Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850-1920

by Peter C. Muir

Overview

Mamie Smith's 1920 recording of ""Crazy Blues"" is commonly thought to signify the beginning of commercial attention to blues music and culture, but by that year more than 450 other blues titles had already appeared in sheet music and on recordings. In this examination of early popular blues, Peter C. Muir traces the genre's early history and the highly creative interplay between folk and popular forms, focusing especially on the roles W. C. Handy played in both blues music and the music business.

Long Lost Blues exposes for the first time the full scope and importance of early popular blues to mainstream American culture in the early twentieth century. Closely analyzing sheet music and other print sources that have previously gone unexamined, Muir revises our understanding of the evolution and sociology of blues at its inception.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252034879
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	01/06/2010
Series:	Music in American Life
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

An internationally recognized pianist, composer, scholar, and conductor, Peter C. Muir is the cofounder and codirector of the Institute for Music and Health in Verbank, New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments   ix
A Word about the Music Examples   xi
Introduction   1
1. The Popular Blues Industry, 1912-1920   7
2. The Identity and Idiom of Early Popular Blues   28
3. Curing the Blues with the Blues   80
4. The Blues of W. C. Handy   104
5. The Creativity of Early Southern Published Blues   141
6. Published Proto-Blues and the Evolution of the Twelve-Bar Sequence   181
Appendix: Titular Blues, 1912-1915   217
Notes   221
Major Works Consulted   243
General Index   245
Song Index   251

Editorial Reviews

Received a Certificate of Merit in the Best Music History category from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2011.

"Required reading for lovers of the blues and historians of American popular music."—Notes

"One of the most important and original books on blues to be published in the past decade."—The Journal of Southern History, David Evans

"Muir's revealing book contributes significantly to understanding how sheet music and the pop music industry influenced the blues. An important work."—Tim Brooks, author of Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919

"This fascinating work discusses the genesis and introduction of a minority music genre into mainstream culture in a way that is impossible to ignore, given the importance of blues connections to other genres. Essential reading for anyone interested in American popular music."—Dick Spottswood, host of The Dick Spottswood Show on BlueGrassCountry.org and editor of Ethnic Music on Records

From the Publisher