Wald — Escaping the Delta

Author: Elijah Wald
Title: Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
Year: 2004
Type: Book (Amistad / HarperCollins)

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues is a book by the writer and musician Elijah Wald, published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2004. It argues that blues was African American popular music from about 1910 to 1960, and that Robert Johnson, little noticed by the Black blues audience of his own time, was a skilled commercial musician whom a later, largely white audience made into a romantic legend. Wald begins from two questions, why Johnson’s records drew so little notice in the 1930s and why he now stands first in blues history. His evidence is Black popular music before Johnson, a study of Johnson’s recordings and the records he learned from, and the music’s later audiences, Black and white. Most reviews praised it, among them the Austin Chronicle’s and the New York Times Book Review’s; Kirkus judged it academic and bogged down, and in 2006 the blues writer Frank Matheis published a defense of Johnson against it.

Amistad published the book in January 2004, with a paperback that December.¹ Wald writes that his view of the blues “has been formed by thirty years of playing the music, many of them as a full-time professional.”² A companion CD, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, came out with it.³

Wald describes the book as a history of blues “as African-American popular music—which it was from about 1910–1960—rather than as a roots, folk style.” His starting questions are why Johnson’s work was “all but ignored by the blues audience of his time” and why he is “now considered the greatest figure in blues history.” In person, he writes, Johnson and Muddy Waters played the whole range of the period’s popular music, “from hillbilly hoedowns to Bing Crosby hits,” and the record companies’ demands kept that range off their records. Three chapters “examine his few recordings in more detail than ever before, exploring his models, the ways he adapted them and created his own style.”² The book then follows the music’s later audiences. Blues, Wald writes, “remained a black pop style until the 1960s,” when a revival led by white fans gave it a new public; “since then, the overwhelming majority of people who identify themselves as blues fans have been white.”² He concludes that Johnson “was not a demon-harried oddity from the primeval delta, but a brilliant and savvy pop musician.”²

When Johnson made his records, Wald told the Voice of America in 2004, “the black public who was buying blues records showed almost no interest whatsoever.”⁴ In another interview he said that Columbia’s 1961 album King of the Delta Blues Singers “changed a lot of people’s lives.”⁵ Robert Gabriel, reviewing the book in the Austin Chronicle, wrote that Johnson’s one hit in his lifetime, “Terraplane Blues”, sold modestly, and that the crossroads legend was originally Tommy Johnson’s.⁶ Kirkus gave the book’s “central point” as the claim that Robert Johnson’s legend came from white promoters and archivists such as John Hammond and Alan Lomax, whose conceptions it called “highly romantic.”⁷

Most reviews praised the book. Gabriel wrote that it “does an extraordinary job of sifting through the myths in order to unearth reality.”⁶ Wald’s own page quotes Eric Weisbard, in the New York Times Book Review, calling it “a gentle wake-up call,” and Louis Menand, in The New Yorker, calling it “an indispensable revisionist history of the blues.”³ Kirkus was mixed: it called the book “essentially an academic enterprise” and wrote that “some solid observations ultimately get mired in the Mississippi mud.”⁷ In 2006 Frank Matheis published “In Defense of Robert Johnson,” which rejected Wald’s view of Johnson as “an extremely minor figure” in the evolution of Black music and denied that Johnson owed his fame to white critics and fans. Matheis wrote that Wald “may be fundamentally correct in many, but not all, of his points,” and that most of them “were not new revelations.”⁸

Key contributions

• Blues treated as African American popular music from about 1910 to 1960.
• Robert Johnson as a skilled commercial musician who drew little notice from the Black audience of his own time.
• Johnson’s legend traced to white promoters, archivists and fans after his death, and the crossroads story to Tommy Johnson.

See also

• Delta blues — the regional style whose myth the book examines
• Segregating Sound — Karl Hagstrom Miller’s 2010 history of the division of Southern music by race
• The transatlantic feedback loop — music carried between Britain and the United States
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• The color line in pop — the color line as industry infrastructure, from market categories to radio formats