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Really The Blues?: A Blues History, 1893-1959, Volume 1 - 1893-1929. West Hill Radio Archives WHRA-6028, 2010 (9 CDs).
Really the Blues? is the latest project from Allen Lowe, whose previous CD series, That Devilin' Tune (West Hill Radio Archives 6028, -29, -30, -31) presented a history of jazz.1 When completed, Really the Blues? will consist of four 9-CD sets containing a total of 900 songs, with Lowe's commentary included on a CD-ROM.
Lowe does not state very clearly the need and scope for this blues series in his documentation, but he gives us two motivations that may help us understand his intent and perspective. One is what he sees as "the politicization of the blues," citing two New York Times articles by Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch2 in which each had, in Lowe's view, tried to "[fit] facts with ideology." That may be the case, but I see those instances as part of a larger trend where writers are shaping their definitions of blues according to their current project. Two examples may be found in recent books by Elijah Wald and Peter Muir. In his chapter "What is Blues?" from Escaping The Delta,3 Wald writes initially (p. 4): "I am not going to enter the meaningless debate over what is or is not the blues - I have no problem with people using whatever definition they like, as long as they grant that it is not the only one." Eventually he states (p. 7): "My working definition of "blues," at least up to the 1960s, would be: 'Whatever the mass of black record buyers called 'blues' in any period.'" To me, it seems less a definition than a limiting boundary of the blues recordings Wald is studying. For his book Long Lost Blues4 Peter Muir quotes Wald's example and says for himself (p. 2): "The definition of blues used in this book is very simple: it refers to titular blues, that is, works that were titled (or subtitled) blues." Again, this is a limiting boundary of study materials, in this case early blues sheet music to 1920. Call these examples subjective, opportunistic, or politicizing, but they fail at identifying at least a common blues characteristic.
Lowe's second motivation is a musical one: to test...