Although it laid low another one of my heroes, Robert Johnson, it was a very useful book, gave me a lot more background than I had had before about the development of the blues, and the Delta blues. ( )

A history of blues anchored on the short life of the iconic Robert Johnson. A very interesting and lucid view on the blues, trying to dispel the myths and focus on what blues really meant to the people who listened to the music across the years, from its origins to the revival of the 1960s and then to modern day.
Well worth the read for anyone who loves this musical genre. ( )

Good historical overview of the blues, particularly notable in addressing common misperceptions about early blues artists. ( )

This history of the blues places Robert Johnson in the context of his time and the music of his time and place. Therefore, it corrects the widely held impression that Johnson in particular and the Delta bluesmen in general were recognized as tortured geniuses and were popularly acclaimed. At the same time, Wald respects and loves the Delta blues recordings and his chapters on Johnson's sessions are a sensitive track by track appreciation and evaluation. ( )

The legend of the wandering bluesman from the Mississippi Delta is one of those enduring images we have from early 20th century America. Even if Robert Johnson didn't sell his soul to the Devil to get a supernatural ability to play blues guitar, that sort of music burst out of the Delta to become R&B, infect jazz, and eventually lead to rock 'n roll. And it all started with these few musical geniuses that grew out of the poor black culture of the previous century, right?

Well, maybe not, if you believe Elijah Wald. In Escaping the Delta, he makes three main points: (i) the blues that was most popular was the more urban, professional, often large-group music heard first on records and then on the radio, (ii) most blues musicians, including those from the Delta were quite versatile musicians that played a wide variety of music, an image not generally recognized today, and (iii) the mystique that's grown up around acoustic Delta blues is mostly that - mystique - and came from the attention mostly white, mostly urban folklorists and preservationists paid to a relatively minor group of artists.

Just so you know, this is a fairly contrarian view of the history of the blues, and one that makes quite a bit of sense to me. Some of today's most highly revered blues musicians were pretty much unknown in their day and had marginal impact on audiences and other musicians. Yet these are the ones that are considered "Father of the Blues" or "King of the Blues". How did this drastic shift in thinking happen? Wald describes a process by which folklorists in previous decades, in trying to preserve the source of the blues, artificially selected unique material or songs that were considered "closer" to the source material instead of the wider selection of what blues artists actually played to audiences. This has distorted what we now view as pure blues and our consideration of the relative importance of various artists and styles.

Escaping the Delta is not a history of the blues. Instead, it's a study on the study of blues history. As such, it's helpful to know something about the music and its history ahead of time. But it's not required. If nothing else, Wald's work is an interesting discussion of how researchers can inadvertently influence the results of their work in unintended ways and how that can ripple into legend and folklore. ( )