Although it is certainly true that nobody does know where the blues come from, the origin of this book can be clearly traced to the groundbreaking work of Paul Oliver, in particular his Blues Fell This Morning: The Meaning of the Blues, which he later argued “disengaged blues from its customary acknowledgement as a late branch of black folk song, or as a tributary to jazz, and distinguished the idiom as a phenomenon to be studied in its own right.”Footnote ¹ Oliver's Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records expanded on his earlier study of blues lyrics and set the standard for others to follow, a challenge that has been ably met by the contributors to this book.Footnote ²

In the first essay, “High Water Everywhere: Blues and Gospel Commentary on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood,” David Evans provides a comprehensive analysis of the flood songs of the Delta and the commercial flood songs of Lonnie Johnson and Bessie Smith, focusing on these songs as oral history. The theme of disaster and oral history is continued by Luigi Monge in “Death By Fire: African American Popular Music on the Natchez Rhythm Club Fire.”

In “Lookin’ for the Bully: An Enquiry into a Song and Its Story,” Paul Oliver analyzes the lyrics of the “pre-blues” songsters and the continuation of the “bully song” genre into the later blues repertoire. The repertoire of the songsters is interesting because it also seems to have contained vaudeville songs and popular songs of the day, alongside those of folk origin. Some tunes, such as “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,” were also played by the jazz bands of New Orleans (109). Discovering how this exchange of repertoire took place could provide a useful insight into how the later blues form was communicated among songsters, vaudeville, and the repertoire of the jazz bands.

Tom Freeland and Chris Smith's “That Dry Creek Eaton Clan: A North Mississippi Murder Ballad of the 1930s” continues the book's focus on Mississippi, as does Guido van Rijn's “Coolidge's Blues: African American Blues Songs on Prohibition, Migration, Unemployment, and Jim Crow,” which argues that the roaring twenties largely bypassed the rural poor of the region.

In “On the Electronic Trail of Blues Formulas,” Robert Springer comments on the establishment of a database for the collection of blues lyrics (BLUR, or “Blues Lyrics at the University of Regensburg”). This is an exciting project, though it is unfortunate that “the sub-genre of the ‘classic blues,’ the BLUR corpus, is at the moment, in embryonic form” (169). If the same level of academic rigor can be applied in the future to the lyrics of vaudeville and jazz blues as has been applied to the country blues to date, then perhaps we can begin to construct a more comprehensive picture of the development of the blues form.

The last two essays extend the scope of the book. In “West Indies Blues: An Historical Overview, 1920s–1950s—Blues and Music from the English-speaking West Indies,” John Cowley explores a much neglected area of musical exchange. Randall Cherry's “Ethel Waters: ‘Long, Lean, Lanky Mama,’” argues for a reappraisal of this vaudeville singer largely through her contribution to jazz rather than to the blues. The blues in vaudeville is an area that is underresearched; although fine work has been published by Daphne Duval Harrison and others, not nearly enough has been done to reflect the importance of vaudeville in the dissemination of the blues, either in the 1920s or before the recorded age.Footnote ³

Nobody Knows Where the Blues Comes From provides much needed primary research and has developed methods of analysis that can be usefully applied more broadly in our understanding of the dissemination of the blues. Yet an assumption underpins this book that in many ways contradicts its title. Since “nobody knows where the blues comes from,” it is dangerous to assume that the Delta blues has primacy, or that it should be the paradigm by which other subgenres are assessed. Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow ably argue in King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton that “it is improper to extol Patton as a blues pioneer in any circumstances, for no one knows when blues developed, or where they developed.”Footnote ⁴ The blues as a musical form appeared almost simultaneously in published rags, in the repertoire of jazz bands, on the vaudeville stage, and also in the Mississippi Delta, and elsewhere in the South in the early years of the twentieth century.

It is clear that the development of the blues is not a simple narrative but rather the product of complex relationships. If this book can also act as the catalyst for debate about the future direction of blues research, and the extent to which the reengagement of the various genres of the blues would prove fruitful, then perhaps we shall be one step closer to finding out where the blues did come from.