Real Life Rock Top Ten – July 2010

As a compiler, Allen Lowe is the music historian’s equivalent of David Thomson with his ongoing editions of A Biographical Dictionary of Film (the latest will be out this fall). In 1998 Lowe produced the nine-CD American Pop: An Audio History—From Minstrel to Mojo: On Record, 1893–1946; in 2006 the thirty-six-CD That Devilin’ Tune: A Jazz History [1895–1950]. Now he is unrolling a thirty-six-CD Really the Blues? A Blues History 1893–1959 in four installments; the first nine-CD box, covering 1893 to 1929, appeared this spring from West Hill Radio Archives. With at least twenty-four numbers to a disc, Really the Blues? is a cornucopia; it’s a swamp. It’s a forest to get lost in, tree by tree or even leaf by leaf. It’s a grand and overarching story—though that ? at the end of his title marks Lowe’s doubt as to whether with the blues such a story is possible, or even a good idea. It’s a flurry of fragments, leaving you grasping for a way to follow the trail.

As his free-swinging liner notes make clear, Lowe is a radical pluralist; as a synthesizer he’s completely idiosyncratic. He may love disjunction far more than unity—but what others hear as disjunctions may be unities to him. Thus along with late-nineteenth-century black quartette singing, Bert Williams, W. C. Handy, early gospel, vaudeville blues, minstrelsy survivals, New York City productions featuring the likes of Mamie Smith, Sarah Martin, and then Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and the lone-traveler-with-guitar of the country blues, there is also Paul Whiteman, Jimmie Rodgers, white mountain singers, Billie Holiday, bluegrass, Sacred Harp chanting, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, and a Charles Ives piano piece from his Symphony no. 1. In Lowe’s hands, the blues is not a feeling (“A good man/woman feeling bad,” in the classical phrase, or, in Buzzy Jackson’s recent revision, “A bad woman feeling good”). It’s a language: something one can draw from the times and the landscape, or out of oneself; it’s a language one can learn. As a language, it gives whoever can speak it a certain purchase on the world, allowing one to present it or oneself in a light different from the light that falls on you without your will or desire coming into play. That is why it takes so many, even infinite, forms.

In the world of the blues as Lowe affirms it, any attempt at summary, let alone a critical assessment of what his crafted world is worth, of whether it’s a spinning globe or a pile of feathers, would demand far more time than it takes to listen—and given the shape of...