The chapter on John Lee Hooker - and here Gioia really hits his stride - deals with Hooker’s endless variations on a one-chord groove, but also with the profligacy of his recording career. Traditional blues’ stubborn allegiance to its own guiding lights, its resistance to corporate interference, its blissful ignorance of music videos and trendy radio formats, its affirmation of its own inexpressibly rich heritage.” “My attraction to traditional blues,” he writes, “was no doubt fueled by my growing dissatisfaction with the overpowering commercialization and commoditization I encountered elsewhere in the music world. On the second page of the preface to “Delta Blues,” his new survey, Ted Gioia explains his middle-aged transition to a deeper level of interest in the blues. Neutral use is O.K.) Five, a sure fix on the best musicians as both extraordinary artists and ordinary subjects of history. (Also, as little positive use of the word “simple” as possible. These were performers grant them their artifice. (In some cases, it’s all we have to rely on - a man or a woman was in such a room at such a time.) Four, no pious implications that the blues always represents righteousness, truth and tradition. Three, the newest discographical and biographical information, as much as possible. Two, a thorough awareness of the notion that blues fetishism, by collectors, producers and writers, has been equally damaging and helpful. Here are some: One, no overwriting and no clichés.
We are in the post-history of the blues, and at this point we might as well set some requirements, guards against benign nonsense, for new books on all blues, but especially Delta blues.
It has been 16 years since the founding of the House of Blues nightclub chain and eight years since the burning of Junior’s Place, in Chulahoma, Miss., one of the last of the great Delta juke joints. It has been 70 years since Robert Johnson’s death and 25 since Muddy Waters’s.
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