Professor Rock hatte leider die Zitate aus der amerikanische Presse unterschlagen, die ich ihm angehängt hatte. Deshalb hier nochmal separat: kurze Auszüge aus der „New York Times“, „Washington Post“ sowie ein Review von „Robert Johnson – Lost and Found“ von Barry Lee Pearson & Bill McCulloch, das bereits im letzten Jahre erschien…
Mr. Wald and other critics argue that the discrepancy between Johnson's stature and his accomplishments stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of blues music by later, mostly white, writers…Mr. Wald continues: „It was invented retroactively as black folk music, which brought a new set of standards to bear on it and created a whole new pantheon of heroes. Suddenly the people who were the biggest stars were too slick to be real.“ Blues music, as Mr. Wald sees it, is simply part of a continuum of black pop. Robert Johnson, Leroy Carr and Bessie Smith were not moaning field laborers. „They were Sam Cooke, they were Snoop Dogg, they were Aretha Franklin. That's what we've forgotten, and that's what a lot of white blues fans don't want them to be.“
Elijah Wald is not so interested in what the blues means in its year of distinction, but he is very interested in how it came to mean something other than what it once did. In Escaping the Delta, he sets out to explore „the paradox of [Robert] Johnson's reputation: that his music excited so little interest among the black blues fans of his time, and yet is now widely hailed as the greatest and most important blues ever recorded.“ Wald sees this paradox as symbolizing a larger gulf between the blues as heard by the black audience in its own time — who knew it as hip, popular music — and a later, mostly white audience that romanticized the blues as „the heart-cry of a suffering people.“ Not a book about Johnson per se, Escaping the Delta is a thoughtful, impassioned historical essay about that gulf.
After a quick sketch of Johnson's life and a critical analysis of his recordings, Wald carries the story through to the folk-revival „discovery“ of the blues in the 1950s and the British Invasion's canonizing stamp of the 1960s, then adds a coda in which he seeks to lay permanently to rest the resilient myth that Johnson met the devil at a crossroads and sold his soul for other-worldly musicianship.
Escaping the Delta is most engaged in the early going, as he dismantles genre stereotypes via endearing tidbits such as that blues singer Memphis Minnie's set list included George Gershwin's „Lady Be Good“ and that Johnson rated the Sons of the Pioneers' „Tumbling Tumbleweeds“ among his favorite songs. … Wald is rarely less than convincing when he makes his case for what Johnson and the prewar blues audience were actually hearing in their own day.
Often it wasn't the blues. Repeatedly Wald drives home the point that neither the musicians nor the audience frequenting a Clarksdale, Miss., juke joint in 1937 likely limited their taste to visceral fare like Johnson's „Cross Road Blues.“ They'd probably never heard it. In Wald's estimation, black listeners tended to prefer the smooth, urbane vocals of the far better-selling (in Johnson's day) blues pianist Leroy Carr, and if the jukebox selections noted by a 1944 field recording team are any indication, some may have liked the „sweet band“ leader Sammy Kaye better than either.
In this fashion Wald does not seek to temper admiration for Johnson and his brilliant Delta generation. Rather he wants to rescue them from a historical narrative he sees as having been edited by record producers (the blues were good business), folklorists (the blues were authentic) and Rolling Stones fans (the blues were outlaw), each of which had a separate agenda for the music.
„Robert Johnson – Lost and Found“ von Barry Lee Pearson & Bill McCulloch
Starting in the 1930's with a handful of jazz buffs, a procession of writers, most of them white, tried to fathom the life and music of Robert Johnson. With little to go on besides Johnson's recordings, the early writers wrongly portrayed him as a genius in coveralls, a farm worker whose music offered a glimpse back in time to the origins of jazz. One of the points of this book, a point clearly missed by some reviewers, is that many later writers doggedly continued to present fanciful views of Johnson and his art, even though such views were contradicted by a large and growing body of reliable information about Johnson and the tradition from which his music sprang. As Pearson and McCulloch document, Johnson was effectively separated from his own rural African-American cultural roots, and his rightful place in American musical history was taken by an imposter, a creation of marketing hype, cultural ignorance, and romantic imaginings. Although this book may annoy some of Johnson's dreamy fans, it's an important addition to the writing on this iconic blues musician, and I highly recommend it.
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