The story goes that one night in Tutwiler, W.C. Handy was at the railroad station waiting for a train. A ragged, skinny black guitarist sat on a bench playing his guitar by sliding a knife along the strings. He sang a song about "goin' where the Southern cross the Dog." And thus was born -- in the mind of W.C. Handy, composer and musician, the form we know as the blues. Blues historians like Paul Oliver and Giles Oakley have repeated this story and added to it, tracing roots (and routes) all through the southern states, and back through the West Indies to Africa, where the slave ships loaded their human cargo and linked the New World with the Dark Continent irrevocably. They charted the history of the music, and the men and women who played and sang it -- from the chain gangs of Louisiana to the ghetto of Chicago and beyond.
In Africa and the Blues Professor Gerhard Kubik continues this study, delving deeper into the African sources of the blues, to discover similarities not only between field hollers and stomps and chants, but even between the physical attributes of the musicians and the instruments used in two different lands separated by a vast expanse of ocean.
Kubik's book provides an academic's look at a music dependent on feeling. His writing is not particularly engaging and at various times seems drier than the dust blowing across the Transvaal, at other times muddier than the banks of the Mississippi. This is surprising considering that Kubik plays clarinet and guitar in a band from Malawi and might be expected to write with more emotion about his art form.
Many of the photographs are helpful, and make his points better than the accompanying descriptions. He shows similar instruments, like mouth-bows, which appear both in different African countries and in various states in America. The two photos, side-by-side, show a black man from Mozambique compared to a white Appalachian man, both with strikingly similar instruments in strikingly similar poses. The first time this reader saw a mouth-bow it was being played by Buffy Saint-Marie, a Native American!
Kubik does attempt to track a 360-degree circle of influence, which is a new and fascinating idea, and one which deserves consideration. Anyone who has heard John Lee Hooker, and then listened to Ali Farka Toure, will recognize similarities which go beyond coincidence. The rise of world music in the past few years has been a blessing for the adventurous listener looking for universal characteristics in music.
There are many brilliant nuggets in this volume, and much to glean, but it is hard work. If you are looking for a quicker, more user-friendly history of the trail of the blues from Africa to the USA and back, listen to the recent album by Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabate, Kulanjan or to Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu.
