The title of today’s post is a direct lift from the title of Elijah Wald’s new book which I am currently enjoying a great deal. There are a couple of his books which I don’t have, but my habit now is simply to pre-order the minute he emails to say that he has another one on the way.
The subtitle of the latest “An Alternative History of American Popular Music” is more telling than the mischief of the title and follows thematically from his earlier “Escaping The Delta” which was subtitled “Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues”. In that book, the reference was not to the invention of the blues by Johnson but rather to the invention of the blues as a marketing category with Johnson as its focus. In both cases Wald is being consciously iconoclastic but he is, importantly, doing so on the basis of extensive research.
He also brings a couple of fresh perspectives. Firstly he is not attempting the usual music criticism grand narrative of movements and influences within an insular musicological setting – he is writing from the perspective of a social historian and fitting musical developments to social changes – particularly racial tension, prohibition and the development of recording technology. In this the book is reminiscent of Terry Jones’ remarkable Chaucer’s Knight: A Portrait of a Mediaeval Mercenary which looked at the Knight in a historical rather than a literary context and drew devastating conclusions. Secondly Wald writes as one who has been and still is a working musician.
In Escaping the Delta, Wald effectively punctured a lot of blues mythology which had been generated and perpetuated by several generations of recording company executives and their marketing departments, blues enthusiasts and critics – most of them white. In the current book he adopts a similar phenomenological methodology, looking at what was happening in American popular music from the late 19th century onwards from the perspective of those who were there, not from the perspective of enthusiasts looking backwards. As he writes in his introduction:
Reading through the histories of both jazz and rock, I am struck again and again by the fact that although women and girls were the primary consumers of popular styles, the critics were consistently male and, specifically, that they tended to be the type of men who collected and discussed music rather than dancing to it […] While there are dozens of scholarly discussions of the Velvet Underground, there are virtually none of KC and the Sunshine Band.
Further, as a working musician, Wald is alive to an aspect of performing which critics and enthusiasts consistently minimise – that creativity will usually be outweighed by the need to make a living.
He is particularly good in both books on the impact of recording technology, both in the shift from music as a social activity associated with dancing to a solitary activity, and on the partiality of the historical record which recordings represent. Commercial recordings were not made for archival purposes but because the record companies wanted product to sell and the recordings made by particular artists did not necesarily represent either what they usually played to earn a living or the sole extent of their tastes. Muddy Waters, for example, was a great admirer of Lawrence Welk and his “sweet jazz” dance orchestra.
A good book which I would highly recommend – and I’ve still got quite a bit of it to go!
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