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Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Blues in the
21st Century
Myth, Self-Expression
and Trans-Culturalism

Edited by
Douglas Mark Ponton
University of Catania, Italy
and
Uwe Zagratzki
University of Szczecin, Poland

Series in Music

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Copyright © 2020 by the Authors.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Vernon Art and Science Inc.
www.vernonpress.com

In the Americas: In the rest of the world:

Vernon Press Vernon Press
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Series in Music

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951782

ISBN: 978-1-62273-634-8

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Cover design by Vernon Press. Cover image by Jean-Charles Khalifa.

Cover font (main title): Free font by Tup Wanders.

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Table of contents

List of Figures vii

List of Tables ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgements xix

Part One:
Blues impressions: responding to the music 1

1. Trouble in mind:
the Blues according to Lightnin’ Hopkins 3
Randolph Lewis
University of Austin, Texas, USA

2. Scales of Blue: the contagion and dissemination, the

persistence and transformations of a form and a name 13
Iain Halliday
University of Catania, Italy

3. The old black or the new white. Identities

in postmodern lyrics: the case of the
King of Desert Blues, Ali Farka Touré 23
Diana Sfetlana Stoica
University of Timisoara, Romania

4. Hendrix’s “Machine Gun”

and the limitations of Blues performance 37
Daniel Lieberfeld
Duquesne University, USA

5. The protean character of the Blues 51

Uwe Zagratzki
University of Szczecin, Poland

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Part Two:
Blues on the page: perspectives from literary criticism 61

6. “Singing your mean old Backlash Blues”:

Blues, history, and racial inequality today 63
Chiara Patrizi
University of Roma Tre, Italy

7. Going back home: the politics of the blues

in Langston Hughes’s “The Backlash Blues” 75
Valerio Massimo De Angelis
University of Macerata, Italy

8. A Bluesy sound: from Weary Blues

to “Nigger-Reecan Blues” 87
Irene Polimante
University of Macerata, Italy

9. “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes:

catharsis and the healing power of poetry and music 101
Adriano Elia
University of Roma Tre, Italy

Part Three: Authenticity and identity in

contemporary Blues studies 113

10. Dead or alive: Blues and the question of authenticity 115

Thomas Claviez
University of Bern, Switzerland

11. I’m goin’ away to a world unknown:

a corpus study of classic Blues lyrics 127
Jean-Charles Khalifa
University of Poitiers, France

12. The devil’s music–a critical discourse analysis-

based study of the lyrics of Robert Johnson 139
Giulia Magazzù
University “Gabriele D’Annunzio”, Chieti-Pescara, Italy

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

13. How blue is our Blues? The validation of Blues

in the 21st century and the role of technology
and social media in its progression 155
Jack Dandy
University of East London, UK
Emiliano Bonanomi
University of East London, UK

14. Black and White Blues:

the sounds of Delta Blues singing 177
Douglas Mark Ponton
University of Catania, Italy

Appendix: Black and White Blues Corpora 193

Author biographies 197

Index 203

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Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

List of Figures

Figure 10.1: Semiotic Model of the Process of Authentication 117

Figure 10.2: Circular First Order Semiotic System of Self-

authentication 118

Figure 10.3: Second order semiotic system 119

Figure 10.4: Third Order Semiotic System 119

Figure 13.1: Musicological Parameters

(a table consisting of the recognised parameters
consistently found within Blues music). 158

Figure 13.2a: Score excerpt from “Human” by Rag ‘n’ Bone Man 159

Figure 13.2b: Score excerpt from “Kind Hearted Woman Blues”

by Robert Johnson 159

Figure 13.3a: Score excerpt from “Human” by Rag ‘n’ Bone Man 159

Figure 13.3b: Score excerpt from “Kind Hearted Woman Blues”

by Robert Johnson 159

Figure 13.4: Metaphorical Parameters (a table of the themes

Shirley McLoughlin believes a musician should address and
demonstrate if they are to be considered as a Blues musician
who embodies the Blues). 160

Figure 13.5a: Score excerpt from “Human” by Rag ‘n’ Bone Man 160

Figure 13.5b: Score excerpt from “Kind Hearted Woman Blues”

by Robert Johnson 160

Figure 13.6a: Score excerpt from “Human” by Rag ‘n’ Bone Man 161

Figure 13.6b: Score excerpt from “Kind Hearted Woman Blues”

by Robert Johnson 161

Figure 13.7: Metagenre-world Model: a holistic model for

viewing Blues music and its varying approaches. 162

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Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

List of Tables

Table 4.1: Hendrix’s original Blues compositions and covers 42

Table 11.1: Top 10 items in Blues Corpus and C.O.C.A. 129

Table 11.2: Nouns 130

Table 11.3: Etymology of HOME 132

Table 11.4: Lexical verbs 132

Table 11.5: Adjectives 133

Table 11.6: Etymology of OLD 135

Table 11.7: Down and Up 136

Table 11.8: Personal pronouns in

black and white traditional music 137

Table 12.1: Semantic field data in Robert Johnson Corpus

and Pre-War Blues Corpus 146

Table 14.1: Technical features of the corpora (%) 185

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Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Preface

Since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, the Blues has been more
than a music style with a seminal impact on twenty-first-century popular
music. As a medium of social expression, it articulated the tribulations of an
entire black culture, male and female. Discourses about race were as much an
integral part of the evolution of the Blues as were those of class, when young
white kids–in America and Europe, especially the UK–adopted the music for
their political and social ends. Idealising black models of culture, white
interpretations verged on myths on the one hand, but on the other brought
out transcultural features of the Blues in their performative acts. Other realms
of performing arts, such as literature, films and photography speak of the
flexibility of the Blues. Its commercialisation by white and black record
companies, or annual festivals around the world, is another proof of its
durability. Bearing this in mind, any doubts about the survival of the Blues in
the twenty-first century are rendered obsolete.
The flexibility and changeability of the music and the culture it is embedded
in are paralleled by the versatility of academic discourses about the Blues.
Early studies of the Blues, chiefly by US-American authors (with the exception
of Blues Fell this Morning: The Meaning of the Blues 1960 or The Story of the
Blues 1969 by the British scholar Paul Oliver), emphasise the evolution of the
genre against the background of structural racism in the US, and further
illuminate the counter-cultural features the producers of the music
incorporated. They made an important contribution to the documentation
and survival of this feature of black Blues culture. Of outstanding importance
is Samuel Charters’ The Bluesmen (1967), The Roots of the Blues; An African
Search (1981) or his The Blues Makers (1991), which come to mind here.1
The chapters in this volume are representative of the papers presented at
the conference “Blues in the 21st Century: Myth, Self-Expression and Trans-
Culturalism”, held at the University of Catania, Sicily, in November 2018. The
conference focused on, among other topics, specific features of corpora of
classic Blues lyrics, Blues tourism (not represented in the book, though it was

1The tradition has continued, as recent studies have shown: Lynn Abbott. 2017. The
original Blues: the Emergence of the Blues in African American Vaudeville. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi. Alan Harper. 2016. Waiting for Buddy Guy: Chicago Blues
at the Crossroads. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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xii
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, ItalyPreface

included in the conference)2 and national, regional and other varieties of

(European) Blues.3
There are three sections of the book: the first, Blues impressions: responding to
the music, is informed by a variety of analytical perspectives including
Cultural/Film Studies, Literary Criticism and Musicology, and presents studies
that focus either on the works of individual artists, including Jimi Hendrix,
Lightnin’ Hopkins, Ali Farka Touré ; or on specific features of the Blues as a
genre. The second group of studies, Blues on the page: perspectives from literary
criticism, focuses on the Blues in contemporary literature, especially in the work
of the prominent poet and activist Langston Hughes, who found in the Blues a
language and a body of cultural practices, appropriate for his needs as an
African American intellectual seeking social freedom, in the period before the
Civil Rights movement. A third section, Scientific perspectives: Authenticity and
identity in contemporary Blues studies, presents studies that use analytical
techniques, from musicology and corpus linguistics, to explore a variety of
issues that include authenticity, vocal technique, emotions in Blues lyrics and
the themes of Robert Johnson.
One of the themes that will be seen to run through the diverse contributions
to this book, whatever their methodological approach, is authenticity. This is
only natural, since it is an issue for the Blues itself. Legend has it that the
Blues began on Dockery’s cotton plantation in Mississippi, in a far-off time of
black slaves, of cultural and religious syncretism, of moonshine whiskey;
when Charlie Patton’s inspirited exhibitions were the evening release for a
burdened people. Its first, most truly authentic performers, before the turn of
the 20th century, came from this problematic social setting, and many took to
music, it is said, as a way of escaping from their lives of drudgery. The early
Blues singers, whose names have mostly disappeared, drew on such
experiences to provide material for their songs, and sang them to a mainly
black audience, who would gather on street corners or at informal dances in
farmhouses, to hear them play. From the musical point of view, the rhythms of
the songs had to respond to the needs of dancers. The lyrics consisted,
initially, of stock references to shared experiences; they used in-jokes, jargon,
veiled social criticism and so on, in a recipe that gave rebelliousness a
compelling voice, that has echoed down the years.

2 An example from the States: Steve Cheseborough. 2018. Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites
of Delta Blues. 4th edition. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
3 For Germany: Winfried Siebers, Uwe Zagratzki, eds. 2010. Das Blaue Wunder. Blues aus

deutschen Landen. Eutin: Lumpeter und Lasel. Michael Rauhut. 2016. Ein Klang – zwei
Welten. Blues im geteilten Deutschland. Bielefeld: Transcript.

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Preface
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy xiii

The names who first emerged as significant artists in the field—Patton

himself, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Son House, Sonny Boy Williamson and
the rest—all knew the tropes of the Blues backwards, both from a musical and a
textual point of view. With these names, we are already approaching a later
period, when advances in technology such as the radio and the phonograph
had begun to bring their music to a wider audience. With the mass exodus to
Chicago in the early 20th century, we find a new form of Blues, one that took the
name of the city, a pulsating electric music that already feels worlds away from
its antique country cousin. Is that music still the Blues, still authentic? Muddy
Waters, one of the great names whose life and work straddles both periods,
talked about the mojo, an amulet or talisman that features in one of his classics
‘Got my mojo working’:
“When you’re writin’ them songs that are coming from down that way, you can’t
leave out somethin’ about that mojo thing…I didn’t believe in it, no way. But
even today, when you play the old Blues like me, you can’t get around from
that.”4 (Palmer 1982, 98-99)

In other words, Muddy himself was engaged in a kind of cultural sleight of

hand, using outdated symbols because the genre demanded it. His dilemma
concerns authenticity, too; how far such country superstitions, which the
singer himself had grown away from, could be relevant to listeners on the
streets of the windy city. If even one of the undisputed masters of both Delta
and Chicago schools could have issues with authenticity, it is understandable
that the music’s adoption by white stars like Eric Clapton and Mick Jagger, in
the 1960s, provoked such a storm. Though many black artists have expressed
their approval for white performers, some would still agree with critic Paul
Garon’s complaint that “Blues as purveyed by whites appears unauthentic and
deeply impoverished.”5
As a white Blues enthusiast, whose interest was kindled long ago and grew
up revering these great figures, I have often pondered these issues. For the
South of England, white and middle class, what possible relevance could this
powerful magic have held, what message could pass from the Delta of the
Mississippi to our own less mighty rivers? In Randolph Lewis’s chapter, he
quotes film-maker Les Blank’s phrase, saying that the Blues would “calm
somewhat the inner terror of my chaotic soul.” Perhaps this comes close to an
explanation, or an answer. Sadly, we will never know what it was like to be a
young black teenager in the audience while Lightnin’ Hopkins was telling the

4Robert Palmer. 1982. Deep Blues. New York and London: Penguin.
5Paul Garon. White Blues. https://ourBlues.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/microsoft-
word-white-Blues.pdf. Last access 18/9/2019.

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xiv
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, ItalyPreface

story of Mister Charlie. We will never be in the same room as Howling’ Wolf,
laying down his powerful, irresistible sounds. The popularity of the Blues
among white audiences is testimony that its message, whatever it is, speaks
not just to the skin but to the soul. To the extent that we share that immediate
feeling, the paradoxes and doubts melt away, and the music is still able to
offer us an authentic experience. Uwe Zagratzki, co-editor of this volume,
writes: “I had to clear the language hurdle, as English is not my native tongue.
Yet my first encounter with the Blues, in a 1970s North-western town in
Germany, via a then-popular radio programme, caught me unawares and
captured me for good. Not by words but by ‘magic’ chords, that struck a chord
with me. When words became comprehensible in the course of time, and with
them came increasing knowledge and–much later–professional ambition, still
the original feelings have prevailed.”
Some of the above themes are picked up directly by our contributors; other
chapters explore different facets of the story of the music, to comprise a work
divided into three thematic sections. The first section is entitled Blues
impressions: responding to the music:
Randolph Lewis argues that authenticity was found, by film-maker Les
Blank, in the life and music of Texas Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Centring on
Blank’s documentary “Trouble in Mind: The Blues According to Lightnin’
Hopkins”, he explores the affinity between the representation (film) and the
represented (Lightnin’ Hopkins), in a “film that moves and feels like the music
it represents.” He discusses how Blank was drawn to the gritty realities of
Hopkins’ life as they contrasted with his own milieu, the superficial,
materialistic world of white American culture.
Iain Halliday’s chapter discusses the transcultural transformations of the
Blues in time and space, and reflects on its paradoxical capacity for speaking
to listeners from social contexts that are worlds away from its starting points.
He considers the metaphorical and emotional dimensions of the colour
“Blue”, which stands for an art form that has endured, and still has the
potential to be associated with authentic human experience and music of
significant quality.
In her study of Ali Farka Touré, Diana Sfetlana Stoica poses the authenticity
question from another angle. Touré is an African musician, and his colour
credentials are therefore impeccable; however, it is questioned how far his
music, in which African sounds and rhythms are perceptible, can be heard as
Blues, and how far it is representative of a kindred, though distinct, tradition.
The Malian musician’s work, she suggests, represents an African counter-
discourse to the African American definition of the roots of the Blues.

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Preface xv

Daniel Lieberfeld focuses on an artist not generally thought of as a

Bluesman—Jimi Hendrix—and convincingly presents him as a true pioneer of
the genre, whose work may be seen as a departure from older Blues patterns,
but nevertheless reproduces the real sounds and feelings of the form. Hendrix’s
whole sound, he suggests, was deeply rooted in the Delta sounds of Hooker and
Waters, and their influences are felt in the song “Machine Gun”, analysed here.
Uwe Zagratzki raises the issue that the authenticity of the Blues consists in its
alternative cultural features (see Raymond Williams), which have survived post-
modernist mainstreaming. Modern listeners adapt the Blues to their personal
experience and thus manage to “reproduce” a plethora of individual
alternatives, which negate the original “aura” (Walter Benjamin’s term), that is
the unique specificity of a work of art. He argues that the Blues, owing to its de-
constructiveness and flexibility, empowers the recipient to retain the music’s
alternative gestures, also under the conditions of technical reproduction.
In the second part of the book, Blues on the page: perspectives from literary
criticism;
Chiara Patrizi underlines the political potential in Langston Hughes’ last
Blues poem “The Backlash Blues” (1967), and explores the interplay between
the written text and the sung version by Nina Simone. Recapturing and
intensifying the denunciatory spirit of the original, Simone’s version
expressed the poem’s latent militancy for a global audience of black and
white, and Patrizi shows how its message still resonates in contemporary
America.
Valerio Massimo De Angelis reflects upon Langston Hughes’ long writing
career and the poet’s purposeful return to political engagement, which
especially emerged in his work “the Backlash Blues”. He explores the roots of
the poem in a lifetime of experience dating from the poet’s days at the centre
of the Harlem Renaissance, and argues that it represents his most complete
attempt to infuse an authentic poetic discourse with the slave language and
“signifying” common in the plantation context.
Irene Polimante’s starting point is Hughes’ work on such poems as “The
Weary Blues”, which left a legacy for poetic strategies in contemporary African
American poetry. The performativity of experimental poets such as Willie
Perdomo, she argues, explores analogous terrain, in terms of authenticity and
identity, to that mapped out by Langston Hughes. Thus, the Blues is seen as a
continual influence, changing form in response to circumstances, linking past
and present, abolishing distinctions between high and low cultural forms.
Authenticity was an issue for Langston Hughes, as he sought for a bridge
between the élite cultural form of poetry and the popular symbols and
patterns of speech and action of his community. As early as 1925, as Adriano

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xvi
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, ItalyPreface

Elia says in his chapter, Hughes produced the first poem that incorporated
actual Blues lyrics. In his study of “The Weary Blues”, he explores Hughes’
conception of music and poetry as possessing a cathartic potential and
healing power. He also shows the extent to which Hughes’ poetical techniques
drew on the forms and features of the field experiences of the American
South.
The final part of the book, Authenticity and identity in contemporary Blues
studies, presents some scientific perspectives:
Authenticity in the Blues is the topic of Thomas Claviez’s contribution. He
recognises the increasing importance of the concept in today’s corporate
business context. He asks, not only whether white boys—and girls—can play
the Blues, but whether “electrified, popular, successful” Blues can be
considered authentic, whether played by black or white. Claviez even
questions the authenticity of one of the foundation myths of the Blues, the
legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil in return for musical
knowledge.
Jean Charles Khalifa also uses corpus techniques to compare black and
white Blues singers, but focuses on features of the texts. A quantitative
analysis of word frequencies and a qualitative grouping of speech patterns
lead to a deeper understanding of the “unconscious” layers of the black Blues.
Their emotional patterns oscillate between feelings of fear, loathing and
curiosity, which depend on complex responses to factors in their immediate
social situations.
Giulia Magazzù applies critical discourse analysis to the lyrics of one of the
best-known traditional Bluesmen, Robert Johnson. As the quintessential
representative of the authentic, “Delta” Blues, Johnson’s texts were both
collections of standard verses that circulated at the time, as well as personal
lyrics reflecting his own preoccupations. The chapter therefore sheds light on
the whole genre, distinguishing between types of lexical units and semantic
structures, and attempting to identify the source of the subversive potential of
the texts.
From a musicological perspective, Emiliano Bonanomi and Jack Dandy
explore the question of authenticity in the digital age, asking how far the
presence of digital recording techniques and new patterns of instrumentation
impact these questions. Communication through social media with a virtual
fan base shows how far the Blues has moved from the earliest periods in its
evolution. A comparison is made between the way a modern artist such as Joe
Bonamassa establishes a sense of community with his public, and more
traditional patterns of old-style Delta relations.

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Preface xvii

Douglas Mark Ponton traces the differences in vocal techniques and other
aspects of performance between black and white singers, exploring Garon’s
claim that whites are incapable of achieving authenticity. It is by now
acknowledged that certain white guitarists (Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Ry
Cooder, etc.) are capable of playing the Blues in an authentic way, but what
about white vocal performers? In a corpus study, the author outlines the
features of authentic Delta Blues singing, and suggests that there are some
white performers able to reproduce them to a degree.
This brief outline highlights the variety of approaches, methodologies and
points of view in this volume. Such diversity is natural in a multi-disciplinary
scientific endeavour. However, the reader will also find many points of contact
between the different chapters, and a common fascination with this
extraordinary musical and cultural phenomenon. It is indeed our hope, with
this volume, to make a contribution to the continuation of scholarly interest
in the Blues.
The two-day conference left many vivid memories. The stimulating talks from
our speakers, performances by Catania-based Blues band “Hot Shanks”, and the
viewing of a film by John Baily on British Blues drummer Hughie Flint, “Beyond
the Blues”, an intense and personal document that shared Flint’s love of the
Blues, as well as his developing interest in Irish music. Perhaps it is appropriate
to end this preface—and begin our book—with Flint, moving on from the Blues,
seeking trans-cultural connections, the emotional sensibility that underlies all
folk music. Not forgetting to include some lines from Robert Johnson:

From Memphis to Norfolk is a thirty-six-hour ride

A man is like a prisoner, and he’s never satisfied

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Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all those who made the conference at Catania such a memorable
occasion.To all contributors to this volume. To Winfried Siebers for his vital
contributions to the copy-editing. To Céline Longin-Khalifa for the cover
artwork.

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

14.
Black and White Blues:
the sounds of Delta Blues singing

Douglas Mark Ponton

University of Catania, Italy

Introduction
...can a white person play Blues? I say I don’t have advantage of a white person. I
only got five fingers. If I had six fingers I could answer you different you know?
And this young man can play!1

Blues legend Buddy Guy, introducing white prodigy Quinn Sullivan, attempts
to put an end, once and for all, to the well-known controversy within the Blues
world, that only blacks can play the music. Questions of authenticity and
ownership have raged around the Blues at least since the 1960s, when white
musicians, especially in the UK, began to use its musical idioms. British
admirers of Elvis and his black models, such as the Rolling Stones and the
Beatles, began to imitate these quintessentially American/black sounds
during the ‘60s, an early landmark in the history of British Blues being the
Stones’ number one hit in 1964 with the Willie Dixon song “Little Red
Rooster”. The debate has even older origins; as more than one critic has
pointed out, the tendency for the hegemonic white culture to absorb
“underclass” black elements into the American cultural/musical mainstream
has been a historical constant, whether the music in question be Jazz, Rhythm
‘n’ Blues, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Soul, Rap, or the Blues (see Stallybrass and White 1986,
5, in Daley 2003, 161, Baraka 1987, 259, in Rudinow 1994, 130; also Benzon
1993, Ward 1998).
The 1980 movie The Blues Brothers represented one of the first steps in the
emergence in corporate branding of the Blues as image (Lieberfeld 1995), and
such processes have only accentuated the accusations of cultural imperialism

1Buddy Guy - Can white people play Blues?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVICdcbHIfw, last visit 07/12/2018.

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178
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Chapter 14

that have accompanied white attempts to perform the music from the first
(Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000, 22).2
The intention of this chapter, however, is not to engage with the well-worn
debate over authenticity (see Claviez, this volume), which has been
thoroughly explored over the years (e.g. Rudinow 1994, Baraka 1999, Daley
2003, Young 2008, Jenkins 2012). The idea that only contemporary blacks have
a right to sing the Blues because of their share in ancestral suffering under
slavery is well answered by Rudinow (1994, 133):
The access that most contemporary black Americans have to the experience of
slavery or sharecropping or life on the Mississippi Delta during the twenties and
thirties is every bit as remote, mediated, and indirect as that of any white
would-be Blues player.

In point of fact, as Guy’s remark indicates, it is widely accepted that certain

white performers have mastered the art of playing Blues guitar to similar
levels of expertise as their black counterparts. In terms of their skill as
instrumentalists, it is indeed arguable that white musicians like Eric Clapton,
Johnny Winter or Stevie Ray Vaughan have taken the music to new heights of
virtuosity. Whether any are able to sing the Blues like their heroes, however, is
another question. As Cory Harris notes in his Blues blog pages, the heart of
the Blues is not pyro-technical guitar playing but Blues singing which, he says,
is much harder to imitate (Harris 2015). In the voice, say Feld et al. (2004, 323),
poetics meets performance. The chapter’s aim is to explore these issues, to
identify features of traditional Blues singing, and see how far these are
reproduced in white performances.

Evolution of the Blues, white Blues

The Blues is a product of black musical and traditional culture, born in the
Mississippi Delta and other places across the southern United States, around
the turn of the twentieth century. As with most musical genres, it did not remain
fixed, but evolved from its early, country origins and simple forms of
instrumentation into a sophisticated urban product. Spencer (1992) documents
the introduction of electric instrumentation during the “Chicago period”, when
the Blues, after the population transfer from the Delta to the northern industrial
centres, gradually lost touch with its rural roots. The new arrangements featured
drums, bass, horn and rhythm sections, and often included long solos from
guitar virtuosos. Such was the music as interpreted by the biggest names of the

2 Analogous processes are described by Feld (1994) in his discussion of Paul Simon’s

supposed ‘appropriation’ of black musical norms in the Graceland project.

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Black and White Blues 179

time like B.B. King, Albert King and Buddy Guy. Thus, the profile of the Blues
singer also evolved: in the early period they tended to be itinerant figures,
roaming the Southern states from party to party, living hand to mouth,
struggling to build up reputations that were seldom more than local.
Increasingly, they adopted the lifestyles of professional musicians, and the best-
known of them became global superstars.
Oliver (1972, 3) refers to the Blues as “the wail of the forsaken, the cry of
independence, the passion of the lusty, the anger of the frustrated and the
laughter of the fatalist”. Gil Scott-Heron says:
There’s the I ain’t got me no money Blues;
There’s the I ain’t got me no woman Blues;
There’s the I ain’t got me no money and I ain’t got me no woman,
which is the double Blues.3

It is a music which represents a virile response to “trouble” in its many forms,

offering the listener a sense of participation and relief, with effects that may
extend to catharsis and healing (Majithia 2012, Stolorow and Stolorow 2012).
Baraka (1987, 259) explores the appropriation of black musical forms by
white artists, and there is also widespread recognition of the appeal to early
white audiences of the Blues. In popular American music, the impact of the
Blues and its derivatives was enormous, starting from the career of Elvis
Presley who, as a white performer steeped in black musical lore, was the right
man at the right moment to take the music to the world. What he delivered
was not so much the Blues as its livelier relation, ‘Rock’n’Roll’, though his
earliest recordings do show him as versed in some of the idioms and features
of Blues singing.4
Another significant moment in the modern history of the Blues was the
appearance of old-timer Skip James, and other veterans such as Bukka White
and Son House, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1966. They had an immediate
impact on white folk music, influencing stars such as Bob Dylan, John
Martyn, Donovan and others; while on the rock scene the impact was even
greater, with bands such as Cream, the Who, Fleetwood Mac, Canned Heat,
the Rolling Stones, the Doors, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and solo artists like
Paul Butterfield, Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter and Stevie Ray Vaughan all drawing

3Gil Scott-Heron, “Watergate Blues” (Winter in America). 1974 Strata-East Records.

4E.g. “Milkcow Blues Boogie”, “Mystery Train”, “That’s Alright Mamma”, etc. on ‘the Sun
Sessions’, RCA records 1976. One of the comparatively few ‘black’ Blues covers Elvis
recorded during his career was the Jimmy Reed song “Big Boss Man” (RCA records
1967). See also Palmer (1982, 241) on the early Elvis.

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inspiration from the old masters’ recordings, which began to be re-issued to

feed the boom in demand for Delta Blues.
The 1980 blockbuster The Blues Brothers represents another milestone, with
the Blues reaching a vast audience through the global medium of cinema. The
escapades of white brothers Jake and Elwood are accompanied by a type of
Blues that is light years away from the down-home sounds of the music’s
origins (Lieberfeld 1995). Apart from a cameo from John Lee Hooker, the
principal Blues offering consists of a version of Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home
Chicago” which in the original is a plaintive Delta Blues ballad. It has become,
by 1980, unrecognisable, dragged out to over seven minutes by saxophone
and electric guitar solos, and can best be described as a catchy foot-tapper. In
comparing the two versions of “Sweet Home Chicago” it is hard not to
sympathise with Paul Garon’s view, that white attempts to play the Blues result
in “unauthentic and deeply impoverished” musical artefacts (Garon 1995, see
also Halliday, this volume).

White and black Blues

At this point, it must be said that there appears to be no comparable kind of

distinct school or cultural tradition to which the abstract label “White Blues”
may be attached, one whose songs may be placed alongside “Black Blues” for
the purposes of thematic, cultural or lexico-semantic comparison. Rather,
white Bluesmen or whites who at times perform the Blues—when they write
their own material–appear to do so in an idiosyncratic fashion, generally
mixing their Blues songs with some other genre such as Rock, Folk,
Rhythm’n’Blues or Jazz. “Steamroller Blues”, for example, is James Taylor’s
affectionate nod in the direction of the tradition, verging towards parody but
still, with its vein of tongue in cheek machismo, evoking comparison with
similar songs by black singers such as Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” or
Hooker’s “I’m in the Mood for Love”.
Of the many possible ways in which black and white Blues could be
compared, this study deals briefly with formal and lexical criteria, and in more
depth with the technical side of vocal performance. Comments on all these
aspects are based on a close listening to the songs in the corpora described
below, and the reader must decide how far they apply, more generally, to the
vast and varied field of the Blues in its entirety.
In terms of form, it is well known that traditional Blues display characteristic
features of lexical and musical construction, and many Blues songs employ
the so-called “12 bar” structure, in which the first line is repeated and a third
rhyming line, resolving the tension generated by the preceding couplet,
completes the verse:

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Now she is a little Queen of Spades, and the men will not let her be
Mmm, she is the little Queen of Spades, and the men will not let her be
Everytime she makes a spread, hoo, fair brown, cold chill just runs all over me
(Robert Johnson, “Queen of Spades”)

It has been suggested that this structure may have African roots (Kubik 1999,
42-43). While white Blues appears to respect this structure fairly rigidly, it is
not uncommon for black singers to deviate from it. While many of Johnson’s
songs follow the pattern, for example, “Walking Blues” does not, simply
repeating an initial couplet to complete a four-line verse:
I woke up this mornin’, feelin’ round for my shoes
Know by that I got these old walkin’ Blues, well
Woke up this mornin’, feelin round for my shoes
But you know by that, I got these old walkin’ Blues

John Lee Hooker frequently seems to ignore both the constraints of the
musical and the lyrical form. In “Hobo Blues”, a typical Hooker number in
many respects, the verse is intoned seemingly over a single chord and the text
makes no attempt to rhyme:
When I first thought to hobo’in, hobo’in
I took a freight train to be a friend, Oh Lord
You know I hobo’d, hobo’d, hobo’d
Hobo’d a long, long way from home, Oh Lord

The text is given coherence by its use of internal repetition and the line ending
“Oh Lord”, and these devices, as well as the accompanying strum and the
heavy vocal give the piece a hypnotic quality typical of Hooker’s style.5
Listening to early Delta Bluesmen such as Bukka White or Son House, it is not
hard to locate Hooker’s music within the tradition; by contrast, there are few if
any white Blues singers who do anything remotely comparable.
In terms of the lexico-semantic parameter, the themes of Delta Blues tend to
be universals such as love, fidelity and betrayal, sex and sensuality, loss and
mourning, rootlessness and existential anxiety. Bob Dylan at times produces
original Blues songs that stick close to these themes; however, he also brings
his own kind of lyrical inventiveness to the form, taking it into new semantic
territory. Consider his version of a traditional Blues by Lightnin’ Hopkins,
which develops a metaphor already explored by Robert Johnson, woman =
car:6

5See Palmer (1982, 242).

6One of Johnson’s classic Blues features this as an extended metaphor, concluding:
“I’m gon’ get deep down in this connection

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I see you drivin’ round Babe, in your brand new automobile;

You're lookin’ happy baby with your handsome driver at the wheel;
In your brand new automobile.
(Lightnin’ Hopkins “Automobile Blues”)

The Dylan version drops the automobile motif in favour of an item that never
featured in any black Blues song, and includes surreal linguistic inventions
that evoke the world of Picasso more than that of the Mississippi Delta:
You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine;
Your brand new leopard-skin pillbox hat.
(Bob Dylan “Leopard-skin Pillbox Hat”)

Blues singing

Palmer (1982, 18-19) describes some technical difficulties associated with

Delta Blues singing:
singing it right involves some exceptionally fine points that few black singers
and virtually no white singers […] have been able to grasp. These fine points
have to do with timing, with subtle variations in vocal timbre, and with being
able to hear and execute […] very precise gradations in pitch that are neither
haphazard waverings nor mere effects.

While this description offers some insight into the processes involved, it also
suffers from the defect of imprecision. For example, “timing” is an essential
attribute of all skilful singing white or black, while “subtle variations in vocal
timbre” can also be found across the spectrum of white music, from country
to choral music. Singing of any kind requires, moreover, nothing if not the
ability to execute “precise gradations in pitch”. Therefore, Palmer’s words do
little to explain the phenomenon of instant recognition that allows a listener
to “hear”, with near certainty, whether they are listening to a black singer or a
white one.
The rest of this chapter focuses on a comparative study that identifies
features of black Blues singing and then compares to see if white Blues singers
reproduce them in their performances. For example, black Blues singers
frequently replace the words of a song with sections of “humming”, which can
be short insertions or long phrases that extend for a whole line or even a
verse. Robert Johnson does this in “Come on in my Kitchen”, which
commences with two lines of verse hummed before singing the refrain. In

hoo-well keep on tanglin’ with your wires;

And when I mash down your little starter
then your spark plug will give me a fire”. (“Terraplane Blues”)

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“Moaning the Blues”, Memphis Minnie hums a whole verse, expressive of her
feelings on learning of the death of her partner:
This morning, setting on the side of my bed
This morning, setting on the side of my bed;
They done come brought you a letter, your plumb good man fell dead

Hmmmmm, hmmmmm (etc.)

Both these instances show how an extremely simple technique can be used to
express a basic emotion, that of sorrow or grief, which is one of the music’s
central themes. No doubt white singers would be capable of humming in this
way, but they appear not to make use of this technique, at least in the current
corpus.

Corpora; methodology

The corpora consist of sixty Blues songs by white and black artists (see
appendix). I chose four black singers, all seminal figures in their own way–
Robert Johnson, widely regarded as the greatest of all Delta Bluesmen,
Lightnin’ Hopkins, one of the Blues’ most prolific songwriters ever; Muddy
Waters, who helped establish the Delta style in its Chicago evolution on the
world stage, and Memphis Minnie, the queen of early country Blues.
While it was easy to find songs by black Blues singers, the problem being
deciding who to omit, it is hard to find a comparable number of Blues songs
by white artists. While many black artists are “Blues singers”, whose normal
practice is to record entire albums on which every number is a Blues,
analogous white figures are thin on the ground. As well as performing other
genres, such artists produce cover versions of black Blues songs as much as
they write their own material (black artists also perform many covers, but not
to the same extent). In 1999, Eric Clapton, one of today’s biggest white
“Bluesmen” and self-avowed devotee of Robert Johnson, released a
retrospective album called “Blues”. Of twenty-five tracks, no fewer than
eighteen are cover versions of black Blues songs by named artists, three are
traditionals from the black tradition, and only four carry Clapton’s name as
author. One of these, “Wonderful Tonight” is a pop song.7

7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_%28Eric_Clapton_album%29, last access 17/12/2018.

In terms of comparing vocal technique alone, it may appear possible to include cover
versions, but the problem here is that the white copyist (black Blues singers do not cover
white Blues songs, to any extent) will also tend to copy the vocal techniques used by the
original, which makes it impossible to identify specific vocal features typifying the two
genres.

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In an attempt to compare like with like, I decided to focus on the Blues

singers who use the conventional, 12-bar format or some version based on it,
tending to avoid cover versions in both corpora, thus representing Clapton,
for example, not by his most celebrated pieces such as “Crossroads Blues” but
by comparatively unknown recordings in the Blues genre. However, some
compromises were necessary in order to obtain a numerically equal corpus:
in some songs by Bonnie Raitt, the genre is more pop-rock than Blues and
hence follows a different formal structure, arguably with different generic
requirements in the area of vocal technique. The same considerations apply
to some pieces by Butterfield (influenced by jazz/rock), Mayall (progressive
rock) and Vaughan (rock).
The methodology involved firstly listening to all the songs in the black
corpus and making notes of specific features of the performance, then
listening to the white corpus and noting instances where they reproduced this
feature.

The corpora compared: technical features

In the following analysis of features of black Blues singing, I have gone back to
the music and noted features of the performer’s style, guided by descriptions
such as that of Palmer (1982, 28), who identifies features of Delta Blues
singing that derive from African traditions, such as “whooping, or sudden
jumping into the falsetto range”, and “affected hoarseness, throaty growls and
gutteral grunting” (30), and others such as this, by Courlander:
In most traditional singing there is no apparent striving for the “smooth” and
“sweet” qualities that are so highly regarded in Western tradition. Some
outstanding blues, gospel, and jazz singers have voices that may be described as
foggy, hoarse, rough, or sandy. Not only is this kind of voice not derogated, it
often seems to be valued. (Courlander 1963, 23)

However, it must be stressed, that the list of features below (table one) is, in
the final analysis, a subjective one, since there is not, as far as I am aware, any
authoritative publication on how to sing Delta Blues, from which to derive
more reliable criteria.8

8 The situation appears to be analogous to that in Gospel music, which has been called

the ‘sacred counterpart of the Blues’ (Allgood 1990, 102). As Williams-Jones (1975, 375)
states, there is a lack of researched primary data on the idiom; and it is equally true of
Blues music that, as she says of Gospel, transmission appears to be mainly oral.

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Table 14.1: Technical features of the corpora (%)

Technical Feature Black White
Corpus (%) Corpus (%)
1 Word-breaking falsetto 10 10
2 Falsetto on syllables like ‘hoo’, ‘hee’, etc. 23 3
3 Extended use of falsetto for whole lines 1.5 1.5
4 Use of humming/moaning 25 0
5 Extended use of humming for whole lines/verses 6.5 0
6 Singer replaces sung words with spoken words or uses 36.5 18
speech
7 ‘Holler’ 21.5 13
8 Intense sound produced by laryngeal constriction 36.5 56.5
9 Imitation of textual feature with instrumental 8 1.5
accompaniment
10 Words fade into moaning or drawn out into wordless sound 26.5 10
11 Avoidance of a ‘taboo’ word by omission 3 0
12 Non-standard pronunciation (e.g. ‘ah’ for ‘I’) 40 23
13 Line opens on non-content word (‘ooh’, ‘well’, ‘yeah’, etc.) 43 33
14 Sudden rise/drop in volume of singing 25 50
15 Unusual voice, strange/ silly voice 30 8
16 Sung notes reproduced on accompanying instrument 1.5 0
17 Interjections (‘oh Lord’, ‘Have mercy’, etc.) 4.5 0
18 Call/Response 3 1.5
19 Non-content syllable/sound (‘woah’, etc.) 6.5 26.5

Discussion

The results fall into three groups: firstly, the group in which the feature is more
frequently encountered in black singing than in white, secondly those where
the proportions are roughly similar, and finally those where the feature is
more frequent in the white corpus.

More frequent in black than white corpus

Use of falsetto. 34.5% (black corpus), 14.5% (white corpus).

Viewing the three different types of falsetto collectively, more than one in
three songs from the black corpus uses it. However, the great majority of
instances occur in the work of Robert Johnson, who uses it to create a
plaintive effect. Over a whole line of verse, the effect is to simulate an
emotional paroxysm; in the following instance, an attack of jealousy:
Oh baby, my life don’t feel the same / you break my heart when you call Mr So-
and-so’s name (black corpus 9)

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Use of humming. 31% / 0%.

Here, the proportion of black to white occurrences is still more striking.

Moreover, this is a technique encountered in all four of the black singers; the
effect has already been discussed, above.

Singer replaces sung with spoken words or uses speech. 36.5% / 18 %.

There are differences in the way this technique is used by the two groups. For
black singers, the spoken sections contain material that seems to have some
textual connection with the subject of the song, e.g. Lightnin’ Hopkins, in
“Bald-headed woman” breaks off singing to enunciate, very clearly:
What you want with a woman who ain’t got no hair? What’s the matter with you
girl? (bc 38)

Here, and in other instances in the black corpus, the use of speech provides
variety, drawing special attention to the phrases uttered. It also allows the
performer to simulate direct, conversational interaction with the audience or
with one specific, real or imagined, listener. By contrast, most of the white
instances refer to stage phrases, that serve purposes such as encouraging
musicians about to play solos, e.g. Paul Butterfield:
Keep on walkin’ honey! (white corpus 10)

Words fade into moaning or drawn out into wordless sound. 26.5% / 10 %.

A technique found in three of the four black singers, again prominent in

Robert Johnson, in whose style it seems to add intensity to the delivery, as the
clear enunciation of the word is twisted, for example by a prolonged
consonant:
When you got a good /fren…/ (bc 13)

Much less common in the white corpus, it is nevertheless to be found in the

most “Bluesy” among these–that is to say Butterfield, Mooney, Morrison,
Vaughan, and Mayall.

Imitation of some textual feature with instrumental/vocal accompaniment. 8% /

1.5%.

Black musicians are famous for using instruments to imitate real-world

sounds. In this small corpus, the objects imitated include a bell (8), a train
(12), a howling wind (14), a corn-mill (48), and clock chimes (51). The Rolling
Stones’ use of the guitar to imitate the “hounds” mentioned in the song “Little
Red Rooster” is an honourable representative of the white corpus in this
respect.

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Unusual voice, strange/silly voice. 30% / 8 %.

Another technique found mainly in Johnson but also used by two other of the
black singers:
I woke up this mornin’, feelin’ round for my shoes, everybody know I got these
old walking Blues (bc 19)

Here the opening lines are clearly sung in a different style to Johnson’s
“normal” delivery (e.g. in the opening lines of “When you got a good friend”).
“Up” comes out on a sudden crescendo and leaps to an upper register, though
not quite falsetto, while the final consonant in “mornin” is drawn out and
finishes in a sort of groan. The singer seems to eat some of the words (“shoes”,
“everybody know”, pronouncing them at the back of his mouth, with a sort of
“hollow” effect. The phrase “Old walking Blues”, by contrast, is produced with
constriction. The device is generally used to draw attention to a particular
portion of text, but in this number the effect is electrifying.

Holler 21.5% / 13%.

Olmsted describes the field-holler as: “a long, vigorous musical call, climbing
then falling, and forcibly entering the falsetto range” (Ohmsted 1853).9
Included in this category are sounds that satisfy the first part of this
description but, since falsetto falls into a separate category, not the second.
Something of the field origins of the Blues are heard in such calls as Lightnin’
Hopkins gives on the underlined word here:
If you ever go out in West Texas…” (bc 34)

Non-standard pronunciation (e.g. “ah” for “I”) 40% / 23%.

In many cases, both black and white, this seems a feature of conversational
style applied to song, as in:
Yes ah (I) followed the hearse down to the burial ground… (bc 39)

Roughly similar proportions in both corpora

Line opens on non-content word (“ooh”, “ah”, “well”, “yeah”, etc.). 43% (black
corpus)/33% (white corpus).

9 “A Journey through Texas.” Cited in Au Pays Du Blues. (my translation).

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More prevalent in white than black corpus

Sudden rise/drop in volume of singing 50% / 25%.

This is twice as common in white than black singing as a means, typically, of

achieving dramatic emphasis, as in Bonnie Raitt’s:
With me lovin’ you, nobody but you…(wc 12)

Non-content syllable/sound (woah, etc.) 26.5% / 6.5%.

In the following instance, from Clapton, the sound seems to release the
emotion evoked by the immediately preceding section of text:
Don’t you be surprised to find me with another lover, (oh!) (wc 55).

Intense sound produced by laryngeal constriction 56.5% / 36.5%.

This is so common among white Blues singers that it is tempting to identify it

as a key feature of white Blues singing. Apart from Mick Jagger and Peter
Green—both represented in the corpus by only a couple of songs—the only
white vocalist not using this technique is Bob Dylan, who I discuss below as a
special case. In all the other singers, this technique helps give an intense edge
to the performance. In the following example, Butterfield bends the
consonants of the underlined word, his voice rising towards falsetto, as well as
constricting the larynx:
Train I ride is sixteen coaches long (wc 8)

As the count shows, the technique is also much used by black singers, though
the great majority of instances come from Johnson’s work.

Conclusion

Even from a rough-grained analysis such as the foregoing, certain important

differences between black and white Blues singing seem to emerge. Whether
the features, identified in this brief study, constitute integral features of black
Blues singing, or whether they are casual devices that simply serve as
embellishments, is debatable.
Their relevance to a discussion of what constitutes Blues singing may be
appreciated if we compare two singers from the white corpus, Bob Dylan and
Van Morrison. Although Dylan clearly drew great inspiration from the Blues,
writing many pieces calling themselves Blues and using a 12-bar form, it is
clear that, in his hands, the music bears little relation to its original models,
especially from the lexical point of view, as pointed out above. As a performer,
too, his Blues singing is deficient in the qualities outlined above. There are one

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or two instances of sudden rising or falling in pitch, and one song, “Bob
Dylan’s Blues”–significantly, from his earliest recording period–that does use
several of the devices. He avoids most of the techniques altogether, however,
including laryngeal constriction which, I have surmised, is the favoured white
means of achieving emotional intensity. Thus, Dylan appears to be avoiding
vocal techniques that most Blues singers, black and white, employ to give
emotional depth to their singing. In his case, the emotional impact may result
from a combination of his distinctive vocal tone, combined with an
unprecedented lyrical inventiveness (Lebold 2007).
By contrast Van Morrison, in one number, “Ramblin’ Blues”, uses no fewer
than seven of the techniques (holler, rise/fall, laryngeal constriction, use of
speech, fade into moaning, non-content syllable, line opens on non-content
word), and thus shows himself to be a performer whose vocal technique is
much closer to the models he is imitating.
Naturally, in a brief chapter like the present, it has not been possible to do
more than outline a few of the more obvious vocal techniques displayed by
Blues performers, nor provide more than cursory descriptions. Further work is
also required to explore the points of cultural and lexico-semantic
similarity/difference between white and black Blues. Hopefully, by moving the
debate on from the by now familiar tropes concerning ownership, cultural
imperialism and–most of all–authenticity, the approach traced above may offer
fruitful research pathways to explore the connections between specific vocal
techniques and the emotional impact and lasting fascination of the Blues.

References

Allgood, Dexter B. 1990. “Black Gospel in New York City and Joe William
Bostic, Sr.” The Black Perspective in Music 18 (1/2), 101-115.
Born, Georgina, and David Hesmondhalgh (eds.). 2000. Western Music and Its
Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. London,
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Courlander, Harold. 1963. Negro folk music, U.S.A. New York: Columbia
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Feld, Steven. 1994. “Notes on World Beat.” In Music Grooves: Essays and
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Feld, Steven, Aaron A. Fox, Thomas Porcello, and David Samuels. 2004. “Vocal
anthropology: from the music of language to the language of song.” In A
companion to linguistic anthropology, edited by Alessandro Duranti, 321-
345. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
Garon, Paul. 1995. “White Blues. Race Traitor” (4). Online at:
http://racetraitor.org/Blues.html. Last access 18/09/2019.

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Harris, Cory. “Can white people play the Blues?” Cory Harris Online at:
http://Bluesisblackmusic.blogspot.com/2015/05/can-white-people-play-
Blues.html. Last access 10/12/2018.
Kubik, Gerhard. 1999. Africa and the Blues. Jackson: University of Mississipi
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Lebold, Christophe. 2007. “A Face like a Mask and a Voice that Croaks: An
Integrated Poetics of Bob Dylan’s Voice, Personae, and Lyrics.” Oral
Tradition 22 (1), 57-70.
Ohmsted, Frederick Law. 1853. “A Journey through Texas.” In Au Pays du Blues.
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16/12/2018.
Oliver, Paul. 1972 [1969]. The Story of the Blues. London: Penguin Books.
Palmer, Robert. 1982. Deep Blues. London and New York: Penguin.
Rudinow, Joel. 1994. “Race, Ethnicity, Expressive Authenticity: Can White
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Spencer, J. M. 1992. “The Diminishing Rural Residue of Folklore in City and
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Further Reading

Baraka, Amiri. 1987. The Music. Reflections on Jazz and Blues. William Morrow:
New York.
Baraka, Amiri. 1999. Blues People. Negro Music in White America. New York:
Harper Perennial.
Benzon, W. 1993. “The United States of the Blues: On the crossing of African
and European cultures in the 20th century.” Journal of Social and
Evolutionary Systems 16 (4), 401-438.
Daley, Mike. 2003. “Why Do Whites Sing Black?: The Blues, Whiteness, and
Early Histories of Rock.” Popular Music and Society 26 (2), 161-167.
Jenkins, Philip. 2012. “The Blues as Cultural Expression.” In Blues Philosophy
for Everyone: Thinking Deep about Feeling Low, edited by Jesse R. Steinberg
and Abrol Fairweather, 38-48. Chicester: John Wiley and Sons.
Lieberfeld, Daniel. 1995. “Million-Dollar Juke Joint: Commodifying Blues Culture.”
African-American Review 29 (2), Special Issues on The Music, 217-221.
Majithia, Roopen. 2012. “Blues and Catharsis.” In Blues Philosophy for
Everyone: Thinking Deep About Feeling Low, edited by Jesse R. Steinberg and
Abrol Fairweather, 84-95. Chicester: John Wiley and Sons.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allan White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Stolorow, Robert D., and Stolorow, Benjamin A. 2012. “Blues and Emotional
Trauma: Blues as Musical Therapy.” In Blues Philosophy for Everyone:
Thinking Deep About Feeling Low, edited by Jesse R. Steinberg and Abrol
Fairweather, 121-131. Chicester: John Wiley and Sons.

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Black and White Blues 191

Ward, Brian. 1998. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black
Consciousnees, and Race Relations. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Young, James O. 2008. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts. Malden, MA,
Oxford: Blackwell.

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Appendix:
Black and White Blues Corpora1

Black Artist White Artist

1 Crossroads Blues Robert All these Blues Paul Butterfield
Johnson
2 Hellhound On My Trail - Blues with a feeling -
3 Milkcow’s Calf Blues - Born in Chicago -
4 Honeymoon Blues - I Got A Mind To Give -
Up Living
5 Traveling Riverside Blues - Last night -
6 Stop Breakin’ Down Blues - Love disease -
7 Little Queen of Spades - Love march -
8 Last Fair Deal Gone - Mystery train -
Down
9 Kindhearted Woman - Shake your money -
Blues maker
10 I Believe I’ll dust My - Walkin’ by myself -
Broom
11 Sweet Home Chicago - Women be wise Bonnie Raitt
12 Ramblin’ on My Mind - Sugar mamma -
13 When You got a Good - About To Make Me -
Friend Leave Home
14 Come On In My Kitchen - Oh Louise John Mooney
15 Terraplane Blues - Bump and grind -
16 Phonograph Blues - Six o’clock in the -
morning
17 32-20 Blues - Need your love so bad Fleetwood Mac
18 Dead Shrimp Blues - Stop messin’ round -
19 Walking Blues - Walkin’ Blues Rory Gallagher
20 Preachin’ Blues (Up - Wanted Blues -
Jumped the Devil)
21 Stones in My Passway - Ramblin’ Blues Van Morrison
22 I’m a Steady Rollin Man - Good Mornin’ Blues -
23 From Four Till Late - Little Red Rooster Rolling Stones
24 Drunken Hearted Man - Nature’s disappearing John Mayall -

1 Recordings of versions available on YouTube at 01/01/2019

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Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Appendix

25 Me and the Devil Blues - Took the car -

26 Love in Vain - My pretty girl -
27 Katie Mae Lightnin’ Riding on the L & N -
Hopkins
28 I feel so bad - All your love -
29 Let me play with your - It ain’t right -
poodle
30 Short haired woman - I could cry -
31 Picture on the wall - Ain’t no brakeman -
32 Baby child - Don’t waste my time -
33 Some day baby - I ain’t got you -
34 Abilene - Outlaw Blues Bob Dylan
35 Jailhouse Blues - From a Buick 6 -
36 Last affair - It Takes A Lot To Laugh, -
It Takes A Train To Cry
37 Bad luck and trouble - Leopard-Skin Pill-Box -
Hat
38 Baldheaded woman - Pledging my time -
39 Cemetery Blues - Meet Me in the -
Morning
40 Don’t think ’cause you’re - Dirt Road Blues -
pretty
41 Life I used to live - Buckets of rain -
42 My girlish ways Memphis Bob Dylan’s Blues -
Minnie
43 Me And My Chauffeur - Tombstone Blues -
Blues

44 Nothing in rambling - Working Man’s Blues -

45 Bumble bee - Texas Flood Stevie Ray
Vaughan
46 Doctor, doctor Blues - Tell Me -
47 When the levee breaks - Dirty Pool -
48 What’s the matter with - Tin Pan Alley -
the mill?
49 North Memphis Blues - Love Struck Baby -
50 Moaning The Blues The Sky is Crying -
51 Meningitis Blues - Boot Hill -
52 My home is in the Delta Muddy Empty Arms -
Waters
53 Rock me - Life by the drop -
54 You don’t have to go - Give me strength Eric Clapton

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Appendix 195

55 Trouble no more - Bellbottom Blues -

56 They call me Muddy - Groaning the Blues -
Waters
57 Mean mistreater - Blues leave me alone -
58 Howlin’ Wolf - Same Old Blues -
59 Got my mojo working - Driftin’ Blues -
60 Mannish boy - Nobody knows you -

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Author biographies

Emiliano Bonanomi is a professional guitarist and tutor with a genuine interest

in music technology and social media. During his Master’s Degree in Popular
Music Performance at ICMP he further investigated the relationship between
contemporary musicians and modern technology. This facilitated his efforts in
analysing Blues in the 21st Century, focusing on the two aforementioned aspects.
Currently collaborating with the University of Derby on the G.A.S.P. project, he
aims to further develop the scholar elements of being a practitioner in popular
music, in accordance with the Practice As Research methodology.

Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory at the University of Bern. He is

the author of Grenzfälle: Mythos – Ideologie – American Studies (1998) and
Aesthetics & Ethics: Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from ‘Uncle
Tom’s Cabin’ to ‘House Made of Dawn’ (2008). He has co-edited numerous
volumes, most recently, with Kornelia Imesch and Britta Sweers, the collection
Critique of Authenticity, published 2019 with Vernon Press. He is the single editor
of the collections The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics at
the Threshold of the Possible and The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of
Precarious Community, both published with Fordham UP in 2014 and 2017. He is
currently working on a monograph with the title A Metonymic Community?
Towards a New Poetics of Contingency, and a collection of essays with the title
Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics as/of Contingency, both forthcoming in 2020.

Jack Dandy has been a keen blues guitarist and enthusiast since the age of 14. He
channelled this passion into his BA (Hons) Degree in music at the University of
Chichester (2012-15). Ready for the next step, Jack undertook a Master’s Degree
in Popular Music Performance at The Institute of Contemporary Music
Performance (ICMP) (2016-17). This enabled him to hone his electric guitar skills
and further explore blues in both a practical and an academic sense. Now a
working musician and guitar tutor, this is Jack’s first publication and he hopes it
will not be the last.

Valerio Massimo De Angelis teaches American Literature at the University of

Macerata. He is the author of two books (La prima lettera: Miti dell’origine in The
Scarlet Letter di Nathaniel Hawthorne, 2001; and Nathaniel Hawthorne: Il
romanzo e la storia, 2004), co-editor of two collections of bio-critical essays on
contemporary American authors, of the proceedings of an international
conference on Philip K. Dick, and of the proceedings of the 19th International
Conference of the Italian Association for North-American Studies (AISNA), as well
as a number of articles and essays on historical fiction, romance, abolitionism,
feminism, modernism, postmodernism, comics, transatlantic Italian-American

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198
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Author biographies

relationships, and on authors like Edgar A. Poe, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce,
Stephen Crane, Henry James, Langston Hughes, Thomas Wolfe, Dashiell
Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Henry Roth, Leslie Fiedler, Doctorow, Stephen
King, Leslie Marmon Silko, Margaret Atwood, and Rudy Wiebe. He is Director of
RSA Journal, the review of AISNA, and Coordinator of the Centre for Italian
American Studies at the University of Macerata.

Adriano Elia is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Translation at the

Department of Political Science, University of Rome “Roma Tre”. He has held
teaching and research positions at the universities of Catania, Naples
“L’Orientale” and Rome “Roma Tre”. His publications include essays on
contemporary British fiction, Afrofuturism, Langston Hughes’s poetry, W.E.B. Du
Bois’s short fiction and poetry, Octavia E. Butler’s fiction and four books −La
Cometa di W.E.B. Du Bois (2015), Hanif Kureishi (2012), The UK: Learning the
Language, Studying the Culture (co-author, 2005) and Ut Pictura Poesis: Word-
Image Interrelationships and the Word-Painting Technique (2002).

Iain Halliday is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation in the

Department of Humanities, University of Catania. His research interests include
literary translation and, more recently, relations between language and music.
His most recent monograph is Huck Finn in Italian, Pinocchio in English: Theory
and Praxis of Literary Translation (2009), while recent articles include “David
Bowie, songwriter, musician and singer” (2017) and “From ‘La canzone del sole’
(1971) to ‘The Sun Song’ (1977): more than textual problems in the translation of
Battisti’s Pop Anthem” (2015).

Jean-Charles Khalifa is Associate Professor of English linguistics and translation

at the Department of English Studies, University of Poitiers, France. His research
interests include formal syntax, corpus linguistics, the syntax-semantics interface,
and professional translation. He has also published papers and given lectures on
the folk tradition in the British Isles and in America, and on the Blues. Among his
books on linguistics are, Syntaxe de l’anglais (2004), L’Épreuve de grammaire à
l’agrégation (2006), Perception et structures linguistiques : huit études sur l’anglais
(2010). He is also a musician and a published translator of U.S. novels, including
recently: Earl Thompson, A Garden of Sand (French title: Un jardin de sable, 2018),
Tattoo (2019), Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing is Monsters (French title: Moi, ce que
j’aime, c’est les monstres, 2018), Frederick Exley, Last Notes from Home (French
title: À la merci du désir, 2020).

Randolph Lewis is a Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at

Austin. A former contributing writer for The Brooklyn Rail, he is the author of
four books including Under Surveillance: Being Watched in Modern America,
Emile de Antonio: Radical Filmmaker in Cold War America, Alanis Obomsawin:

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Author biographies 199

The Vision of a Native Artist, and Navajo Talking Picture: Cinema on Native
Ground.

Daniel Lieberfeld started hearing and playing blues as a teenager. He has taught
history and international politics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Colgate
University, and Bowdoin College. His articles on music and cultural history have
appeared in Rock Music Studies, The Sixties, African-American Review, The
Drama Review, The American Scholar, Film Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film
and Video, Logos, and the Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Giulia Magazzù obtained a BA in Modern Languages from the University of

Messina, Italy and an MA in Translation Studies from the University of Bologna,
Italy. She is completing a PhD in English Studies at the University of Rome Tor
Vergata. Her dissertation deals with audiovisual translation and the fansubbing
of multilingual TV series. She also works as adjunct lecturer at “Gabriele
D’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, where she teaches English
linguistics and translation at undergraduate level.
Her areas of research are translation studies, audiovisual translation, ESP, and
critical discourse analysis. Among her publications are The Representation of
Immigrants in the Italian Press: Exploring visual Discrimination (in InVerbis,
2018); “Dottore, dottore!” Subtitling dialects and regionalisms: the case of
“Inspector Montalbano”. In Corrius M., Espasa E., Zabalbeascoa P. (eds),
Multilingualism and Audiovisual Translation. Peter Lang 2019. She is currently
working on a book about the language of Donald Trump to be published in 2020
by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Chiara Patrizi holds a PhD in American Literature at Roma Tre University and is
cultrice della materia at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her PhD research
examines the concept of “wilderness of time” in contemporary American
literature, focusing on Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Don DeLillo. She holds an M.A. from
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice—her thesis received a special mention at the
Lombardo-Gulli Award 2015. She is a member of the American Studies
Association of Italy (AISNA). She was Visiting Scholar at Duke University, and has
participated in conferences in Italy and abroad, collaborating with the Don
DeLillo Society, the Centro Studi Americani (CSA), and the AISNA. Her main
publications are “Body and Time in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist” and “‘A Moth-
eaten Shirt’: Memory and Identity in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing.” Her
research interests include contemporary American literature, African-American
literature, literature and the arts, and trauma studies.

Irene Polimante is a PhD student in Modern Languages and Literatures at the

Department of Humanities, University of Macerata. She works on contemporary
American poetry with a focus on hybrid and performative poetic forms. She is
currently completing her dissertation on performance poetry as a strategy of

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200
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Author biographies

aesthetic resistance and critical discourse on society from the diasporic

perspective of Latin@s, Caribbean, and African-American poets. Her research on
texts that lie in-between orality, literacy and performativity (live or digitally
mediated) questions and re-negotiates common understandings of poetic
textuality through the lens of performance studies, semiotics, and digital
humanities.

Douglas Mark Ponton is Associate Professor of English Language and

Translation at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of
Catania. His research interests include political discourse analysis, ecolinguistics,
discourse in interaction, applied linguistics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics and
critical discourse studies. He has held teaching and research positions at the
universities of Catania, Messina and Pisa. His most recent research projects
concern representations of Russia in western media, the Montalbano effect on
tourism in Sicily, processes of late industrialism and ecological questions in
South-Eastern Sicily, and Sicilian dialect theatre. His main publications are For
Arguments Sake: speaker evaluation in modern political discourse (2011), and
most recently Understanding Political Persuasion: Linguistic and Rhetorical
Analysis (2019). As well as politics, his research deals with a variety of social
topics, including legal metaphor, the discourse of mediation, cross-cultural
politeness, folk traditions including proverbs and, last but not least, the Blues.

Diana Sfetlana Stoica was born in Baia Mare, Romania. She is a 3rd-year student
at the Doctoral School of Philosophy, Sociology and Political Studies of the
University of West Timisoara, Romania, conducting research on Sub-Saharan
change perspectives in the context of European non-global anti-migration
discourse. She graduated in Communication Studies, with a bachelor‘s degree in
Advertising, in 2014. During the master studies in International Development,
from which she graduated in 2016, she focused on African studies, inspired by
her own interests and her geologist father’s dream to climb Kilimanjaro. Her
conceptual writing is inspired by intercultural communication and knowledge
production. It is founded on a vivid interest in concepts of development, race,
and power, as well as their image in the branding of destinations and global
knowledge exchange. Her research is based on observations in the field of
tourism and air transportation, and participation in high profile exhibitions.

Uwe Zagratzki is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures and the Chair
of Literature at the Institute of English at Szczecin University. He has widely
published in Scottish and Canadian Literature and Culture, Cultural Studies (e.g.
African-American Music) and War and Literature. He is a co-founder of the
Szczecin Canadian Studies Group and has had teaching and research posts at the
Universities of Osnabrück and Oldenburg (Germany), Brno (Czech Republic)
and the University of West Georgia (US).

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 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy
Author biographies 201

His recent publications include Ideological Battlegrounds–Constructions of Us

and Them Before and After 9/11. Vol. 1 (co-ed. with Joanna Witkowswka, 2014),
Despite Harper: International Perceptions of Canadian Literature and Culture (co-
ed. with Weronika Suchacka and Hartmut Lutz, 2014), Exile and Migration (co-
ed. with Joanna Witkowska, 2016), Disrespected Neighbo(u)rs–Cultural Stereotypes
in Literature and Film (co-ed. with Caroline Rosenthal und Laurenz Volkmann,
2018) and Perspectives on Canada–International Canadian Studies despite
Harper and Trudeau (co-ed. with Barbara Butrymowska, 2018).

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Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

 Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

Index

blues musicians, 6, 10, 21, 38, 39,

A 140, 156, 157, 164, 165, 166,
167, 169, 170
Africa, 18, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34,
Bonamassa, Joe, xvi, 56, 165, 168,
35, 190
169, 173
African American, xi, xii, xiv, xv, 5,
Boogie Woogie, 55
8, 9, 10, 17, 27, 28, 30, 53, 55, 59,
Branding, 116, 173
63, 64, 67, 69, 72, 73, 126
Broonzy, Big Bill, 129
African music, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28,
32, 45
Alienation, 29 C
American Dream, 71, 73 California, 4, 5, 34, 35, 189
apartheid, 4, 9 call-and-response, 103
Armstrong, Louis, 89, 109 Calloway, Cab, 14
authenticity, xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, catharsis, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108,
xvii, 6, 57, 58, 115, 116, 117, 109, 179
118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124,
125, 155, 156, 157, 158, 164,
165, 167, 170, 171, 172, 177,
Ch
178, 189 Chicago, xi, xiii, 9, 11, 21, 34, 44,
48, 49, 56, 59, 64, 66, 73, 110,
B 120, 145, 152, 171, 174, 178,
180, 183, 189, 190, 193
baby, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 143,
147, 182, 185, 194
Backlash Blues, xv, 63, 64, 65, 66,
C
67, 69, 73, 74 Civil Rights, xii, 63, 70
banjo, 15, 139 Civil Rights movement, xii
Baraka, Amiri, 69, 93 Civil War, 17, 51
Benjamin, Walter, xv, 51, 57, 59, 60 Clapton, Eric, xiii, 7, 14, 39, 178,
Berry, Chuck, 40, 41 183, 188, 194
Blank, Les, xiii, xiv, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, Collins, Albert, 6, 39
10, 11 contemporary, xii, xv, xvi, 19, 20,
Bluegrass, 127, 128 23, 27, 31, 43, 47, 113, 135, 140,
Blues Brothers, 3, 21, 177, 180 142, 145, 148, 155, 156, 157,
158, 164, 167, 170, 178, 198
Cooder, Ry, xvii, 31, 32, 39, 45

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204
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy Index

corpus, xii, xvi, xvii, 127, 128, 129, G

130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136,
137, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, gambling, 7
146, 152, 183, 184, 185, 186, Germany, xii, xiv, 54, 56, 165, 200
187, 188, 198, 200 Gillespie, Dizzy, 5
Country Blues, 6, 51, 60, 121, 140, guitar, 15, 19, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45,
151, 183 52, 67, 122, 125, 139, 145, 165,
Crow, Jim, 10, 53, 60, 65, 73 178, 180, 186
culture, xi, xiv, 4, 6, 7, 10, 14, 20, Guy, Buddy, xi, 39, 155, 173, 177,
21, 26, 27, 28, 31, 46, 51, 52, 53, 179
54, 56, 66, 69, 70, 115, 121, 124,
126, 157, 163, 169, 177, 178 H
culture industry, 14, 21, 52, 115,
121, 124 Handy, W.C., 19, 116, 122
Harlem, xv, 69, 101, 102, 106, 110
Harlem Renaissance, xv, 69, 101,
D
110
Davis, Miles, 43, 45, 167 harmonica, 68, 139
Delta Blues, xii, xvii, 177, 180, 184 hell, 37, 149
Dixon, Willie, 44, 177 Hendrix, Jimi, xii, xv, 7, 37, 38, 39,
Dockery’s, xii 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,
Du Bois, W.E.B., 24, 27, 34, 198 49, 166, 167, 172
Dylan, Bob, 40, 46, 128, 137, 179, Heron, Gil Scott, 14
181, 182, 188, 190, 194 Hooker, John Lee, 19, 27, 28, 37,
40, 55, 109, 180, 181
E Hopkins, Lightnin’, xii, xiii, xiv, 3, 4,
5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 39, 47, 131, 132,
Ellington, Duke, 43 181, 182, 183, 186, 187, 194
emotions in Blues, xii House, Son, xiii, 40, 134, 179, 181
ethnicity, 28, 33 Hughes, Langston, xii, xv, 19, 63,
64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 99,
F 101, 109, 110, 111, 126, 198

Fanon, Frantz, 25, 30, 34

I
feeling, xiv, 3, 5, 8, 13, 43, 45, 103,
104, 106, 108, 134, 156, 158, identity, xii, xv, xvi, 25, 29, 39, 46,
163, 164, 193 53, 56, 57, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 113,
female, xi, 52, 121, 123, 141, 143, 157, 161
147, 149, 150, 169 irony, 104

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Index
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy 205

J Monk, Thelonious, 89
Montesquieu, 23, 25, 34
Jagger, Mick, xiii, 39, 188 Morrison, Van, 39, 188, 189, 193
James, Elmore, 37, 42, 145 musicology, xii, 161
jazz, 19, 20, 27, 37, 40, 41, 48, 101,
107, 139, 167, 184 N
Johnson, Robert, xii, xiii, xvi, xvii,
14, 15, 39, 45, 46, 74, 116, 125, New Orleans, 5, 120
126, 132, 139, 140, 143, 144, New York, xiii, 5, 11, 22, 34, 40, 41,
146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 42, 44, 48, 60, 65, 73, 74, 99, 109,
159, 160, 161, 174, 175, 180, 110, 126, 151, 152, 171, 174, 190
181, 182, 183, 185, 186, 187,
188, 193 O
Joplin, Scott, 102
Oliver, Paul, xi, 13, 16, 17, 105, 108
Otherness, 26, 27, 28, 29
K
Kansas City, 102 P
Kind Hearted Woman, 159, 160,
161, 174, 175 Parker, Charlie, 89
King, B.B., 42, 55, 56, 155, 166 Patton, Charlie, xii, 136
Perdomo, 87, 94, 95, 96, 97
Perdomo, Willie, xv
L
photography, xi
Leadbelly, 123, 129 piano, 68, 103, 106, 139, 167
Lomax, Alan, 123 Popular music, 58
Presley, Elvis, 179
M Puerto Rican, 97

Malcolm X, 63, 74 R
male, xi, 51, 52, 53, 122, 141, 142,
143, 147, 149, 150, 169 racism, xi, 5, 6, 10, 18, 28, 51, 53,
Manhattan, 20, 64 70, 71
melancholy, 13, 21, 54, 56, 91, 93, rhythm, 10, 21, 26, 27, 31, 45, 55,
106 159, 166, 178
metaphor, 29, 133, 159, 160, 161, Rock ‘n’ Roll, 177
163, 170, 181, 200 Rolling Stones, 53, 55, 177, 179,
Minnie, Memphis, 129, 183, 194 186, 193
Mississipi Delta, 178, 182 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 124
Mississippi, xi, xii, 15, 37, 45, 116,
129, 131, 134, 140, 151, 172, 178
mojo, xiii, 195

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206
Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy Index

S twenty-first century, 148, 155, 156,

157, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167,
Scorsese, Martin, 3, 26, 111 168, 170
sex, 7, 54, 56, 143, 181
Sexuality, 121 U
Simone, Nina, xv, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68,
72, 73, 74 University of Catania, xi, 11, 200
singing, xvii, 8, 15, 21, 45, 58, 67,
68, 101, 105, 106, 166, 167, 177, V
178, 179, 182, 184, 185, 188
slave trade, 15, 18 Vaughan, Stevie Ray, xvii, 6, 178,
slavery, 4, 17, 18, 52, 71, 72, 120, 179, 194
178 vocal technique, xii, 183, 184, 189
Smith, Bessie, xiii, 39
Syncretism, 16 W
Waters, Muddy, xiii, 37, 39, 40, 42,
T
44, 45, 46, 52, 53, 166, 180, 183,
Texas, xiv, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 194, 195
131, 187, 194, 198 Weary Blues, 74, 87, 90, 91, 92, 97,
the Beatles, 41, 177 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 111
the Devil, xvi, 14, 15, 125, 147, 149, White Blues, xiii, 177, 180, 189, 193
151, 193, 194 Williams, Raymond, xv, 51, 54
The Panther and the Lash, 63, 69 Williamson, Sonny Boy, xiii
The Weary Blues, xv, xvi, 101, 102, Winter, Johnny, 6, 39, 120, 178, 179
103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110 Wolf, Howlin’, xiv, 37, 39, 42, 155,
Touré, Ali Farka, xii, xiv, 23, 24, 25, 163, 164, 174, 195
26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 Wolof, 15
twelve-bar, 16, 64, 66 woman, 5, 6, 9, 17, 18, 47, 51, 52,
twentieth century, 15, 27, 89, 94, 55, 105, 129, 130, 131, 134, 140,
97, 167, 178 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148,
149, 174, 175, 179, 181, 186, 194
World War II, 44, 53

Douglas Mark Ponton, University of Catania, Italy

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