The Land Where the Blues Began

...The world of media lights and recording contracts has moved closer to the blues...

...If they couldn't find them, they'd go after their families, burn down their houses...

...Lomax devotes less than two pages to rap, and those are largely taken up with a structural analysis of the idiom...

...Jason Berry lan Lomax, now nearly eighty years old, is a legendary figure in the annals of American popular music...

...The bulk of this book, then, represents a sort of sociology of the past," he writes...

...This line of thinking, however, hardly advances Phillips's efforts to clarify the contemporary scene...

...With a muckraker' s zeal, he began traveling rural backroads during the Depression with his father, John, whose folk music writings set a high standard...

...Orphaned by their society," he writes, "the itinerant Delta bluesmen created songs that appealed to women for sympathy and a place to hang their hats...

...Put in his terms, self-avowed "bourgeois liberals" who stress the contingency of thought and identity, such as Richard Rorty, must be classified as "communitarian...

...Phillips wants to debunk this nostalgic idealization of the past by showing that the good old days weren't nearly so rosy...

...Two chapters on early America follow, then two on the Middle Ages, finally one on ancient Athens, plus instructions on "Learning from History...

...But Phillips claims that what"communitarians" have in common is the effort to restate this old dichotomy to the detriment of rightthinking liberal minds...

...That is, liberal values, like all human goods, depend upon a complex social network of practices and institutions...

...Such comments tie the narrative together with illuminating threads and extend the psychological terrain of the music...

...Phillips at one point claims that these alleged differences stem from different views of the self, in which communitarians stress the "emergent" and unchosen features of identity which result from the contingencies of birth and history, while liberals want to emphasize "selfcreation" and play down the ways in which selves are "products of our social relations...

...Of prisons, he writes: "Despite the guards, who sat by during all the recording sessions, despite our own pale faces, which must have seemed like masks of indifference to so many of them, the convicts filled our records with a thousand moving songs, an epic of hot sun and brutality and human courage, mounted upon sincere and profound melodies...

...Those blnesmen who grew up in solid families or were left to the care of beneficent grandparents or other caring relatives seem less agonized, at least to my ear...

...Together they recorded songs and life-tales of singers-even men in prison...

...The rise of early jazz and blues, even midcentury rhythm-and-blues, fits that thematic embrace...

...What is missing from Phillips's thin theory of "attachments" is the recognition that the goods he most praises, such as individual agency, dignity, and critical inquiry, cannot be sustained over time apart from ongoing patterns of collective action and practice...

...These tutorials are neither startling nor particularly gripping in their recitation of the oppressions and violence of the allegedly more "communal" societies of the past...

...Part of the history which counts here is trying to understand how such a fundamental recognition could have been eclipsed in much modern thought and action...

...When those Deep Delta peckerwoods heard the records, they'd come looking for them...

...Phillips proceeds to "uncover the communitarian ideal," asserting that it continues the critique of modern society put forward in the nineteenth century by thinkers nostalgic for a lost premodern world...

...W]hen the folks went out on the town, such a hilarious, wild, moody, and eccentric sound arose in the gin mills and dance halls on the South Side--such a wailing of clarinets, such a braying of trombones, such a singing of trumpets, such a fiver of rhythm from pianos, guitars, and drums...burst out...

...Important new cultural dynamics emerged after the early-century black migrations to the urban North...

...Unfortunately misled by the effort to find some essence of"communitarianism," Derek Phillips never identifies his authors' major themes clearly enough to subject them to critique...

...WILLIAM M. SULLIVAN teaches philosophy at La Salle University...

...Phillips asserts that while "social ties, attachments, and fellow feeling" are necessary for human well-being, they need not entail "relatedness in terms of the group or collective," nor find their source in "the community...

...Today' s harsher pop idioms can be traced back in certain ways to the older forms...

...Rap music is the voice of the new generation, an idiom whose coarsest manifestations celebrate violence and degradation of women...

...Shifting back and forth in time, it is sharpened by historical insights and reflections of the heart...

...The argument Phillips misses is the claim that the survival of liberal goods is threatened by public and theoretical languages, not to say social developments, which ignore or run down those sustaining social and moral contexts and curtail discussion of them...

...I kept my promise until 1990"-by which time the three men were dead...

...What counts, we are told, is not "membership" or participation but "attachment...

...Something like this, and not nostalgic appeals for Gemeinschafi, is closer to the core of the criticisms of liberal individualism, atomism, and abstraction found in Maclntyre, Taylor, and others...

...From the grieving mother's shack, Lomax moves on to find Son House, who had been a mentor to Johnson...

...This, of course, is that staple of introductory sociology texts, Ferdinand Tonnies's contrast between the lost warmth of Gemeinschafi and the chilliness of modern Gesellschafi...

...The central issue here turns out to be that while liberals want to exalt the freedom, dignity, and self-determination of persons, communitarians "and their nineteenthcentury counterparts emphasize the primacy of the collective life over the individual...

...As an historian and collector of songs, his career spans the era in which blues music rose from remote Southern hollows to an internationally commercial art form...

...Thus, for Phillips, whatever particular authors say, "community" must mean common territory, common history and values, a widespread participation in common activities, and a high degree of solidarity, especially as expressed in emotional attachments springing from ascribed rather than achieved status...

...When he plays back the recording they make him promise not to reveal their names...

...Lomax' s last chapter is a bittersweet reflection of how far the nation has come in embracing African-American artistry...

...The new book sees blues through the prism of a culture resisting forms of racial domination that today ]nay seem archaic...

...I]t was the degree to which each bluesman experienced the sense of pain and loss that accompanies the disappearance of parents, which determined the way they sang the blues...

...Here, labels such as "communitarian" aside, the significance of the arguments surrounding the authors Phillips criticizes begins to appear...

...In New York he conducts a long interview with Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson...

...JASON BERRY's books include Lead Us Not Into Temptation (Doubleday) and, as coauthor, Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II (DaCapo...

...And so it goes...

...Yet the land where the blues began, the deep Delta counties of Mississippi, is still economically grim for most blacks, and ravaged now by drugs and drive-by shootings...

...Constant fear and humiliation had disappeared from their lives," Lomax writes...

...But an imagination of violence permeates the postmodern psyche and its nihilism seems to betray the more soulful message of yesteryear's great passion lyrics...

...PASSION LYRICS THE LAND WHERE THE BLUES BEGAN Alan Lomax Pantheon, $25,540 pp...

...DARIA DONNELLY teaches literature at Boston University...

...The story opens in 1942 in Delta plantation country as the author, eluding thuggish deputy sheriffs, locates the mother of Robert Johnson, whose haunted lyrics echoed the tragedy of his early death-poisoned (presumably) in a lovers' quarrel...

...In his many books, articles, and films Alan Lomax has left a singular mark on that history: his poetic voice, driven by a passion for the musician's struggle, radiates on every page he writes...

...The patient reader will find more to ponder in the concluding chapter, "A Liberal Reply to Communitarian Thought...

...Lomax's concept of the blues provides a counterweight, of sorts, to ideas about the splintering of black families...

...Lomax approaches music in much the way Theodore White covered politics-as a romantic...

...Tubshaw, lots and lots of people don't have rhythm...

...There Phillips tries to stage a head-to-head confrontation between the approaches of the "communitarians" and those of a variety of philosophical liberals...

...Finally, though, we get to a strong, if not entirely clear, statement of the book's thesis...

...More than a memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began recounts Lomax's journeys over the last half-century...

...This was America in 1948," writes Lomax...

...Various scholars have chronicled the idiom...

...The author occasionally fails to meet his own exacting standards, as when he passes on the story of Bessie Smith, dying after an automobile accident in Mississippi because no white hospital would admit her--a tale that Chris Albertson disputed convincingly in his major biography of the great blues singer...

...It didn't matter that the three of them lived in Chicago," he writes...

...But critical caveats are inevitable with a book of such sweep...

...REVIEWERS WILSON CAREY McWILLIAMS teaches political science at Rutgers University...

...Part of Lomax' s influence on writers who cover music is his insistence on treating the lyrics, rhythms, and body language of dance steps as a cultural vocabulary, a coded way of embracing life among those 20:17 December 1993 Commonwealon the bottom of society...

...Fact is, Mr...

...Some will take exception to Lomax's labeling Chicago "the capital city of jazz and blues," given the predominant role of New York as the commercial arena, and of New Orleans as the wellspring of jazz and rhythm-and-blues...

...Commonweal 17 December 1993:21...