The Original Blues

With The Original Blues Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff have completed an indispensable trilogy of works about the ascendance of African American popular entertainments from the 1890s to the 1920s. As with their two earlier books—Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895 (2003) and Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (2007)—this richly illustrated volume is based on decades of painstaking research in the black press begun long before the availability of searchable newspaper databases. And like its predecessors, the result is more chronicle than synthesis, stringing together detailed descriptions of the careers and achievements of mostly forgotten artists and entrepreneurs. Together, these profiles and biographies offer a broad survey of the development and organization of the black entertainment business and its leading exponents in its formative years. The core argument, suggested by the subtitle, is that the blues as a distinct musical designation and genre emerged not from some rural folk culture but from the commercial entertainment world of African American vaudeville, which took shape in the first decade of the twentieth century through a fusion of music (ragtime, “coon” songs), comedy, and dance. At the center of this argument stands a performer named Butler “String Beans” May, the subject of an entire chapter but referred to throughout the book. Almost entirely unknown today, String Beans left behind no sound recordings before his untimely death in 1917, but Abbott and Seroff contend he was the best-known, most influential black vaudeville artist of the 1910s and the one who can most rightfully be called the first popularizer of the blues, beginning around 1910. With an act combining singing, piano playing, comedy, and dance, he was the “first national blues star” and a major force in bringing the cultural power of southern black vaudeville to the north (p. 115

Art · Art history · Blues · Entertainment · Jazz · Literature · Musical · Popular music · Trilogy · Visual arts · American Sports and Literature · History · Music History and Culture · Theater, Performance, and Music History

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