Marybeth Hamilton: IN SEARCH OF THE BLUES

[7/4]

February 24, 2008

Out on Highway 61

By DAVE MARSH, NYTimes

IN SEARCH OF THE BLUES

By Marybeth Hamilton.

Illustrated. 309 pp. Basic Books. $24.95.

"In Search of the Blues" is

not about the blues, or the people who made the blues. It's about

people who made the dark side of blues music into what popular

mythology calls "the Delta blues." Those people aren't singers or

players but folk song scholars and record collectors.

So Marybeth Hamilton believes. She organizes her book around the

personal stories of five people or groups of people. The first three —

Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough, and John and Alan Lomax

— are scholars. The last two groups — Frederic Ramsey, Charles Edward

Smith and William Russell, followed by James McKune and the acolytes

called the Blues Mafia — are collectors. Most of the scholars are

older. The collectors are more obsessed.

Hamilton's position is that these scholars and collectors — all of

them white, all of them educated, all of them middle-class — are the

people who determined our understanding of the Delta blues (a k a

country blues). That is, the musical similarities and differences among

Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf

— all of them black, none of them educated, all of them poor — can be

excluded from such a discussion, except in the way they affected the

thinking of the scholars and collectors. "Here our view of the singer

is obscured by the presence of the narrator," Hamilton writes. But as

she tells the story, the singer is obliterated.

Hamilton, who teaches American history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is the author of a book about Mae West,

ignores the lineage of heavy beats and a common pool of lyrical

imagery. She does not even bother to state and then dismiss the notion

that there is something in the content of the music that led to its

image as profound and unsettling. Instead, she describes the blues as

an idea that developed as the result of a search for a pure aesthetic

expressed by primitive African-Americans untainted by the modern world.

The seekers, some in the service of white supremacy, some operating

under the banner of Popular Front proletarianism, some in the thrall of

art for art's sake, hoped to locate the one true voice of the Negro in

the deepest, darkest South.

The map of this multigenerational pursuit doesn't show Highways 61,

55 and 49; it's a more mythic path revealed only to a studious elite.

The Delta blues survive not because of the talent and emotional depth

of the music makers, but because of the image of them that was

constructed by the scholars and collectors.

In that light, let's tell a familiar story: Eric Clapton was spurred to an obsession by a bootleg tape of Robert Johnson, on which he thought

he heard an amazingly creative guitarist with a haunting voice and

strikingly original ways of framing blues imagery. But the sounds were

merely the foundation on which a concept had been established by the

Blues Mafia and its predecessors.

Hamilton's neatest trick, perhaps, is simply to write out of the

story any alternate routes to what Clapton and others wound up

experiencing. She does this not only by displaying an aversion to any

extended discussion of music and musicians, but also by omitting

incidents that portray a different trajectory.

Consider Robert Johnson. He became famous in the North because he

was the missing performer at the 1938 Spirituals to Swing concert,

missing because he had died. Hamilton does not mention Spirituals to

Swing, although she does several times mention the show's promoter,

John Hammond.

Hamilton writes that Hammond, like the blues fanatics Ramsey and

Smith, believed that "a distinctly black, defiantly proletarian art

form" needed to be nurtured "in an era when ... jazz had been tamed,

sweetened and commodified, with white performers like Benny Goodman and Paul Whiteman praised as its consummate practitioners."

Not only did the real John Hammond feature Benny Goodman's band in

Spirituals to Swing, the whole purpose of the night's program was to

show that jazz had grown from solid roots in Negro culture, that its

modern incarnations were vital in part because they came directly from

those roots, and that its power spoke to and could be interpreted by

all kinds of people, not just black ones.

That's the best competing argument of how the blues aesthetic has

been transmitted: through the evolution of a specific culture —

segregated from the American mainstream not by choice but by law and

custom — that time and again, from spirituals to hip-hop, goes off like

a bomb when it's been more widely exposed.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of "In Search of the

Blues" is that virtually no black voice is heard. (The page-and-a-half

exception is a characteristically vituperative letter written by Zora Neale Hurston

to John Lomax.) John Work III is not a figure in this tale, even though

as a second-generation black musicologist, he was Alan Lomax's partner

and guide in a project to record blues in the Delta in the early 1940s.

Lomax never credited Work, but recent research has established him as

at least Lomax's equal in the study. Hamilton gives him but two passing

mentions, neither of which even alludes to Lomax's dishonesty.

At least Work is mentioned. Some important black writers, including Clyde Woods and Amiri Baraka,

are not recognized at all. Those writers are not concerned with purity

and primitivism in the blues — unsurprisingly, since they know the

demeaning light in which such terms cast black culture.

"In Search of the Blues" is at best frustrating and sometimes

infuriating. It may seem to come out of left field, but it's actually

one of the clearest examples of the revival of interest in writing

about folk music spurred by the "Old, Weird America" chapter in Greil

Marcus's "Invisible Republic." Marcus told the story of the collector

Harry Smith in a book mostly concerned with music. Smith got all the

attention. His "Anthology of American Folk Music" (1952) has now been

succeeded, in various forms, by what amounts to a continuing Harry

Smith Project. "In Search of the Blues" brings the process to its

culmination by making the music invisible and all but irrelevant.

Hamilton spends pages on John Lomax's twitchings as he tried to

avoid making his white-supremacist ideas congruent with the conditions

endured by black prisoners in the South. Here Hamilton takes sides,

using a few quotations from the writer and song collector John Henry

Faulk to dismiss the significance of Lomax's racial attitudes. Later,

she terms Lomax's lie that he never saw a black chain gang "muted ...

criticism."

To the perspective of Leadbelly, Lomax's discovery and near chattel, she devotes one paragraph.

The book's final two pages describe James McKune's descent into

living on skid row among "junkies, hookers and derelicts," without ever

mentioning mental illness as a possible cause. In conclusion, Hamilton

compares McKune's demise — murdered in a hotel room by what the police

assumed must have been a sex partner — with the death of Robert

Johnson, reputedly poisoned by a jealous husband. But she is apparently

thinking not just of their similar manner of death but of what she

believes was a similar manner of life, each of them an "alienated

drifter, scorning the pull of the marketplace, uncorrupted to the very

end."

A writer who finds a bohemian version of a fairy-tale ending in such circumstances is a rare thing, and for good reason.

Dave Marsh is writing a book about why "American Idol" is evil.

[paul secor]

Have to say that I listen to music as music. I'm not concerned with musicologists, scholars, "blues mafia", collectors (except that I'm very grateful for certain collectors making recordings available to the general public) , etc. And I would not give one iota of credence to anything that Dave Marsh writes.

As I say, I'd rather listen to blues recordings than read someone's thesis about the blues.

Edited February 24, 2008 by paul secor

[AllenLowe]

the book is worthwhile - Marsh is semi-literate, a complete moron who cannot write - and I've been reading that book (see a related post in another thread) and though I have some serious disagreements, she is a good writer, extremely smart, and has a persuasive perspective. Shame on the Times for printing an idiot review that may, unfortunately, scare people away. One problem that guys like Marsh have with her, I am certain, is that she is a woman and not part of the club -

Edited February 25, 2008 by AllenLowe

[Larry Kart]

What a hit-man job that review was! Almost breathtaking in its dishonesty. I thought of saying "in its ignorance," but Marsh can't be that dumb or entirely that dumb; he's almost certainly operating here as a conscious assassin. Disclaimer: While I haven't read the book, and I think that Allen's mixed estimate of it is where I'd end after I did, the way Marsh plays the race card in this review has more convolutions to it than a coiled snake.

[Guest Bill Barton]

"Dave Marsh is writing a book about why 'American Idol' is evil."

Somebody should be writing a book about why Dave Marsh is evil.

Damn! What a piece of shit that review is!

[AllenLowe]

actually, Larry, I've read a fair amount of Marsh and I believe he's actually even dumber than the review indicates - as a matter of fact, the review is more coherent than his usual stuff; must have had a conscientious editor -

[John L]

Indeed, I have never understood how Marsh can make a living doing what he is doing. His writing has always been terrible.

[AllenLowe]

I think it's the early association with Springsteen -he wrote some books on him and gave Brucie a lot of nice blurbs -

[papsrus]

Marsh's criticism is that the author is (pardon the phrase) whitewashing the history of the emergence of the Delta blues. Is this anywhere near an accurate criticism of the book Allen? Marsh points out that some prominent figures are barely discussed, or not discussed at all. He may be overly harsh in his review, but if these omissions are the case, doesn't he have a point?

At the same time, I'm under the impression that there is some strength in Hamilton's argument, as far as I can understand it -- that there is no small degree of mythology built into how the blues emerged. That white record labels (among other factors) dictated the course of the music to an extent (who would play what, that sort of thing).

Please forgive any misinterpretations I might have, but I'm curious about this.

(Brutal review)

[AllenLowe]

Marsh's whole perspective is irrelevant to Hamilton's point, in my opinion - what she is doing is trying to examine how the whole idea of the delta blues emerged, as much as the actual music, and she deals with several key and important figures - she does not pretend to be doing a detailed historical survey, but more of a focus-in on how the blues revival began and developed. Now, I would disagree on certain larger points, and I have emailed her about these things - mostly having to do with the need to develop a real and alternate way of evaluating how significant the delta blues were in their time, as both a cultural force and as a subculture; the numbers we have, sales, etc, are not an accurate measure, as they were not well accounted for. There are other measures of influence, other than sales and popularity that is - and there are other ways of measuring cultural impact - what she is saying is that we need to look at how we've done so to date, and that we must come to terms with the deficiencies of the old kind of blues historicism. I agree with her there, and I think she has started a much-needed dialog. Marsh is largely arguing with himself, demonizing her out of territorialism and out of an idea of male historical privilege.

Edited February 26, 2008 by AllenLowe

[kenny weir]

I have yet to read the book - and am looking forward to it.

But I get the sense Marsh - for whatever reason - is criticising it for not being something it never claims to be.

I for one am very interested in the dynamics of how my early blues/roots tastes were affected by the blues mafia or whatever you want to call them.

And that's quite a different thing from writing a history of the music itself.

These days, it's a pleasure to enjopy a far more encompassing view of pop music and its history, but I find it all very intriguing.

[Larry Kart]

Marsh's criticism is that the author is (pardon the phrase) whitewashing the history of the emergence of the Delta blues. Is this anywhere near an accurate criticism of the book Allen? Marsh points out that some prominent figures are barely discussed, or not discussed at all. He may be overly harsh in his review, but if these omissions are the case, doesn't he have a point?

At the same time, I'm under the impression that there is some strength in Hamilton's argument, as far as I can understand it -- that there is no small degree of mythology built into how the blues emerged. That white record labels (among other factors) dictated the course of the music to an extent (who would play what, that sort of thing).

Please forgive any misinterpretations I might have, but I'm curious about this.

(Brutal review)

Another review that gives a better idea of what the book is about. For myself, I'd say that the mythologizing narrative business is true (though damn complicated in its interaction with social-musical realities; Allen Lowe is an expert here), but only a fool could deny the power of music of Patton, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Son House, et al. About the Clapton example that Marsh harps on (as though what moved Eric Clapton and how was that damn important), I think it's pretty likely that Clapton or anyone else who so to speak "came to" the blues (including myself, in a different place) was responding both to the music and the myth-making, if only because it was virtually impossible to encounter the former without tasting the latter. It helped, though-- as I'm sure Chuck could testify more fully than I could -- to actually be around, say, Big Joe Williams or Fred McDowell a bit and take in and respond to what you thought was up in a reasonable seat-of-the-pants manner.

By Caspar Llewellyn Smith

Sunday January 14, 2007

The Observer

In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions

by Marybeth Hamilton

Cape £12.99, pp246

The idea that the Mississippi Delta is the birthplace of the blues haunts the history of popular music. The alluvial soil brought forth cotton and slavery, and from despair was wrenched the howling moan of Charley Patton, Son House and the damned Robert Johnson. Even before their time - the Twenties and Thirties - the archetype existed.

It was at a Delta railhead that the blues were first documented; in his 1941 autobiography, composer WC Handy recalled being woken from a reverie one night in Tutwiler in 1903: 'A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me as I slept,' he wrote. 'His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar ... his song struck me instantly ... the weirdest music I had ever heard.'

Never mind that when the first commercial blues record was released in 1920, the singer was a vaudeville practitioner from Cincinnati (and a woman to boot). 'Crazy Blues' by Mamie Smith sold 75,000 copies in its first month of release and began its own craze, as labels such as Paramount discovered an audience of black Americans and flooded the market with 'race' recordings. Nor, as Marybeth Hamilton notes in her iconoclastic study, did the Delta bluesmen even enjoy much of a local audience. Even in and around Clarksdale, jukeboxes played the hits, which meant acts such as Louis Jordan and Count Basie, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. Patton's recordings sold only moderately in his lifetime and those of his followers barely at all.

It is not the history of blues performers in which Hamilton is interested, nor in their prehistory - the theory, for instance, that the blues have their origins in the Islamic music of west and central Africa. But between 1890 and 1930, she observes, ethnographers studying Native American song made some 14,000 field recordings using primitive phonograph cylinders. By contrast, no one much bothered with African-American voices, but Hamilton discovers that the Georgia-born sociologist Howard Odum might have been the first person ever to record the blues - 40 miles east of the Delta in Lafayette County in 1907, 13 years before Mamie Smith's studio date.

Travelling the back roads, Odum heard 'music physicianers', 'musicianers' and 'songsters', singing songs made up of a single line, repeated two or three times, and he persuaded them to sing into his phonograph in return for a token sum. But tantalisingly, Odum seems to have lost or discarded his cylinders at some point in the Twenties.

Even so, it is not evident that he captured the kind of performances that later aficionados would have cherished - the blues in their rawest form, before commercial processes contaminated the results. Odum saw himself as a scientist and conceived of his phonograph as an instrument of science; it was insight into the potentiality of the 'Negro race' that he really sought. But his subjects saw the machine as a wonder in front of which they might show off and they sang 'ragtimes', 'coon songs' and the latest 'hits', which, he lamented, replaced 'the simpler Negro melodies' that Odum had sought.

It is Odum and fellow travellers such as writer Dorothy Scarborough, folklorist John Lomax and a group of collectors who named themselves the Blues Mafia who are the subjects of In Search of the Blues. Its central conceit is that 'the Delta blues were "discovered" - or, if you like, invented - as the culmination of a quest that began in the early 20th century, as white men and women, unsettled by the phenomenal success of race records set out in search of black voices that they heard as uncorrupted and pure'. It is a picaresque journey, ranging from Mississippi to Manhattan, mirroring the journey that Lomax took with the ex-con Huddie Ledbetter in the Thirties.

Ledbetter, or Leadbelly as he became known throughout the world, killed a man in Texas and was sent to the Central State Prison Farm in 1918. There he came to the attention of the state governor, who told his friend Dorothy Scarborough that the inmate had sung to him seeking clemency. The daughter of a Confederate veteran from Louisiana, Scarborough had studied at Oxford University and Columbia, and was living in New York before she launched a four-year journey back through the South to collect black folk songs in 1921. Captivated by an image of the 'old-time Negro', she believed the music passed down by black Southerners reflected 'the lighter, happier side of slavery'; indeed, that the songs had first been appropriated from the white plantation owners, rather than springing from their own culture.

Scarborough opted not to meet Leadbelly, relying, as in other instances, on the state governor's recollections for her 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs. Lomax, father to the more celebrated folklorist, Alan, their relationship always full of ambiguities, acted differently. He met Leadbelly when the singer was incarcerated in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana 10 years later.

Lomax was not only amazed by Leadbelly's facility as a performer, he valued his 'primitive purity'; jail had inoculated him from contamination with the modern world. The 65-year-old Mississippian also relied upon his assistance on his journey through six Southern states in the autumn of 1933, when he sought to record other black voices. But Leadbelly came to chafe at Lomax's demands, telling him finally: 'I'm tired of lookin' at niggers in the penitentshuh. I wish we could go somewheres else.'

'Somewheres' turned out to be New York, where in 1935, Lomax presented Leadbelly in concert, advertising him to the public as something akin to a noble savage. Crowds flocked, but the singer refused to accept his role and, rather than simply sing his prison songs, he started playing new hits that he heard, whether the country songs of Gene Autry or Tin Pan Alley standards.

In New York three decades later, the blues were reborn, when Columbia issued Robert Johnson's recordings, and singers such as Skip James, assumed dead, were rediscovered and brought before new audiences. Key to the blues revival were the activities of the Blues Mafia, a group of collectors who, from the mid-Forties onwards, congregated around Indian Joe's second-hand record store in Manhattan and the mysterious figure of James McKune.

McKune was the record collector nonpareil, the model for the Steve Buscemi character in Terry Zwigoff's film Ghost World and everyone with a spot of Nick Hornby in them. In 1944, through a contact or from one of the second-hand stores that he frequented, he chanced upon a battered copy of Paramount disc serial number 13110, 'Some These Days I'll Be Gone' by Charley Patton, an entirely neglected genius about whom he knew nothing. McKune was transfixed, and passed his passion on to his acolytes, who went on to promote the idea of the country blues - the blues of the Mississippi Delta - to a much wider public. Fans included the young Eric Clapton in Britain and the similarly influential US guitarist John Fahey, who, in turn, was responsible for the 2001 release of Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues, a monumental seven-disc boxed set tribute to Charley Patton, hailed by the likes of the White Stripes' Jack White.

If the Blues Mafia has predecessors, they were Frederic Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith and William Russell, three friends who had rediscovered Jelly Roll Morton in the late Thirties as part of a quest of their own - to identify the origins of jazz. In Search of the Blues sketches their story, too, including their pursuit of a rumoured box of wax-cylinder recordings made in New Orleans in the mid-1890s by Buddy Bolden. Smith even tracked down a woman who confessed she had owned just such a box - the mythic cornet player might be heard at last! - but the cylinders had gathered dust in her living room for 40 years and 12 months previously she had thrown them out.

It is in these detective stories - these searches for obscure recordings and pursuits of an idealised past - that Marybeth Hamilton proves herself a fine and sensitive detective. The author spent her teenage years in San Diego and was a fan of prototype punks the New York Dolls. She came to the blues through the writings of critic Greil Marcus, in whose seminal Mystery Train, Robert Johnson was fancifully identified as rock'n'roll's progenitor. It took Hamilton 15 years to get around to listening to Johnson's recordings - and he only ever did commit 29 songs to vinyl, before his death at the probable age of 27 in 1938. (The story is that he was poisoned; an article in the British Medical Journal last year also posited Marfan's syndrome - a connective tissue disorder, symptoms of which, such as spindly fingers and limbs, Johnson seemed to share.) When the author did listen, she confesses: 'I heard very little, just a guitar, a keening vocal and a lot of surface noise' and certainly not the tale of existential anguish that others identified.

Her brief but provocative book doesn't aim to question the artistic accomplishments of the spectral Delta bluesmen, whose recordings might all too easily have slipped from view. But it shakes the foundation myth of so much in music that followed, as well as explaining a great deal about what it is to be a record collector, itself a dying calling in the age of the iPod, when every kind of music from every age is digitally accessible.

[kenny weir]

Perhaps March's problem is that like Clapton, myself and so many others, his path as a fan and a writer was formed at least in some partmand perhaps in BIG part, by the trends and dynamics described in the book.

[seeline]

Perhaps March's problem is that like Clapton, myself and so many others, his path as a fan and a writer was formed at least in some partmand perhaps in BIG part, by the trends and dynamics described in the book.

You get an "Amen" from me - I'm 1/3d of the way through this book and can see why it would upset people ... The mythologizing behind a lot of "received wisdom" about any number of things is one of the main points she (and Elijah Wald, reviled though he may be by some here) are after. I think their books compliment each other quite well... And that I now need to go back and read a lot of material (especially Zora Neale Hurston's) for a contrasting view.

Interesting how she shows Hurston and Jean Toomer inveighing against the evils of phonographs and mass-produced records, right along with their white semi-counterparts of the same era. (I say "semi" because I can't imagine Hurston, Toomer - or any of their colleagues - romanticizing the antebellum era as some sort of now-lost golden age!!!)

Hamilton is also critiquing a lot of things that lie behind the idea of sociology (and related disciplines) as some sort of exact science(s).

I have to say that a lot of the pronouncements by a lot of the people she quotes (very much including Odum) are enough to make me feel literally sick to my stomach - SO much racism is involved, in a very overt way.

Hmm.

Edited February 27, 2008 by seeline

[garthsj]

For what it is worth, her book on Mae West is an excellent social history of the West phenomenon, and what it meant for the shift in sexuality (and issues of social control) in American culture in the 1930's ... I have not read the book on the blues, but will do so when it comes up on my "to read" list ...

[papsrus]

Another review that gives a better idea of what the book is about. For myself, I'd say that the mythologizing narrative business is true (though damn complicated in its interaction with social-musical realities; Allen Lowe is an expert here), but only a fool could deny the power of music of Patton, Robert Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Son House, et al. About the Clapton example that Marsh harps on (as though what moved Eric Clapton and how was that damn important), I think it's pretty likely that Clapton or anyone else who so to speak "came to" the blues (including myself, in a different place) was responding both to the music and the myth-making, if only because it was virtually impossible to encounter the former without tasting the latter. It helped, though-- as I'm sure Chuck could testify more fully than I could -- to actually be around, say, Big Joe Williams or Fred McDowell a bit and take in and respond to what you thought was up in a reasonable seat-of-the-pants manner.

By Caspar Llewellyn Smith

Sunday January 14, 2007

The Observer

In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions

by Marybeth Hamilton

Cape £12.99, pp246

(...)

Thank you for posting that. A far more even-handed review, and one that I think gives me a much better sense of the book and the subject matter.

[AllenLowe]

thanks, Larry, for posting that review - I have sent a letter to the NY Times book review, though I'm not optimistic about the chances of them printing it (on the other hand, though I may be wrong, I think Peter Keepnews, who is a good guy, is an editor in Books - or at least used to be) -

I do wonder about the main thrust of some of the revisionist crticism - by Wald, et al - that the contemporary popularity of people like House/Patton/Johnson has been grossly exaggerated; I do know that in bios of Muddy Waters he has praised Johnson and House, but who knows if he is just revising his own thinking in light of contemporary (1960s) trends -

I do think it would be worthwhile to approach their importance from a perspective of the idea of a sub-culture, an underground movement of songs and songsters - and I do know of people I would trust to give an accurate sense of what things were like in those days - I would talk to Dick Spottswood, Kip Lornell, Doug Seroff, all of whom have dealt with many primary sources of that era. On the OTHER hand - I always think of how literary history is approached, how it seems to pull writers mostly for their artistic/literary importance, and does not appear to worry about contemporary popularity and visibilty - but I may be wrong about that - what do you think, Larry?

Edited February 27, 2008 by AllenLowe

[AllenLowe]

juts as an important aside, the first commercial blues recordings were earlier than 1920 - Lasses White, in 1913; Gus Haenschen included a blues strain in a 1919 recordings, as did the Victor Military band in, I think, 1914 -

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I am more than overawed.

MG

[AllenLowe]

two of those (the Haenschen and the Victor Military Band) are on Devilin Tune - which, by the way, is in the mail to you in 4 separate packages - let me know when it arrives -

[seeline]

I'd love to see an interview with Dick Spottswood on these topics. Should be very interesting!

Edited February 27, 2008 by seeline

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

two of those (the Haenschen and the Victor Military Band) are on Devilin Tune - which, by the way, is in the mail to you in 4 separate packages - let me know when it arrives -

Gawdblesher Guv.

MG

[kenny weir]

Oddly enough, but not really surprisingly, there were 2 or 3 record shops in my hometown of Dunedin, deep in the South Island of NZ, that had pretty darn good blues sections at the time I started taking an interest, in the late '60s and early '70s. (Dunedin's population then was about 100,000).

Certainly, much, much better than you average mall store in 3-million plus Melbourne today.

But still, information was exceedingly hard to come by.

So getting a copy of Paul Oliver's The Story Of The Blues as a birthday prezzie was a a really BFD.

Oliver, IIRC, did a pretty good job of covering the jazz band-backed chick blues singers and the minstrelsy influence and so on.

Yet even then, I avoided Ma Rainey and the likes, and also Papa Charlie Jackson, in favour of the "far cooler" Robert Johnson, Hooker and so on.

The idea of digging ona banjo-guitar playing minstrel bluesman didn't appeal.

Which was/is crazy - as about the same time, thanks to another gift (a banjo that I never did master) and a mind-blowing Dunedin concert by Mike and Alice seeger, I was also embarking on a country journey.

In recent years I have got a few Jackson sides on various compilations, but recently had a burning desire to hear more, so I ordered his complete recordings as found on three Dopcument label CDs. I have the first two so far.

Ah - sweet epiphany!

By the time I was 14 or so, I was subscribing to the Brit magazine Blues Unlimited, and then started importing albums to NZ at great cost. The first was Lightnin' Slim's Rooster Blues.

As a pretty much penniless schoolboy it was tough. At one stage there I was gathering up empty beer cans at rugby union matches and sending them by the hundred to a blues lovin' can collector on the east coast of the US. He gave me 20 cents a can and sent me albums. I visited him later when I first hit the US.

Those Blue unlimted guys played a role in keeping my tastes mongrel, too, with the likes of swamp poppers Cookie and the Cupcakes. John Broven in particular, with his subsequent book South to Louisiana, set me up for along love affair with cajun, zydeco, swamp pop, and Bruce Bastin's Flyright label had all kinds of crazy stuff on it.

[AllenLowe]

Papa Charlie Jackson caused me to buy a six-string banjo -

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

in my hometown of Dunedin, deep in the South Island of NZ, that had pretty darn good blues sections at the time I started taking an interest, in the late '60s and early '70s. (Dunedin's population then was about 100,000).

Ah, the spiritual home of Flying Nun Records!

MG