Going Up the Country: Adventures in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s

By Marina Bokelman, David Evans and Stephen Wade

At the height of the blues revival, Marina Bokelman and David Evans, young graduate students from California, made two trips to Louisiana and Mississippi and short trips in their home state to do fieldwork for their studies at UCLA. While there, they made recordings and interviews and took extensive field notes and photographs of blues musicians and their families. Going Up the Country: Adventures in Blues Fieldwork in the 1960s presents their experiences in vivid detail through the field notes, the photographs, and the retrospective views of these two passionate researchers. The book includes historical material as well as contemporary reflections by Bokelman and Evans on the times and the people they met during their southern journeys. Their notes and photographs take the reader into the midst of memorable encounters with many obscure but no less important musicians, as well as blues legends, including Robert Pete Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Al Wilson (cofounder of Canned Heat), Babe Stovall, Reverend Ruben Lacy, and Jack Owens.

This volume is not only an adventure story, but also a scholarly discussion of fieldwork in folklore and ethnomusicology. Including retrospective context and commentary, the field note chapters describe searches for musicians, recording situations, social and family dynamics of musicians, and race relations and the racial environment, as well as the practical, ethical, and logistical problems of doing fieldwork. The book features over one hundred documentary photographs that depict the field recording sessions and the activities, lives, and living conditions of the artists and their families. These photographs serve as a visual counterpart equivalent to the field notes. The remaining chapters explain the authors’ methodology, planning, and motivations, as well as their personal backgrounds prior to going into the field, their careers afterwards, and their thoughts about fieldwork and folklore research in general. In this enlightening book, Bokelman and Evans provide an exciting and honest portrayal of blues field research in the 1960s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496842015

Marina Bokelman

Marina Bokelman (1942–2022) maintained a career as a practicing folklorist and a cappella ballad singer in her community in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California. She received a grant from the California Arts Council to document the social and cultural life of that community and produced an educational folk music program for local community radio station KVMR. She was active in the healing arts and was a pipe carrier in the Native American tradition.

Book preview

Going Up the Country

ADVISORY BOARD

David Evans, General Editor

Barry Jean Ancelet

Edward A. Berlin

Joyce J. Bolden

Rob Bowman

Susan C. Cook

Curtis Ellison

William Ferris

John Edward Hasse

Kip Lornell

Bill Malone

Eddie S. Meadows

Manuel H. Peña

Wayne D. Shirley

Robert Walser

Going Up the Country

ADVENTURES IN BLUES FIELDWORK IN THE 1960S

MARINA BOKELMAN AND DAVID EVANS

FOREWORD BY STEPHEN WADE

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI / JACKSON

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

Designed by Peter D. Halverson

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Copyright © 2022 by Marina Bokelman and David Evans

Foreword copyright © 2022 by Stephen Wade

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

All photographs are by Marina Bokelman, except photographs of Jack Owens and Marina Bokelman by David Evans. Photographs in chapter 4 are from the personal collection of Marina Bokelman.

First printing 2022

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bokelman, Marina, author. | Evans, David, 1944– author. | Wade, Stephen, author of foreword.

Title: Going up the country : adventures in blues fieldwork in the 1960s / Marina Bokelman, David Evans, Stephen Wade.

Other titles: American made music series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2022. | Series: American made music series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022015964 (print) | LCCN 2022015965 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496841971 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496841988 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496842022 (epub) | ISBN 9781496842015 (epub) | ISBN 9781496842008 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496841995 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Bokelman, Marina. | Evans, David, 1944– | Ethnomusicology—Southern States—History—20th century. | Blues (Music) —Southern States—1961–1970—History and criticism. | Blues musicians—Southern States—Portraits. | African American musicians—Southern States.

Classification: LCC ML3798 .B65 2022 (print) | LCC ML3798 (ebook) | DDC 780.72—dc23/eng/20220419

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015964

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015965

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

We dedicate this book to the following three couples, without whom we could never have achieved the success we had in the field:

Robert Pete and Hattie Mae Williams

Herb and Louella Quinn

Myrt and Hettie Holmes

We were strangers and they took us in

Going up the country

Baby don’t you want to go

Contents

Foreword

STEPHEN WADE

Preface

DAVID EVANS

Chapter 1: Doing Blues Fieldwork

DAVID EVANS

Chapter 2: Editing the Field Notes

MARINA BOKELMAN

Chapter 3: How to Look at the Photographs

MARINA BOKELMAN

Chapter 4: Before the Field: Marina’s Story

MARINA BOKELMAN

Chapter 5: Before the Field: David’s Story

DAVID EVANS

Chapter 6: Blues Central

MARINA BOKELMAN

Chapter 7: Sometimes the Field Came to Us

MARINA BOKELMAN AND DAVID EVANS

Chapter 8: Going Up the Country: Field Notes from 1966

MARINA BOKELMAN AND DAVID EVANS

Chapter 9: Home Field Advantage

MARINA BOKELMAN AND DAVID EVANS

Chapter 10: On the Road Again: Field Notes from 1967

MARINA BOKELMAN AND DAVID EVANS

Chapter11: After the Field: Marina’s Story

MARINA BOKELMAN

Chapter 12: After the Field: David’s Story

DAVID EVANS

Appendix: UCLA Background Sheet

MARINA BOKELMAN AND DAVID EVANS

Notes

Bibliography, Discography, and Archival Materials

List of Photographs

Index

Foreword

STEPHEN WADE

At the close of this remarkable book David Evans looks back at the routes that he and coauthor Marina Bokelman have traced in the half-century since their collaborative musical adventures took place. Both Marina and I, he writes, have lived folkloristic lives, she in the world outside academia in the performing and healing arts, I within but also outside the ivory tower. While their fieldwork together effectively ended in 1967 following their second Southern expedition, their continuing explorations of traditional culture illuminate folklore as a way of understanding the world.

Across a two-year span that began in late summer 1966, their joint documentary work, launched as graduate students working in fulfillment of their master’s degrees, took them to Mississippi and Louisiana to locate and record some of the last proponents of prewar country blues. Each night they wrote the journal entries that comprise the core of this book. These field notes, typically made after a day of recording and interviewing, include the personal toll this work exacted on them and the complexities of their circumstances. The entries reveal their vulnerabilities and their youth, their surprises and setbacks, as well as their discipline and their determination. While the fieldwork they accomplished has long proved invaluable, these field notes chronicle still another element: they communicate with palpable closeness the research experience itself. From these impressions of their subjects, their families, neighbors, and communities, we glimpse not only those individuals they visited, but the candor of the living moment.

The voices of Marina and David, each different from the other yet wholly compatible to read side by side, reflect their priorities and concerns. David’s center more on the performers they came to document, while Marina observes the living conditions of those around them as well as their own. Her notes evoke the flea bites and vermin, the spray can fogs of DDT, and the challenges of nighttime mosquitos and all-the-time cockroaches. At one point Marina calls their housing a pest-hole in which they were forced to stay. They find a frog in their quarters and more than once they spot a rat.

Both tell of race relations, not only with suspicious whites wary of the recent Freedom Riders who had passed through their towns, but also with local Black residents finding their own peace with segregation. Blues musician Myrt Holmes describes putting up with his white bosses: I let them do the talking and I do the listening.

Elsewhere in the notes, David and Marina talk about their hosts. They candidly assess the lesser performers they meet. They discuss alcohol purchases as a musical lubricant, the dangers they witness, sometimes escalating into unsheathed knives and wielded guns, the financial expectations they repeatedly face from sources who have experienced so much disappointment as Black Americans, and the frequently raucous social settings during which they have to record. They contrast the gracious understatement of some of their hosts with futile drives taken down unlit country roads where they find no one at home.

During their explorations they encounter everything from traditional riddles to nocturnal premonitions of death, to a devil story caught on tape, and in a moment of subtle joy, Marina dancing with a woman named Eloise, each mirroring the other.

These accounts come tinged, not surprisingly, with sadness as well as discovery. After a particularly difficult day, Marina writes from one cramped Mississippi motel room, There was a stupid dog outside, who wouldn’t stop barking. We retired early due to fatigue, depression, and a desire to escape reality. They endure thwarted hotplate meals (in which the hotplates would blow up), wrestle with limpid shower nozzles, and perhaps saddest of all, recognize that one of their sources was just another bluesman in the tradition and didn’t really shed much light on the origins of the style.

Between their two long-distance trips of 1966 and 1967, they found that some of the performers they had heard about, along with other blues players, had migrated west either to visit or reside. This allowed the southern California couple to conveniently document these artists. But whether Marina and David went into the field, or as they say, the field came to us, they applied the same methods as reflected in their field notes. At home or away, their writing yields an intimate account of what it is to document human experience.

That’s a complicated task to undertake anytime, and accordingly, ethnographic folklore field collections typically comprise multi-format works expressed in recordings, photographs, maps, diaries, field notes, artifacts, handbills, and other ephemera, let alone the revised materials found in articles, books, albums, and films born of that fieldwork. That so many mediums support these efforts does not seem surprising given the three-dimensionality of the original task. Accordingly, the bibliography, discography, and archival materials found at the back of this book identify the surfeit of riches Marina and David’s efforts have generated.

These lessons from tradition that the couple experienced could not have arrived at a more propitious time. Longstanding divides within the American body politic apparent at the time of these trips have since found increased vehemence in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, as has the balkanization of so much current thought and effort in cultural matters. David and Marina’s stories bridge those gulfs. The perspective that guided their journeys attests to the underlying promise of the cross-cultural work they ventured.

Fieldwork, as David explains, has changed over the ensuing half century since that era. Apart from current theoretical abstractions and the plethora of release forms and approvals required nowadays, researchers are increasingly investigating their own personal cultural backgrounds…. Back in the 1960s it was common to find an identity somewhere in the wide world … often to find it in another culture or in a blending of several cultural streams. In approaching the persons that he and Marina documented, in coming to them filled with sheer love for their music, they repeatedly crossed cultural divides during even the most abbreviated of visits. A civic hope dwells in the disarmingly plain truth that David summons about those whom he and Marina documented: Instead of human subjects in today’s parlance, David notes, they were just people. Within that humane point of view lies not only an ethical stance, but perhaps a way forward.

♦ ♦ ♦

In fall 1965, Marina Bokelman, then 23, and David Evans, 21, enrolled as first-year graduate students in the nascent Folklore and Mythology Program at UCLA, led by professors Wayland Hand and D. K. Wilgus. Both of these legendary teachers followed in the intellectual lineage of the late nineteenth-century dawn of formal folklore studies in the United States, then centered at Harvard University. Wilgus studied under Francis Lee Utley, who studied at Harvard under George Lyman Kittredge, who, in turn, studied there under Francis James Child. Hand, majoring in Germanic folklore, studied under Archer Taylor, who attended Harvard during Kittredge’s time. A common thread running through all their work was a focus on the products of folklore, of items transmitted over the course of informal tradition.

That priority contrasts with today’s emphasis on performance as interpreted through the lenses of race, class, and gender. Those frameworks of relational power and identity formation, while as applicable then as now, played a lesser role in folklore studies of the mid-1960s, which centered around the gathering of the material itself, formulating biographies of the singers, and cataloguing associated traditional verbal forms that arose in the course of collecting.

Marina came to this work with a bachelor’s degree, accorded high honors in cultural anthropology. She turned down a Fulbright scholarship to continue her studies at UCLA. She had grown up immersed in folklore, nurtured in the babble of voices that filled her childhood neighborhood of New York’s Spanish Harlem. From there to southern California where the family next moved, she was raised in a home that embraced vernacular musicianship and welcomed both traditional and folk revival musicians. Early on she began to sing and play. Her interest in photography also began in her youth, and we learn from her the shaping influence of Edward Steichen’s exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art and its accompanying book. That exposure was soon followed by Walker Evans’s pictures in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Like Steichen and Evans, she wanted to capture in black and white not posed portraits but images of people, as she says, living their lives. In keeping with her preceptors and her principles, she took these pictures solely with available light, matters that she explains more fully in the pages that follow. Meanwhile, she put to use the tools she gleaned from anthropology with respect to gathering family information and cataloguing the domestic settings of those they visited. Small wonder that in the fall of 1965, in the first semester that both she and David Evans attended UCLA’s folklore program, D. K. Wilgus appointed Marina his teaching assistant, tasking her with grading papers and preparing tapes for classroom use.

David arrived at graduate school with a magna cum laude classics degree from Harvard. But he was also well attuned to the blues artistry that he and Marina would document together on their travels. As David chronicles in his autobiographical preface, by 1965 a country blues revival was underway in urban centers. Mostly young, mostly white devotees sought out Black recording artists from the late 1920s. In those years a pantheon of revered performers found new prominence with college-educated audiences. These players included Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House, Big Joe Williams, Blind Gary Davis, Fred McDowell, Sleepy John Estes, and the Reverend Robert Wilkins.

Their rediscovery and the lure of related 78-rpm records of their contemporaries inspired young musician/scholars like David to study these works and to seek out the veteran musicians who made them. Back in Cambridge he shared some of these prized discs and the mysteries they bore with a new and soon-to-be close friend, Alan Wilson, the guitarist and singer who later founded Canned Heat, the famous blues-rock band whose music opens the film Woodstock. Wilson’s reedy singing style stemmed from his emulation of Nehemiah Skip James, another of the great blues recording artists and recently rediscovered Mississippi blues musicians. The song Wilson led in the movie also draws from another rarity, the 1928 Vocalion release of Bull-Doze Blues by the Texas-based songster Henry Thomas. Canned Heat’s memorable flute break re-creates Henry Thomas’s signature panpipes, meshing with Alan Wilson’s plaintive Skip James tonality. Wilson inserted the verse I’m going up the country, baby, don’t you want to go from a melodically unrelated song, likely from the playing of Roosevelt Holts, or else Babe Stovall, as both performed Up the Country.

David had recorded each of these two performers individually, and then later with Marina early in their work together. As their close friend and occasional housemate, Alan Wilson often listened to their tapes. He may have heard the up country verse there or when he and David saw Babe Stovall perform the song in Boston in April 1965. There’s also a December 1967 recording made by Marina of David performing that song with its memorable verse, while Al played second guitar. Still another conduit possibly comes from Blind Willie McTell, who sings, Going up the country, mama, don’t you want to go, in the widely known Statesboro Blues. In sum, the key verse in the Canned Heat song bearing that title, and over time, forming the title of this book, derives from a phrase widely known in earlier folk tradition and heard throughout the blues revival of the 1960s. For Alan Wilson, a genuinely talented musician, all the needed creative materials lay at hand for him to formulate Going Up the Country.

This elasticity of influence, of tradition’s continuing reach, shows up from yet another country blues musician who influenced Alan Wilson and David Evans. At some point during these years, David told his friend about canned heat, the denatured alcohol used in Sterno and whose content repeatedly furnished both subject matter and libation for Mississippi bluesman Tommy Johnson (1896–1956). Wilson adopted Johnson’s 1928 song title, Canned Heat Blues, for his band’s name, while along another tangent, Tommy Johnson had everything to do with the making of this book.

Johnson’s 1928 and 1930 recordings, beginning with Big Road Blues, proved influential in his time, affecting his fellow players and reaching across the decades. His compelling musicianship moved past his home territory of Jackson and Crystal Springs, Mississippi, to reach the urban blues revival. Yet as late as 1965, Tommy Johnson’s life lay almost entirely unknown to the world at large. In response to that lacuna, David and Marina undertook their field trips. Admittedly, their interests also included other blues artists and their traditions. They successfully traced, for instance, the community of Bentonia, Mississippi–based musicians associated with Skip James and his style. But the initial motivation for it all started with Tommy Johnson.

For David, the tracing of a tradition in the blues, in particular the compositional patterns that its players applied and reworked, stemmed from his undergraduate studies at Harvard under Albert Lord. Lord and his teacher Milman Parry, in the course of their mid-1930s fieldwork, examined how Yugoslavian bards found ways to perform their sung traditional epics—massive poetic works drawn both from memory and from the moment at hand. David made a correlation between these semi-improvised epics, and folk blues lyrics, melodies, and guitar parts.

As a result, the research work that David began in Cambridge led him to Louisiana and Mississippi in late summer 1965 and again in early 1966, where he began making field recordings of a circle of musicians who had known Tommy Johnson. Beginning with Babe Stovall’s aforementioned visit to Boston, the musicians he contacted in the South—Roosevelt Holts, Herb Quinn, Rev. Ishmon Bracey, and Johnson’s brother, Mager—coupled with time spent with former bluesman Rev. Ruben Lacy in California, who had also known Johnson, formed the blueprint for his trips with Marina Bokelman, the first of which they took in August and September 1966.

♦ ♦ ♦

Marina and David must have appeared as a redoubtable research team when they set out in their red Volkswagen Beetle with California tags that they filled, in addition to themselves, with suitcases, a guitar, a mandolin, a fiddle, a large reel-to-reel tape recorder, blank spools of tape, a single boom mic stand with a heavy metal base, and a portable typewriter. All this came home with them, the Volkswagen further weighted by some of the 78- and 45-rpm records they had found in rummage shops, along with cookbooks obtained along the way and, in 1967, a full set of Alabama pottery.

The folklore graduate program at UCLA required fieldwork on the part of all its students, and in those years and for more than a decade still to come, fieldwork was understood as cross-cultural in nature. In other words, it presumed that students, whatever their background, would venture into a given cultural environment in an effort to gather folklore materials. In the case of Marina and David, they pursued this fieldwork wholeheartedly, intellectually prepared if surprised and sometimes dismayed by the challenges they encountered. They admitted, too, that cultural misunderstandings on their part sometimes ensued. Yet neither David nor Marina ever lost sight of the fact of their being white strangers who arrived as guests in Black homes. Many of those they visited, moreover, had scant knowledge of them before they came. Awareness that these two young researcher/recordists were doing this for school opened most doors, while for others, that access at first stayed shuttered, the inhabitants wary. Yet the cross-cultural bridge that Marina and David so willingly followed frequently led to bi-cultural closeness. Marina’s telling of how she learned to cook country gravy at Rev. Ruben Lacy’s home evokes in just a few sentences how she received culinary knowledge long passed from elders to youth, in the way women teach their children how to cook. Her account reveals an immemorial process of culture shared with mutuality and affection.

Sometimes, during their trips, Marina and David took time off. They mirthfully spotted a sign advertising Hendrix for Police Juror one that surely didn’t refer to the psychedelic guitarist soliciting votes in search of a new occupation. In a Bogalusa, Louisiana, shop window, they saw the just-released Beatles album Revolver. A few days later, while stopping with their friends in New Orleans they got to hear it, and their notes gleefully register their thoughts about the record and the band. At another juncture they scrutinized a coin-operated Magic Fingers device, a massage machine implanted in motel bed frames of that time that for a few minutes would vibrate the mattress. Back then fewer consumer entertainment options existed, and the notes tell of their watching tiny, hotel-provided black-and-white TVs until the broadcast day stopped, usually by midnight. In that pre-computer era, too, they received mail from home at post offices along the way. We learn about their delight in the latest Marvel comics and repeatedly follow their record collecting efforts. It seems altogether dazzling to realize that they financed these trips by searching out old records, many of which were being discarded as LPs took the place of 78s. Both David and Marina recognized a new auction market that prized vernacular music. Repeatedly their field notes make mention of caches of records they found (including jukebox 45-rpm titles they came upon), and the nightly work required to clean and package them for shipment.

Through it all they followed their convictions. How they saw their work and the standards they set for themselves is epitomized by their reaction while driving past the entrance to the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. This grim place, a scene of legendary recording activity for folklorists past, does not beckon to them. Instead, they wrote that collecting from a captive audience didn’t appeal to us—it was too easy, and a true field collector never does what is easy or obvious.

♦ ♦ ♦

In their later autobiographical chapters, David and Marina tell us how folklore continued to shape their lives. Marina writes about old-time courtship songs and finds them in actual practice during the period she lived in the mountains of North Carolina. Her study of Native American life led to her earning the right to a Pipe, the heart of a devout and venerable tribal practice. She gives a harrowing account of the spirit quest she underwent to receive this privilege. Bolts of lightning and days of waterless fasting reveal her commitment to a life guided by time-tested custom. From sweat lodges to herbal medicines to library singing programs for children that crossed generations, she traces the profundity she found in the power of oral tradition. In searching, sensitive prose she describes her life from both a folklorist’s perspective and as a participant, enriched by its depth and guided by its lessons.

David’s autobiographical account likewise reveals an unbelievably prolific life focused on the country blues. He enumerates the breadth of published works these field trips yielded in the years that followed. These, in turn, become followed by his own forays into the field, which led to the staggering amount of writing he has produced. While he makes no mention of it anywhere, his CV, which I have seen, runs more than fifty single-spaced pages, enumerating works he has authored on the blues, recordings he produced, panels on which he served, books he edited, and appearances he made as both an accompanist to elderly bluesmen and on his own. As the leading country blues scholar in America and across the world, it hardly seems surprising to mention he has, along the way, received two Grammy Awards.

At the heart of this book we meet two gifted persons at the dawn of their adulthood. The good sense that would serve them throughout their lives lay already in place. We see these committed individuals for what they were—brave, thoughtful, inexhaustible, and vulnerable. They proved themselves worthy successors to their teachers, and stewards of an invaluable music and its makers. They demonstrate the value of cross-cultural work and provide an exemplary model in how they approached their sources and how as scholars they preserved those findings for us all.

♦ ♦ ♦

On a personal note, I can attest to Marina Bokelman and David Evans’s impact. Marina’s much-lauded 1968 master’s thesis that she completed following her final field trip with David, ‘The Coon Can Game’: A Blues Ballad Tradition, remains a classic folksong study. This late nineteenth-century blues ballad inspired numerous recorded versions, all of which she traced with scholarly precision. Her thesis, praised by my mentors Archie Green and Judith McCulloh, themselves masters of folksong case study, became an aspirational model for my own work. David’s writing, too, fills my file boxes, and in their profusion, sag the floors of this room. But there is more. In 1978 the Library of Congress issued Afro-American Folk Music from Tate and Panola Counties, Mississippi. David produced and annotated this album. For decades this has remained one of my favorite records. Most of the tracks he recorded himself. These include a family band where the father whistles a tune that others in his community played on a fife, while his children have turned the benches and boxes lying about their yard into drums. On the recording they chatter as they get ready to play, everybody just getting in place, and then comes the piece—a music made with nothing but what lay at hand. Another performer heard on that record that David recorded was fife player, singer, and bandleader Othar Turner (1907–2003). Admired throughout the region, Othar upheld traditions rooted in colonial militia drills as well as those sourced in turn-of-the-century blues and reels.

Together these performers absolutely gripped me, and because of this album I began to visit this community beginning in the mid-1980s. On the first of these trips, Othar took his homemade cane fife and led three younger drummers, trailed by the rest of us, around his yard in what some of his neighbors called jump and kick music. We marched to a swaying two-steps-forward, one-step-back pattern. I moved close behind him, holding my microphone high in the air. At evening’s end, I thanked Othar. His reply makes indelibly clear the value of cross-cultural work, of what David Evans and Marina Bokelman endeavored so long ago and so expressively summon in this book. It makes added sense, too, to give Othar Turner, this unforgettable traditional musician, the last word. His words ring with the canny wisdom of folklore that enriches all our lives: You tell people about me, and I’ll tell people about you, Othar said, and that’s how we’ll get through this thing.

A musician, Stephen Wade is the author of The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience.

Preface

DAVID EVANS

This is a book about the experience of two young white graduate students doing fieldwork in the African American blues music of Mississippi and Louisiana during the height of the 1960s blues revival. For several decades blues had been appreciated and supported mainly within the Black community, but in the years leading up to 1966, when we made our first field trip, the music had begun to be discovered by a young audience outside its original cultural and geographical setting—white Americans, mostly from the urban North and West Coast, and Europeans. This discovery would have a profound effect on the direction taken by American popular music. It was also paralleled by and related to the discovery by this same youth audience of the longstanding grievances of the American Black community over the lack of civil rights and the lack of opportunities to progress economically, socially, and politically.

As we use the term discovery here, it is only in the sense of learning about something that one was not previously aware of. It does not mean that something was lost or buried and needed to be found, preserved, or taken possession of, although some participants in the blues revival may have had such understandings. It is also not meant to suggest that blues performers and Black Americans in general were passive participants in this process. They, in fact, discovered new audiences for their music and culture and often acted on their own behalf. But we, as writers who were products of the blues and folk revival, naturally emphasize and can speak best about our own sense of discovery.

For most participants in the blues revival, their involvement consisted of purchasing records, attending concerts, perhaps reading some articles or books about blues, and possibly meeting an artist backstage now and then. Similarly, supporters of the civil rights movement could attend speeches and rallies, read literature, contact their legislators, and provide monetary and other tangible support. Most of this support and patronage, both of blues and the civil rights movement, took place on the safe home ground of the discoverers and was of an aesthetic, intellectual, or ideological nature. The personal and cultural encounters between the discoverers and the discovered were usually brief and often superficial, although this is not meant to downplay their importance in general or specifically for some individuals on both sides of the encounters.

Our own first encounters with the blues were also brief and largely superficial, and they occurred mostly on our home ground. All that changed in the summer of 1966, following our first year of graduate study in UCLA’s Folklore and Mythology program, when we set off from California in a red Volkswagen bug headed for the Deep South and several weeks of immersion in the culture and communities of people who produced this music that had so greatly attracted us. Our experience was paralleled by that of the northern white civil rights workers who a few years earlier had spent weeks in the South in similar communities, often risking their lives for a cause they passionately believed in. We were meeting the music not in our own space but in its own space. We met blues performers of many different personality types and levels of musical ability, and we met their families, friends, and neighbors. We recorded and interviewed in settings that were sometimes quiet and relaxed, sometimes quite chaotic. And we had the occasional encounter with representatives of the world of the local white folks, who still held all the power in these communities and who were mostly hostile or suspicious of our presence there.

Much has been written about the blues revival and the closely related folk revival. It has been praised, criticized, romanticized, deconstructed, and sometimes even described accurately. In fact, it was a multifaceted social and musical phenomenon. It had its heroes and bad actors, its successes and failures; and, as in any cultural encounter, there were misunderstandings as well as new and better understandings, both on the part of the discoverers and the discovered. Discovery, in fact, was only one phase of the revival. There was also publication in the form of commercial records, articles, and books. Both some of the discovered and some of the discoverers had careers in performing or promoting music, or in writing, teaching, and research. Others went on to different things in their lives or never realized their dreams for success and recognition. All of these trends and outcomes are represented in the account we present here.

Fieldwork, or field research, is a term used in disciplines such as anthropology, folklore, ethnomusicology, and sociology to denote the gathering of information and other material such as songs, narrative tales, and physical artifacts, from living people in a community under study. This material may be obtained through observations, interviews, formal surveys, questionnaires, recordings, photographic or film documentation, or other means, but in all cases the investigators immerse themselves for a period of time in a social or cultural environment different from their own and emerge from it with collected data that represent artistic products of that community or information that is used to draw conclusions about the social/cultural group or individuals within it.

Field might suggest that the work takes place in a rural environment, and that was indeed often the case in the early days of these scholarly disciplines, when investigators with formal educations studied the cultures and cultural expressions of people in rural or peasant communities and so-called primitive societies. It was also to some degree the case with us, as we abandoned our graduate school environment and casual 1960s lifestyle in California and immersed ourselves for a time in the southern rural and small-town world of older blues musicians, their families, and friends, sometimes following leads that took us into a related cultural world in the cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Jackson, and Memphis.

The core of this book consists of the three chapters titled Going Up the Country: Field Notes from 1966, Home Field Advantage, and On the Road Again: Field Notes from 1967. These chapters contain the actual notes we wrote in the evenings following days of trying to locate, record, and interview musicians and their family members, as well as the photographs taken during this work. Both the excitement and frustrations of fieldwork are represented in this core account, which is essentially contemporary with the work itself and not based on our fifty-year-old memories. The latter come into play only when we discuss the work retrospectively in the introductions to these chapters or in the other chapters providing context and commentary. The chapter titled Sometimes the Field Came to Us represents two occasions when blues musicians stayed with us in our home in California, the photographs taken at that time, and our retrospective memories of those times. Even though we made interviews and recordings, we did not write notes at the end of the day as we did when we were in the field. A few days at the end of our 1967 field trip, when we did not write notes, are also reconstructed from our tapes, interview transcripts, photographs, and memories.

The core chapters are written in our two different voices. They also reflect key words in the subtitle of this book, adventures and blues fieldwork. Our field notes contain not only our accounts of blues musicians and recording and interview sessions but also things that happened to us and people we met outside of a specific blues context—racists and racism, problems of finding adequate accommodations in small southern towns, food we ate, health problems, and what we did to take breaks from the stresses of fieldwork. Marina has edited these field notes, juxtaposing and interweaving our voices, eliminating redundancy in our two accounts, and sometimes cutting or paring down the account of an incident deemed to be of lesser importance. Her editing naturally reflects more of her voice, experience, and perspective. The notes that she worked with provide a subjective day-to-day account of our blues fieldwork but do not provide the reasons why we chose to seek out and visit certain musicians,