Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural AnalysisHailed as a classic in music studies when it was first published in 1977, Early Downhome Blues is a detailed look at traditional country blues artists and their work. Combining musical analysis and cultural history approaches, Titon examines the origins of downhome blues in African American society. He also explores what happened to the art form when the blues were commercially recorded and became part of the larger American culture. From forty-seven musical transcriptions, Titon derives a grammar of early downhome blues melody. His book is enriched with the recollections of blues performers, audience members, and those working in the recording industry. In a new afterword, Titon reflects on the genesis of this book in the blues revival of the 1960s and the politics of tourism in the current revival under way. |
Contents
| 3 | |
The Singers Perspective | 30 |
Early Downhome Blues on Record A Representative Sample | 59 |
Musical Analysis Toward a SongProducing System | 137 |
Formulaic Structure and Meaning in Early Downhome Blues Lyrics | 175 |
Recording the Blues | 193 |
The Cultural Significance of Race Record Advertisements | 218 |
Afterword | 261 |
Patterns of Record Purchase and Listening | 281 |
Sermon by the Reverend Burnett Dickinson Is There Harm in Singing the Blues? | 287 |
NOTES | 289 |
Bibliography | 305 |
Index | 313 |
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Common terms and phrases
accompaniment Actual Key advertisements ain't artists baby Band banjo beat Bessie Smith Biddle Street Blind Blake Blind Lemon Jefferson blues family blues lyrics bumble bee Charley Patton Chicago Defender chord Columbia complex culture dance David Evans Delta downhome blues downhome blues singers downhome blues songs early downhome blues entertainment Fahey farm FIGURE folk music goin gonna guitar guitarist hillbilly House Ibid Ida Cox Interview John Leroy Carr liner notes listeners Lonesome Blues mama melody Memphis Minn Mississippi mornin musicians Negro OKeh Orchestra Origin Jazz Library Paramount Paramount Records performance phonograph phrase piano plantation play Pony Blues popular race records Rainey record companies rhythm sang singing skeletal tune Son House stanza Starting pitch studio style sung syllables tell tenant Titon Tommy Johnson tone transcr transcriptions vaudeville vaudeville blues Victor vocal and guitar Vocalion whiskey woman Yazoo York
Popular passages
Page 176 - a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea.
Page 223 - ... the arrest or even deterioration in mental development is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts...
Page 285 - The proof is in the hearing. Any Victor dealer in any city in the world will gladly play for you Victor Records by Caruso or any other of the world's greatest artists.
Page 119 - 'classic' twelve-bar, three line form" of the blues, as in Eddie "Son" House's "Dry Spell Blues": The dry spell blues have fallen, drove me from door to door. Dry spell blues have fallen, drove me from door to door. The dry spell blues have put everybody on the killing floor. Now the people down south sure won't have no home.
Page 236 - I suppose the most degraded race of human beings claiming an Anglo-Saxon origin that can be found on the face of the earth...
Page 31 - If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroad is.
Page 69 - I can strut my pudding, spread my grease with ease, 'cause I know my onions, that's why I always please.' " The following Saturday will see her stripped from the waist up, wearing James's old horsehair war sporran as a wig, singing, "I'm Just Wild about Harry
Page 4 - Census has defined a plantation as a "continuous tract of land of considerable area under the general supervision or control of a single Individual or firm, all or a part of such tract being divided into at least five smaller tracts, which are leased to tenants.
Page 24 - St. Louis woman wid her diamon' rings Pulls dat man roun' by her apron strings. Twant for powder an' for store bought hair De man I love would not gone nowhere.
Page 24 - ... materials, they set the mood for what we now call blues. My own fondness for this sort of thing really began in Florence, back in the days when we were not above serenading beneath the windows of our sweethearts and singing till we won a kiss in the shadows or perhaps a tumbler of good homemade wine. In the Delta, however, I suddenly saw the songs with the eye of a budding composer. The songs themselves, I now observed, consisted of simple declarations expressed usually in three lines and set...