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Article: Messing with the blues: revisionism comes to the Delta.(Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues)(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- June 1, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 Reason Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Every casual blues fan has met a hard case, the guy--it is always a guy--who pores over the tiny ads in the back of Goldmine in search of "real" blues recordings. He is the keeper of esoteric sideman knowledge, the arbiter of notes bent and pre-bent, and sadly in need of being told to give it a rest.
In Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (Amistad/ HarperCollins, 2004), Elijah Wald seems like he's out to take the stuffy blues purists down a notch or two with a fresh look at the received history of the blues. But despite his impressive scholarship and obvious love of the material, Wald winds up substituting, ones, which is not quite ...