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Africa and the Blues, by Gerhard Kubik
For decades, scholars in African American studies have been obsessed with the blues, more often than not construing it in the broadest possible terms as nothing less than the values and motives underlying Afro-American culture and literature. Thus it is something of a shock, but ultimately a relief, to encounter Gerhard Kubik's new book, which focuses narrowly but with great precision on the African origins of the blues as a musical/poetic genre.
Ethnomusicologists know Kubik as a distinguished specialist in African music, an indefatigable field researcher, and the author of dozens of articles and monographs. His work is careful and methodical, grounded in empirical observation and skeptical of "the pleasures of freewheeling thought associations" (21-22). Africa and the Blues, a masterful synthesis of a vast but fragmented body...