Elijah Wald

"This book includes many quotations and lyrics that some readers will find offensive. I find some of them offensive myself. I was tempted to censor some passages, but in a book that criticizes other writers for censorship and examines the ways their viewpoints and prejudices affected their work, I have no business shielding myself." - p. xiv

"Unlike the songs of sailors, cowboys, soldiers, and men's clubs, which are often openly hostile to women, blues was typically performed in venues where women were present, often sung by women and with women as the most active and enthusiastic audience." - p. 20

"Those early blues were not songs in the sense that someone born in 1915 - someone like Alan Lomax - grew up thinking of a song. Before songs were regularly marketed on sheet music or records, they were often just a musical equivalent of stories.... if you ask someone the title of a story they just told, they will tend to be puzzled by the question..." - p. 29

"Nostalgic recollections of the 'gay nineties' and the era before Prohibition often include men harmonizing around a back-room piano, and for white, middle-class men, singing rough lyrics about Black barrelhouse life provided the same vicarious pleasure their great-grandsons would get from bumping gangsta rap." - p. 63

"This kind of segregation remains common in folkore studies and, as with other forms of segregation, the separation is not equal: studies of white culture in the United States have always included ragtime, blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and more recently rap as popular elements, but the fact that Black Americans danced square dances and waltzes and sang 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain' and 'Danny Boy' is generally treated as irrelevant to their culture - or, if relevant, as evidence that they were subject to Euro-American cultural hegemony rather than because Afro-American culture is as broad and omnivorous as any on earth." - p. 100

"So it is worth remembering that in cultural terms - in terms of the audience, the neighborhoods, and the attitudes of insiders and outsiders alike - a rap show in a Black neighborhood club is closer to a night at the Funky Butt than any jazz concert has been for almost a century, beset by the same stereotypes and dangers and the same appreciation of rough comedy and rhyming." - p. 142

"I'm telling these stories to give a sense of some people who were more central to the New Orleans sporting world than any musician but have been completely ignored by historians, and to present some women involved in sex work as notable individuals who exercised control over their lives and the people around them. If their environment was often exploitative and abusive, they were all the more celebrated for turning the tables on the exploiters and gaining a stature they could never have attained in the straight world." - p. 172

"Sexually explicit entertainment is often euphemistically called 'adult' but tends to be conspicuously adolescent, designed as much to assuage male fears as to satisfy male desires, and wildly unrealistic about female desires." - p. 201

"Folklorists in the early twentieth century were fascinated by the improvisational facility of Black singers. White ballad singers were celebrated for their ability to recall lyrics learned and preserved over generations; their performances inevitably varied, but most did their best to repeat what they had heard from previous singers, and the results were valued as historical artifacts. Some Black singers did the same, but others were noted for their ability to extemporize verses to even the most familiar ballads." - p. 228

"In hindsight many of us hear the Black murder ballads of the 1890s as an early form of blues, but to musicians of [Jelly Roll Morton's] generation those songs must have sounded as dated as the rock 'n' roll 'oldies' of the 1950s to young Black dancers in the age of James Brown and Aretha Franklin." - p. 263

"...in oral traditions, repeating something exactly does not mean producing a stenographic copy; it means accurately replicating the experience, which involves both more and less than the words." - p. 268