• Reinventing the Blues
• Gregory P. Downs (bio)

In 1941, three Fisk University scholars—musician John Wesley Work, sociologist Lewis Jones, and sociology student Samuel Adams—documented the listening habits of Black residents of Coahuma County, Mississippi, and the jukebox offerings in the Black-patronized establishments of Coahuma’s county seat, Clarksdale, while their Library of Congress colleague Alan Lomax recorded local blues and folk musicians.

Lomax was in search of Robert Johnson, who had died three years earlier, so instead recorded songs by Muddy Waters, Son House, and other Delta blues musicians that remain lodestars of the genre. Work, Jones, and Adams, however, discovered that many Black Delta people did not listen to much blues. At the King and Anderson Plantation, near Clarksdale, Black farmworkers and sharecroppers liked some blues songs (though primarily of the crooning type that would influence 1940s jazz) but listened mostly to popular songs, swing numbers, hymns, and gospel, admiring Cab Calloway and the sometimes-bluesy Count Basie but also Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Roy Acuff. On the jukebox at Messenger’s Café in Clarksdale, the top six numbers were by bandleaders Count Basie, Louis Jordan, Johnny Hodges, Eddy Duchin, and Sammy Kaye. Even in the cradle of the blues, scant miles from Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, in the town where Bessie Smith died, Black Mississippians were mostly listening to other things. Even in 1941.¹

This disparity between apparent and actual Black Southern taste endures: now, Clarksdale is a center for blues tourism, attracting more than 100,000 visitors—almost all white—to the blues clubs downtown, while Black people repeatedly told sociologist B. Brian Foster that they mostly liked other music: soul (Luther Vandross, Marvin Gaye, Patti LaBelle) and gospel, among older people, and hip-hop (Nicki Minaj, Moneybagg Yo, 2 Chainz), among the younger. Even when asked to name blues music they like, they refer to people who might be classed as blues but might also be called southern soul: Johnnie Taylor, Marvin Sease, Jackie Neal, Tyrone Davis. [End Page 422]

How important are the blues anyway to Black Mississippians? This is the question Foster poses in his skeptical, sometimes-circular, but often compelling I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place & the Backbeat of Black Life. Over five years, Foster lived in Clarksdale for stretches, observing from diner booths and sidewalks, and conducted more than 200 interviews with Black Clarks-dale residents. What Foster wanted to know changed over the course of his interviews, in ways that help us pin down the elusive, unavoidable question of what the blues mean today. Foster arrived in Clarksdale determined not to write a study of the blues. He wrote in his notebooks, “I am not studying the blues” (p. 2). He wondered if “Black southerners were no longer blues people” but “post-blues people,” “beyond the blues” (p. 3).

Foster himself hated the blues, and hated even more Clarksdale’s downtown blues district. And Black resident after Black resident told him that they too hated the blues and never went to those clubs. “Fuck that blues shit,” one tells him (p. 3). At its best blues was “old-timing,” (p. 51) as one of Foster’s subjects says, (a view arguably widespread even among 1930s Clarksdale Black residents); at worst, it was a put-on for white tourists, who got what they demanded and who saw in it what they wanted to see, mostly a façade of authenticity.

Instead of the blues, Foster went to Clarksdale to explore an important lacuna in contemporary sociology (and arguably history): the study of 21st-century rural Black Southerners. Foster quickly sketches the emergence of the Black rural South as a problem in early-20th-century sociology, then its eclipse by urban studies, then by studies of what Foster calls the New South (Atlanta) and the Historic South (New Orleans.) What disappeared in these studies were the people who stayed in place, in places where the population was shrinking, the economy...

• 重塑布鲁斯
• 格雷戈里·P·唐斯（生物）

1941 年，菲斯克大学的三位学者——音乐家约翰·卫斯理·沃克、社会学家刘易斯·琼斯和社会学学生塞缪尔·亚当斯——记录了密西西比州科胡马县黑人居民的聆听习惯，以及科胡马县城黑人光顾的自动点唱机, Clarksdale，而他们在国会图书馆的同事 Alan Lomax 录制了当地蓝调和民间音乐家的唱片。

Lomax 正在寻找三年前去世的罗伯特·约翰逊 (Robert Johnson)，因此录制了浑水 (Muddy Waters)、儿子豪斯 (Son House) 和其他三角洲布鲁斯音乐家的歌曲，这些音乐家至今仍是该流派的领头羊。然而，沃克、琼斯和亚当斯发现许多黑人三角洲人并不怎么听蓝调。在克拉克斯代尔附近的国王和安德森种植园，黑人农场工人和佃农喜欢一些布鲁斯歌曲（尽管主要是影响 1940 年代爵士乐的低吟类型），但主要听流行歌曲、摇摆乐曲、赞美诗和福音，欣赏 Cab Calloway 和有时忧郁的贝西伯爵，还有本尼古德曼、阿蒂肖和罗伊阿库夫。在克拉克斯代尔 Messenger's Café 的自动点唱机上，排名前六的数字是乐队领队 Count Basie、Louis Jordan、Johnny Hodges、Eddy Duchin 和 Sammy Kaye。即使在布鲁斯的摇篮里，在贝西·史密斯 (Bessie Smith) 去世的小镇上，距离罗伯特·约翰逊 (Robert Johnson) 的十字路口仅数英里，密西西比黑人大部分时间都在听其他事情。即使在 1941 年。^1个

这种明显和实际的南方黑人品味之间的差异持续存在：现在，克拉克斯代尔是蓝调旅游的中心，吸引了超过 100,000 名游客——几乎都是白人——到市中心的蓝调俱乐部，而黑人反复告诉社会学家 B. Brian Foster，他们主要喜欢其他音乐：老年人喜欢灵魂乐（Luther Vandross、Marvin Gaye、Patti LaBelle）和福音音乐，年轻人喜欢嘻哈音乐（Nicki Minaj、Moneybagg Yo、2 Chainz）。即使当被要求说出他们喜欢的布鲁斯音乐时，他们也会提到可能被归类为布鲁斯但也可能被称为南方灵魂的人：Johnnie Taylor、Marvin Sease、Jackie Neal、Tyrone Davis。【422页完】

无论如何，布鲁斯对密西西比黑人有多重要？这是福斯特在他的怀疑论中提出的问题，有时是循环的，但通常是引人注目的我不喜欢忧郁：种族、地方和黑人生活的背景。五年多来，福斯特在克拉克斯代尔住了一段时间，从餐厅的摊位和人行道上观察，并对布莱克克拉克斯代尔的居民进行了 200 多次采访。福斯特想知道的事情在他的采访过程中发生了变化，以帮助我们确定今天忧郁的含义这一难以捉摸、不可避免的问题的方式。福斯特抵达克拉克斯代尔后确定不写布鲁斯的研究。他在笔记本上写道：“我不是在学习蓝调”（第 2 页）。他想知道“黑人南方人不再是布鲁斯人”，而是“后布鲁斯人”，“超越布鲁斯”（第 3 页）。

福斯特本人讨厌布鲁斯，更讨厌克拉克斯代尔市中心的布鲁斯区。布莱克居民告诉他，他们也讨厌蓝调，从不去那些俱乐部。“操他妈的布鲁斯狗屎，”一个人告诉他（第 3 页）。正如福斯特的一位研究对象所说，最好的忧郁是“过时”（第 51 页）（这种观点甚至在 1930 年代的克拉克斯代尔黑人居民中也广为流传）；在最坏的情况下，它是白人游客的装扮，他们得到了他们想要的东西，并且从中看到了他们想看到的东西，主要是真实的外观。

福斯特没有去布鲁斯，而是去克拉克斯代尔探索当代社会学（也可以说是历史）的一个重要空白：对 21 世纪农村黑人南方人的研究。福斯特迅速勾勒出南方黑人农村的出现是 20 世纪初社会学中的一个问题，然后城市研究使它黯然失色，然后福斯特称之为新南方（亚特兰大）和历史悠久的南方（新奥尔良）的研究。在这些研究中消失的是留在原地的人，在人口萎缩的地方，经济……