THE outstanding excerpt in this most readable anthology on the blues and jazz is novelist Ralph Ellison's "BluesPeople", a response to LeRoi Jones's famous book of the same name. Ellison suggests that "any effective study of the blues would treat them first as poetry and as ritual". He chides LeRoi Jones for drawing a false distinction between classic and country blues, "the one being entertainment and the other folklore" because "classic blues were both entertainment and a form of folklore".
It's an argument we have heard a lot about the years as the notion of Irish traditional music rises and falls on the tide of what is or is not "pure" more real more pure more Irish. A renewed perspective could be Ellison's marvellous comment about the origins of "the blues"
"A slave was, to the extent that he was a musician one who expressed himself in music, a man who realised himself in the world of sound. Thus, while he might stand in awe before the superior technical ability of a white musician, and while he was forced to recognise a superior social status, he could never feel awed before the music which the technique of the white musician made available. His attitude as "musician" would lead him to seek to possess the music expressed through the technique, but until he could do so he would hum, whistle, sing or play the tunes to the best of his ability on any available instrument. And it was, indeed, out of the tension between desire and ability that the techniques of jazz emerged."
The last phrase is really an aphorism for all art. For the blues, the spirituals, the jazz, the dance, were, according to Ellison, "what we had in place of freedom".
Whether hanging out with Art Pepper "On the road with Stan Kenton's Band, 1946 52", picking through the gory details of "The Death of Bessie Smith" or delivering the argument between James Baldwin and James Lincoln Collier about whose music is it anyway, Campbell's book sets a few records straight.
The lives of the musicians are given in the stories they tell struggles with dope, racism, the grind of touring, battling with an audience like Howl in Wolfs in Alabama "They acted like heathens down there, stomping all over my breast." Or the tale Billie Holiday tells of her days singing for $18 a week. One night a millionaire came in "he asked me to come back and have a drink with him. When I did, he gave me the 20 dollar bill in my hand. I figured, if a millionaire could give me money that way, everybody could. So from then on I wouldn't take money off tables. When I came to work the other girls used to razz me, call me Duchess and say, Look at her, she thinks she's a lady. That was the beginning of people calling me Lady."
Geoff Dyer remarks in the concluding excerpt, "Tradition, Influence and Innovation" "suddenly the music is happening". There is no accounting for what that means, what it does, where it comes from, and why. As Philip Larkin's poem, For Sidney Bechet has it, On me your voice falls as they say love should/Like an enormous yes." That'll do.