Ramblin' on My Mind

"Indispensable."--American Book Review "[An] illuminating volume. . . . Recommended to all blues fans."--Sing Out Like a program album wherein melodies and chords are carried from song to song, the authors in this collection pass themes from one essay to the next.--Journal of Southern History

David Evans is a professor in the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music at the University of Memphis and the author of Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues, Tommy Johnson, and The NPR Curious Listener's Guide to Blues. A seasoned performer and producer, Evans is also a Grammy Award winner.

Contents Introduction David Evans 1 Bourdon, Blue Notes, and Pentatonism in the Blues: An Africanist Perspective Gerhard Kubik 2 "They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me": Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff 3 Abbe Niles, Blues Advocate Elliott S. Hurwitt 4 The Hands of Blues Guitarists Andrew M. Cohen 5 From Bumble Bee Slim to Black Boy Shine: Nicknames of Blues Singers David Evans 6 Preachin' the Blues: A Textual Linguistic Analysis of Son House's "Dry Spell Blues" Luigi Monge 7 Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson's Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic Value in Delta Blues James Bennighof 8 "Guess These People Wonder What I'm Singing": Quotation and Reference in Ella Fitzgerald's "St. Louis Blues" Katharine Cartwright 9 Beyond the Mushroom Cloud: A Decade of Disillusion in Black Blues and Gospel Song Bob Groom 10 Houston Creoles and Zydeco: The Emergence of an African American Urban Popular Style John Minton Index Ramblin' on My Mind Introduction David Evans The years since the late 1950s have seen a dramatic growth in scholarly and popular literature about blues music. Blues was certainly mentioned in print before this time, but previous writers had almost universally viewed it as either simply a type of folk music, more or less anonymous and unchanging, or a "root" form of jazz, worthy of a chapter or two at the beginning of any study of that genre. While it was recognized that blues had been popularized and commercialized, folklorists generally viewed this process with alarm, equating commercialization with a decline in artistic quality and cultural relevance. Jazz writers were more favorable toward commercial blues, but few had heard enough of it to do more than comment on selected artists and recordings that came to their attention, especially those that contained good jazz instrumental work. What was lacking, except among musicians themselves and their immediate audiences, was a sense of blues as a distinct type of music with its own personalities, stylistic variety, and history of musical development. The modern era of blues scholarship and the significant growth of our knowledge of this genre began with the publication of Samuel B. Charters' The Country Blues (1959) and Paul Oliver's Blues Fell This Morning (1960), followed soon by the launching of the British magazine Blues Unlimited and a steady stream of albums featuring both reissues of historic commercial recordings and contemporary recordings in a full variety of styles. Blues artists were interviewed and profiled in magazines. New artists were discovered, while older recording artists were "rediscovered" and had second careers. Folklorists began to explore the relationships between folk and popular blues and place more emphasis on the personalities of their informants. Historians began to write the story of this music in particular cities and regions, identifying both an array and evolution of styles. Musicians from outside the traditional blues community began to learn how to perform the music and teach others, both directly and through instructional books and articles. There are now books that analyze blues as music, literature, and culture, that profile individual artists, producers, songwriters, and record companies, and that explore the relationship of blues to religion, philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, and ethnicity. The music is today more popular and widespread than ever, as witnessed by the growth of an international club, concert, and festival circuit, blues magazines in ten languages, thousands of available CD recordings, university courses and archives, radio and television programs, blues as theme music for advertising, blues awards programs, museums, and even blues tourism. One now hears increasingly of a "blues industry." Interest in blues has particularly increas