical, social, or musical understanding). This whole thing reduces those of us who have spent so many years in support of this music to idiotic racial symbols. The truth is, without these white advocates, neither jazz history or the history of the blues would have been preserved in any comprehensive manner. I have just had enough of this bullshit. I support black writers, but I refuse to change my standards based on a false sense of historical reparations (which I also support). I write a lot about this, btw, in my recent book Letter to Esperanza, about the stupidity of ideologically-based historicism with people like Rhiannon Giddens and Daphne Brooks. And don't get me started on Nicholas Payton.

Every Dog Has His Day.....with Shipp, Mat Walerian, William Parker, Hamid Drake STILL SEALED ESP $8 plus media shipping ($4) Sonic Fiction......with Shipp, Mat Walerian, Michael Bisio, Whit Dickey STILL SEALED ESP $8 plus media shipping ($4) This is Beautiful Because We Are Beautiful People....with Shipp, Mat Walerian, William Parker STILL SEALED ESP $8 plus media shipping ($4) The Uppercut....with Shipp, Walerian, recorded live. STILL SEALED ESP $8 plus media shipping ($4) Jungle.....with Shipp, Walerian, Drake 2 CDs STILL SEALED ESP $10 plus media shipping ($5) World Construct Matthew Shipp Trio with Shipp, Bisio, Newman Taylor Baker STILL SEALED ESP $8 plus media shipping ($4) all shipping prices to the USA; will send overseas for extra my paypal is allenlowe5@gmail.com

for me his best work are the solo piano albums; there are two or three that I own. I find his post-'60s orchestral work intriguing but ultimately aimless, with some notable exceptions. But the solo piano work shows how amazing his musical conception was, in small, focused snippets.

price increase; you missed your chance: $275 plus shipping.

thanks; Dick was just frustrated, I think; this would really have put him out there.

question for those reading the bio - does it mention Dick Katz? He was the last pianist Sonny hired in the '50s before Sonny decided to go without a piano (sorry, I may have mentioned this earlier; I am having some of what I hope are temporary cognitive glitches due to a sudden and major resurgence of neuropathy). Dick was still pissed off about this 20 years later, feeling that he had missed a big chance.

final price drop before these go to the Audio Graveyard: $250 plus shipping in the USA.

Jim - I may have posted this already, but I once told Bill Barron how good he was on that recording, especially against a powerhouse like Ervin. Bill was a very modest guy, and I think he was embarrassed but very flattered.

George Adams' playing drives me up a wall; always goes into that patented yodel of his; an entire Mosaic of him would definitely send me to the loony bin (which might make my wife happy). I will tell you a great Mosaic - and one that I actually believe would do well - Dave Schildkraut; I've got everything, even one with a solo from circa 1954 that sounds pre-Coltrane (and Trane admired him, voted for him once as best alto, and dedicated a song to him at his Jazz Gallery gig). There's plenty, a lot of amazing side man work, and I think I have everything (including a mint reissue LP pressing of Like Cool with Eddie Bert and Hank Jones). And I recorded him in 1978 and there is some amazing stuff that he did. That settles it; I guess the consensus is for Schildkraut.

I will post a picture - I think they sound best elevated at least slightly -

OK cheapskates; you can't get speakers of this quality for anywhere near this price - I will say $350 plus shipping, but otherwise it goes into the landfill, or the home for old stereo equipment.

I don't know if Noto is still alive, but he alienated half of Facebook by making some crazy political statements and endorsing Trump.

which I will print here in its entirety, unless the moderators find it excessive. And if you like, it is not too late to order; I will briefly offer the whole project - two books and thirty cds - to all Organissimo members for $150 shipped USA, a discount from the usual $175 shipped USA: Allen Lowe. “ Turn Me Loose White Man” Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960, vols. 1 & 2. Hamden, CT: Constant Sorrow Press, 2020/ 2021. x þ 352 pages, 397 pages, 30 CDs. by Eric Lott If you too have been waiting for a magisterial study of popular music animated by traditional racism and religiosity, victims of irony, dynamics of resistance, Christian warfare, God’s militia, the Confederacy in absentia, crimes of sentiment, country folk’s synchronized swim, praying for good sex, proletarian orchestras (in church), worldly cluelessness, the rhythm method (“a more subtle kind of resistance”), plant-based courtship (I’ll poke it through the window), love and booty, white moments of feeling, Death Be Not Barefoot, out of the mouths of white people, victims of style, and the Hawaiian version of the Baja marimba band, the wait is over. Allen Lowe’s “ Turn Me Loose White Man” Or: Appropriating Culture: How to Listen to American Music, 1900-1960 is here. The foregoing names only the first half of its table of contents more or less (vol. 1), but volume 2 follows suit (e.g., the minstrel wound, hillbillies with 401k’s, gospel in drag), and the writing lives up to its billing in punch and pith. All of it with a lucid and irrecusable rendering of the politics of cultural appropriation, but don’t expect a scolding, despite its how-to subtitle. Right on time with the arrival of The Harry Smith B-Sides (Dust-to-Digital’s new collection of the flip-sides of Smith’s famous 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music’s 78s), Lowe’s two prodigal volumes and their accompanying 30 CDs (each with 25-30 songs, 798 in all) far outpace the Smith compilations, which featured 84 A-sides and now 81 B-sides (three cut for racist lyrics) for a total of 165—not that it’s a contest, particularly since the projects do not conceptually overlap. Where Smith sought to conjure an occult Other America, Lowe means to trace various points of genre and stylistic inception, elaboration, and transformation, with an eye especially to the ways commercial song walked the color line. Greil Marcus in Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (renamed The Old, Weird America) (1997) famously argued that Smith in his Anthology created a “Smithville” in which racial boundaries sometimes became so blurred as to disappear. While often blurry in Lowe’s volumes, racial lines quite rightly haunt everything, lyrically, musically, and above all politically. The two volumes are appropriately titled. Lowe captures as well as anyone I’ve read the Jim Crow strictures and cruelties often audible in musical cultures that nonetheless are always all up in one another’s Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 35, Number 1, pp. 139–144, Electronic ISSN: 1533-1598 © 2023 by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch (IASPM-US). All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1525/jpms.2023.35.1.139 business, mostly to surprising effect. As I say, Lowe doesn’t finger-wag or preach over all this but rather explores, notes ironies, lays out contradictions, and not infrequently waxes mordantly funny at the results. And he is way beyond understanding Black music as the sum of its miseries. For Lowe, apartheid America structures but doesn’t a priori define the nation’s musical outcomes. Before digging in, it’s worth noting just what is in front of you when you encounter this stunning archival effort. Lowe’s ear-boggling retrievals of U.S. vernacular musicking going back to the late nineteenth century are all selected from his personal collection as exemplary pieces for his purposes. Since much of it on the early end is of poor sound quality, he did capable sound restoration on it. Mastering and digitizing multiple CD sets for distribution was no doubt an operation in its own right. Lowe did due diligence as discographer, tracking down personnel, recording dates, locations, and cultural coordinates for as many of the recordings as possible. And it was a one-man job: literary historians such as big-data “distant reading” Franco Moretti employ whole teams of researchers to do analogous projects. The books themselves, handsomely self-published, proceed essentially song by song through all 30 CDs from just before 1900 to around 1960, annotations that continually rise to the level of musicological and cultural analysis of a high and readable order; local insights connect to multiple arcs of development and sudden left-turn innovation in what feels like real time (as well as they are written, the books require readerly patience). It’s not unlike spending roughly 2,025 minutes or 34 hours—five whole business days with lunch breaks, more or less—listening along with an excited, loquacious, acute, and inexhaustibly knowledgeable host tracking and tracing certain evolutions in pop music over the first six decades of the twentieth century. No wonder Lowe writes in a preface that “this is really the last such project I will do, at least without a grant or a substantial cash advance (meaning that, yes, this is really the last such project I will do)” (I, 2). I’ll believe that when I (don’t) see it. Because that “last,” for those unfamiliar with Lowe’s work, alludes to a number of fine previous books (with accompanying CDs) including Really the Blues?: A Horizontal Chronicle of the Vertical Blues 1893-1959, That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History 1900-1950, American Pop—From Minstrel to Mojo: On Record 1893-1956, and God Didn’t Like It: Electric Hillbillies, Singing Preachers, and the Beginning of Rock and Roll 1950-1970, which over the years have garnered praise from Francis Davis, John Szwed, David Hajdu, Jonathan Lethem, Jody Rosen, Peter Stampfel, Robin Kelley, Greg Tate, and Greil Marcus, among others, the last two of whom provided tandem introductions to the books under review. And for those who don’t know, Lowe is an excellent and esteemed avant-garde saxophonist who has played and recorded with Julius Hemphill, Marc Ribot, David Murray, Roswell Rudd, Matthew Shipp, Gary Bartz, Don Byron, and many more, with more than twenty albums as leader to his credit. This high-end performance background, coupled with his scholarship, is certainly one context for the ear-driven distinctions Lowe makes throughout “ Turn Me Loose White Man”—his ear is trained, and he listens carefully. Indeed, thinking with his ears from pop to blues to country to jazz (and also, along the way, pre-jazz, precountry, minstrel, ragtime, folk, rhythm & blues, gospel, show music, and rock ‘n’ roll), Lowe, to note one instance among dozens, can suggest almost in passing that while Fred Van Eps’s “Florida Rag” (1912) is technically able, it is no match in spry facility for Vess Ossman’s “Chicken Chowder” (1906), and if you too can casually do that, more power to you (I, 41). And where Harry Smith and later commentators such as Marcus pursue a vaguely mystified, sometimes class- and race-blind vision of an esoteric America (and in this regard see also Rani Singh’s appallingly white- and male-centric documentary The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music [2007]), Lowe in example after example hears otherwise: “the history of American music, to my ears, is essentially a timeline of African Americans liberating themselves in sound, creating an alternative history to that which has been imposed on them” (I, 9). Lowe’s governing emphasis on cultural appropriation has political currency, of course, but it’s to his great credit that he renders the matter with a confounding intricacy worthy of his materials. All down the line Lowe is level-headed and lucid—if at times blunt and candid—about the gnarled contradictions and paradoxes he finds. Operating with the now relatively uncontroversial notion that “a great deal, if not all, of American music is rooted in forms that derive in some way from Minstrelsy” (I, 15), Lowe consistently delivers the nuances of a given situation. In a history far messier than the mechanical theft of Black sounds and images for white sport and profit, U.S. musicking was through the decades an arena of exchange, larceny, fantasy, and desire structured in racial dominance in which each party (each of them multiple!) exerted its influence and lived through the changes, across many genres in many locations, fueled by widespread commercial distribution, whatever the format (street, stage, wax cylinder, shellac 78, radio, jukebox, vinyl 33 1/3). The upshot of all this, Lowe correctly notes, is that the broad diffusion of minstrelsy and post-minstrel cultural forms, Black as well as white, “created a mass movement of sound and motion that had shattering effect [sic] on all of not just American music but, categorically, American culture” (I, 15–16). Minstrelsy as the collective engine of cultural revolution—say what? That is, for better and worse, one of the main outlines of the story Lowe has to tell and attempts to track. Lowe’s song-by-song presentation of his musical examples tends to bury ledes (everywhere), but they nonetheless grab you. Here is one: Some of the strangeness of early jazz surely, I would say, has to do with the slow and gradual removal of the minstrel mask from both white and black performers. What lies beneath is still often an expression of perplexed, racial ambivalence, a sense that fantasy has replaced reality for so long that we no longer can determine precisely which is which. So black performers, as a habit (and not necessarily as a bad habit but as a professional habit), in the process of throwing off real and perceived professional chains, often remain in debt to a complicated and conflicted history of both professional and social enslavement, juxtaposed with a paradoxical form of liberation that is still part enslavement. (I, 51) “What lies beneath” the mask is less roots than once and future ambivalence and crossracial debt, liberation in chains, points of resistance and moments of supersession. As Stuart Hall once put it, this is the dialectic of cultural struggle.1 1. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (New York: Routledge, 2016) [1981], 227–39. Lott | Book Review: “Turn Me Loose White Man” Where once it was commonplace to assume a clear distinction between debased culture industries such as minstrelsy and authentic folk and roots cultures both white and Black, it is now widely regarded a mixed-up, commercially saturated situation all the way down. As the blues arose in part out of traveling Black minstrel shows, so early country music often sported blackface on the National Life and Accident Insurance Company’s Grand Ole Opry stage. In this sense, Lowe contends, minstrelsy wasn’t dead but rather embedded everywhere, from the early-country minstrel religiosity of Ernest Thompson’s “Climb Up Them Golden Stairs” (1924) to Louis Armstrong’s hip yet flamboyant wresting of, signifying on, and thereby controlling the minstrel template to his advantage (I, 70). This at a time when Black sounds were unremittingly (and not unwittingly) infiltrating white musical modalities, with minstrelsy the vehicle, producing what Lowe calls the “deep and ugly contradiction” of a dominant culture attending to and inspired by a culture it continued to exploit (I, 72). Was white country music a communal gathering of the like-minded whose basic response to Jim Crow was to continue to do what came naturally, pursuing a method of liberation that didn’t appear to threaten anything? Or did it willfully submit itself to Black ideas and performance innovations in ways that radiated shocks through the system, however subtle? Yes to both, or Love and Thrift, as Lowe styles it in response to my notion of Love and Theft (II, 51).2 Lowe is fascinating on the fretboard intersections of country and blues in the banjo playing of (Black) Jimmy Strothers (1936) and the guitar of (white) Utah Smith (1944), who by turns (of phrase, even) fuse Black and white musical gestures while looking forward to both rock ‘n’ roll and bluegrass (II, 54–55). He does not shrink from proposing Al Jolson as a central figure influencing the development of American singing—check his analysis of the Jolson-y Black group The Bubbling Over Five (1929) (I, 227–28)—but is not unaware that Jolson occupied an altogether different sphere of influence than Charley Patton or Son House. Attuned to the complexities of minstrelsy, as well as segregated sound (in Karl Hagstrom Miller’s sally), privileging neither racial crosstalk nor apparently endogamous local knowledge, Lowe follows the music.3 He is as fresh on Armstrong’s singular innovations as he is precise on the ways Bing Crosby made cunning use of them (I, 137–8, 250). So it goes, in performers fleeting or enduring, local genre permutations and lasting subgenres such as honkytonk. Part of the irreducible pleasure of these volumes, impossible to convey in a review, is in seeing the year-to-year developments occasionally rise to the level of the transmundane (Elder Johnson’s amazing “God Didn’t Like It” [1948]) or explode by way of supernovas (Thelonious Monk at around the same time). Lowe proceeds with performer-by-performer discipline but is chatty and capacious enough in his purview to maintain a roomy feel (albeit with zingers aplenty). This produces a rather novel and indeed salutary music-history temporality in which stars and standouts live in the loam of everyday musicking that buttressed and sustained them. Lowe doesn’t mystify the nearly 2. Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 3. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). anonymous nor let genius take up too much space. It does annoy him that certain writers have tried to take Robert Johnson down a notch by restoring him to the milieu he came from, but then he doesn’t think much of Chuck Berry, a mostly amusing idiosyncrasy (I, 185). The point for Lowe, even when he’s just showing rather than arguing the case, is understanding better the contours of exchange and admixture by looking incrementally at the musical road everybody shared. Also hearing better how self-conscious the exchanges and historical attention often were. Lowe is great on Bob Wills and “country’s search for itself” in the 30s and 40s, built out of old-time fiddle playing, early jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and the Swing Era, hoedown show blues shot through with white jive (ahh-ha!); and he’s good again on Little Walter’s adaptation of old-style country blues to swing-era rules, planting his electrified harp between jazz time and blues accent, all of it audible in “I Just Keep Lovin’ Her” (1947) (II, 181, 189, 105). Lowe excels in isolating the almost scholarly riff allusions of Jelly Roll Morton, his way with Tiger Rag in 1938: “Like an old-days Jaki Byard he has a way of evoking a distant musical past through the surface of a porous musical present. Every note and turn of phrase is like a sideways-glance at some different and distant musical day, shaded by a very personal, present-tense, intellectually and aesthetically active cultural worldview” (II, 116). Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You” (1942), says Lowe, showcases country music’s equally self-conscious interest in conveying “graven images that come at us in three-minute sequences,” less “simple snapshots” than “sonic life studies” (II, 156). Lowe’s way with the issue of appropriation, in other words, opens onto musicking in and as everyday life, which the paratactic side-by-side procedure of these volumes strangely echoes, one after another life-giving medium channeling a broad array of elements: Hank Williams, Memphis Minnie, Faron Young, and Elizabeth Cotten; Little Richard, Little Jimmy Scott, and Lefty Frizzell; The Orioles and The Blue Ridge Quartet; Billy Love and Doris Day; Wanda Jackson, Link Wray, and John Coltrane. One of several compelling statements regarding this connection comes in Lowe’s remarks on what he terms an aesthetic of the homemade, or the homemade as an aesthetic, visible in artists such as Cow Cow Davenport but rising to new heights in Thelonious Monk. Monk, Lowe writes, comes not just from the blues but from that strange twilit zone where minstrelsy, the blues, dance, and old-time pop merged; not just from stride and barrelhouse but the whole house party tradition, where volume and rhythm were as important, if not more so, as melody and tone. Hence “a particular African American stylistic continuum” in which the music is not just self-taught (Black musicians often denied institutional training and traditional forms of employment) but home-made. “Sound in this musical environment was a matter of adapting to so many different kinds of repertoire—think Jug Bands, early plantation bands like Muddy Waters,’ the way in which even players like Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson played pop tunes—that everything was a music in the moment, and it led even musicians who had more of a ‘classical’ approach into some odd stylistic corners.” Imagine Monk touring with an evangelist, which he did: every jazz musician has played for occasions and affairs that demand they dredge up odd pieces of hokum. Monk and Sonny Rollins both, Lowe observes, tended to play out-of-the-way pop tunes, while before them James P. Johnson absorbed the sound Lott | Book Review: “Turn Me Loose White Man” and feel of the country dance and ring shout (which leads us back to Monk) (I, 327). Surely there are white, working-class and/or anti-“classical” versions of this “music in the moment” bricolage as well, and the notion offers up a welcome sense of how a lone performer might embody inventories of musicking that carry Lowe’s volumes across sixty or more years. All the way out to 1962, say, which finds a young Robert Zimmerman singing Richard Rabbit Brown’s 1927 “James Alley Blues,” more medicine/minstrel show than blues, Lowe notes, “stagey and warm,” a departure from what would become Delta style. Probably learning it from Harry Smith’s Anthology, Bob Dylan refuses white-boy mimicry, evoking the old school without self-parody. “Brows[ing] his way through the American vernacular,” like Lowe himself, Dylan at the end of these two volumes stands in for a way of working by absorption that it is Lowe’s determination to capture in most of his subjects throughout “ Turn Me Loose White Man” (II, 388). So even (or especially) if you’re not one of Those People—the R. Crumb obsessive 78 collector in rumpled corduroys and Coke-bottle specs indelibly captured in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World and Amanda Petrusich’s Do Not Sell at Any Price —or even if you are—Lowe makes an excellent Virgil. With great wit and energy, armed with a satchel of opinions, Lowe is never not alive to either the vagaries of cultural exchange or the social determinants that shape them. He helps you hear America better.