jeffkuhn

I know I'm coming late to this discussion, having just finished the book, but I have to agree that Marsh's review did Hamilton a disservice. There have have been numerous blues biographies and histories (perhaps most notably here, Robert Palmer's Deep Blues) and there was no reason to expect Hamilton to add another to the list. Instead, she brings something new to the table. For this, Hamilton is accused of "whitewashing" the original singers and musicians out of history, but it's silly to think that such a thing is possible or that she would attempt it. Marsh also resorts to easy race-baiting, castigating Hamilton for failing to properly demonize John Lomax or devote ample space to black writers. But he's too shallow to even recognize the true racial issue, which is that all of these white researchers and collectors (with the possible exception of McKune) attempted to use black music as evidence for their own ideologies, whether that was white supremacist or Marxist. ... Speaking of which, I once saw a lecture by Bill Russell on a local public access channel in which he contended that Ellington, Goodman, Gillespie, Mingus, Coltrane, etc. were not jazz. Jazz, in his view, occurred only when the front line consisted only of clarinet, trumpet and trombone. The saxophone was not a jazz instrument, he said, and therefore its presence meant that any music in which it appeared was not jazz. And it certainly did not interest him.)