Elijah Wald - new book on blues

[David Flower]

Those who went to Darbuka to see Elijah present his Beatles book last year might be interested by this , from his latest round-robin email:

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My immediate news is a pocket paperback, "The Blues: A Very Short Introduction," newly published in Oxford's "Very Short Introductions" series. I would not normally have chosen to be limited to 125 pages of text, but the challenge was interesting and I'm happy with the result.
The first half is a concise history of blues, with nods to the most important performers and trends and some attempt to explore not only what happened but why and how. The second half has chapters relating blues to jazz and country music and looking at the language and poetry of blues lyrics. If you want to know a bit more, I've put up a page at
http://www.elijahwald.com/bluesintro.html
and if you want to buy a copy it's available in all the usual places. (As always, I recommend patronizing independent bookstores, and it is also helpful to encourage
your local library to order one.)

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[Des]

Just what the world needs.

[Neil Foxlee]

Just what the world needs.

Just what the world needs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMS2uMUQNnQ

[Chris P]

Just what the world needs.

Oh that buggy boogie woogie sweeps me off my feet
What this world needs is a good retreat
What this world needs is a good two dollar room
'n a good two dollar broom
One day I was sweepin' down by the wall
I bumped a mama spider 'n the babies begin' to fall
Off o' my broom
Now I gotta keep on sweepin' 'n sweepin'
'fore they fill the room
Now that buggy boogie woogie sweeps me off my feet
I gotta keep on sweepin' 'n sweepin'
Seems like I could keep on sweepin' 'n sweepin'
'n there's still too many feet
What this world needs is a good two dollar room
'n a good two dollar broom
What this world needs is a good two dollar room
'n a good two dollar broom
Seems like I could keep on sweepin' 'n sweepin'
'n there's still too many feet
Well the way I must be sweepin'
Must be with too many feet
Ah, 'n I'll still keep on sweeping 'n sweepin'
'n there's still too many feet

D.V.V.

[elijah wald]

For what it's worth, I quite agree. On the other hand, the world definitely needs more jobs for writers, so when they approached me I said yes. And I tried to get a few new facts and ideas into it... but heaven knows this is a very, very well-trodden path.

[Adam Blake]

Elijah, I teach guitar to kids and believe me, there are a whole lot of kids discovering the blues for the first time, all the time. One of them might pick up your book, or have it given to them as a present by a bemused parent, and learn a whole lot of stuff they didn't know and that they find fascinating.

Des, for shame! Are there too many books on bird watching?

[Pete Fowler]

Des, I was taught at school by Paul Oliver. When he was teaching me, he was spending his holidays travelling round the States researching what became Blues Fell This Morning. I was seventeen, I guess he was in his late thirties.

When it came out, someone in my class said, ‘well, that’s the blues covered for our generation…’ And maybe it was. It’s certainly still available, even now; and Oliver himself is still around, somewhere, with his MBE for services to architecture.

I, of course, being younger and therefore wiser than my old school teacher, thought, in the 1960s, that he’d been trounced by Leroi Jones. In my view, only a black guy from the States could possibly understand the blues.

A lot of flood water has passed over the bridges of history since then; and Leroi Jones is largely forgotten. As are the blues themselves. But precisely because the blues is an endless and eternal form - twelve bars that can somehow always be used to tear the guts out of any generation that has feelings (and that’s all of us) – it’s become a recurring musical theme. It fades sometimes, but springs back with the bounce of a Berry or the hooks of a Hooker, the howls of a Wolf or the wails of the Waters.

And it’s such a great, simple form for aspiring musicians: they can realise their dreams and play like an angel in those three-chord sequences. It’s all that’s needed to get their emotions out onto a stage and into a studio. It’s still, all these years on, such a great starting point: it facilitates the immediacy of the Yardbirds and the structural simplicity of the Sex Pistols. And yet it can, should the musician so desire, become wonderfully complex and innovative.

But, if I were seventeen now, and wanting to read something on the blues, there’s no way in the world I would turn to Paul Oliver. And I’d have never heard of Leroi Jones. I’d want to read something that spoke to me, not to my father and his father. It wouldn’t occur to me that what I was reading was a re-hash, even if it were, I just want to know something from someone who connects to my generation.

Every generation needs its voices and its storytellers. And every generation needs someone to tell them about things. Even if those things came from the generations before.

[Alan Balfour]

When it came out, someone in my class said, ‘well, that’s the blues covered for our generation…’ And maybe it was. It’s certainly still available, even now; and Oliver himself is still around, somewhere, with his MBE for services to architecture.

Yes Paul's indeed still around he graciously sends me an Xmas card each year. He spent a couple of decades working on an Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World which was finally published in three massive volumes in 1997. Last year he saw published a manuscript which had lain dormant for some time (Barrelhouse Blues) but his long time goal has been to finish his magnum opus, Blues The World Forgot. A 2003 Xmas card read "Am slowly moving on BTWF". He's now 83, lives in Oxfordshire and seems to spend his time in Europe on lecture tours.

But I seem to have strayed from the topic.

[Adam Blake]

My favourite blues book is "Deep Blues" by Robert Palmer. That was the one that spoke to me. I daresay all blues fans have a book that got through to them at a particular age and time. Later on I thoroughly enjoyed Charles Shaar Murray's "Blues On CD" and I find I still refer to it even though the availability of this, that or the other is long out of date. Murray's potted biogs are witty and entertaining and he makes no apology for talking to his readers as one who discovered the blues via rock - as most of my generation did.

[elijah wald]

For what it's worth, I'm very pleased at the choice of books being mentioned here. I am currently teaching my "Blues in American Music" class at UCLA, and I assign chapters from Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Oliver, and Palmer. None of them seem to me to have aged badly, though obviously there are some errors in all three that have been cleared up since they were written. (Incidentally, I have "errata" pages on my website to let people know about the errors that are found in my books.)

History is not static, and after more than fifty years of blues histories written by people who came to the music by way of folk, jazz, and rock, it is past time for someone to do a serious rethinking of blues history with insights drawn from rap/hip-hop. (As it happens, I'm planning on something of that sort myself, but I'm also assuming that what I see and hear will be very different from what someone raised on hip-hop from childhood would see or hear.)

[garth cartwright]

Good to know you are writing a new book, Elijah! Robert Palmer's Deep Blues was my Bible as a teen - I still have my original copy with the address and ph no of where I was living at the time on the fly leaf.

Blues is a living art form in constant flux - not only are there new artists (today I listened to new recordings of Errol Linton featuring Adam - exceptionally good!) the past is also being constantly sifted so artists that were largely unknown for decades sometimes get rediscovered (most recently the great and mysterious Geeshie Wiley was only known to serious 78 collectors until a few years ago). As a writer Elijah is never pedestrian, always looking for new angles. His book will be of interest, I'm sure, to anyone with a love for blues.