The Land Where The Blues Began
It is impossible to overstate folklorist Alan Lomax's impact on the spread of American roots music. His now legendary trips to the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s and 1940s to document the African-American musical heritage for the Library of Congress introduced many to music (namely the Delta Blues) that would shape all subsequent American popular musics. In his book The Land Where The Blues Began (1993, The New Press) Lomax invites us into his world and, by association, the world of the Mississippi Delta.
Often traveling to great lengths (literally and figuratively) and at great cost to their personal safety (including being shot at, being threatened by plantation bosses, and being detained by racist sheriffs) Lomax and the African-American musicians he encounters on his journey crossed the lines of intense segregation and defied the racial codes of the era to record, for posterity, the music that so powerfully encapsulated life for them in that time and place.
Now there are many fine books written on the blues, but Lomaxs work stands out for several reasons. First and foremost, Lomax's account is not an historical account so much as it is an ethnographic one. In other words, Lomax is not accessing archival information on the Delta Blues. He is living in the Delta among the people who created the music, talking to them firsthand. A chance conversation with the mother of Robert Johnson, a recording in a barn of Son House and his boys, a Delta Baptist Church Revival---all the result of unprecedented access and attention, make his accounts truly special ones.
Although the focus of the book is on the emergence of the Delta Blues, Lomax expertly traces connections between West African cultural and musical traditions, Diaspora cultural and musical traditions (including the study of the Vaudou practices in Haiti), the musical practices of African slaves in the United States, and the post-slavery Delta conditions that influenced the creation of American roots music. Famous country icon Jimmie Rodgers, and progenitor of rock music Elvis Pressley, for example, also hailed from the Mississippi Delta and were very much influenced by the African-American Delta music they encountered as youth. Lomax argues that the relative isolation and insulation of African-Americans in the Delta, the strength of the African-American community, the ascendancy of the Black church all played important roles in the creation of blues, an expression of suffering through song, a cathartic music at once of triumph and tribulation.
Finally, Lomax's book stands out as a result of his candid portrait of the abject conditions of racism and rural poverty, the trap of the sharecropper system that surrounded African-Americans at the time, and the resistant subcultures of the Mississippi River roustabouts (forerunners to the railway porters) who escaped sharecropping life to spread blues music up and down the Mississippi. Lomax draws from interviews, observations, and his own historical research to eloquently document the perseverance of Africanist cultural norms and musical styles, and, most importantly, the spirit of passion, the energy, the creativity with language, the candor, the sexual liberation, the appreciation of dance and movement, and the willingness to unabashedly celebrate of life that infused African-American lifestyle and the music they created both in the Motherland and in the Diaspora.
It is impossible to truly understand the Delta Blues outside of the circumstances, both good and bad, that created them. It is also impossible to understand the spirit of American roots music outside of understanding the conditions and the people who have given us the Delta Blues. This 539-page tome stands as both indictment and celebration. Mostly it sets itself apart as an impassioned, well informed, beautifully written memoir of a man and the music that he loved. Indeed, Lomax sums up his feelings in his dedication which reads:
To the black [sic] people of the Delta, who created a Mississippi of song that now flows through the music of the whole world.
Our debt to these music pioneers is great, but the contribution of Alan Lomax is no less significant. |