Reviews in American History

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...