I'm reminded of John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay on the blues, "Unknown Bards", where he talks about the album "Pre-War Revenants": "We're talking about strains

I'm reminded of John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay on the blues, "Unknown Bards", where he talks about the album "Pre-War Revenants": "We're talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey's 'Woman Woman Blues,' his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, 'She got coal-black curly hair.' Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson's 'Dark was the night, cold was the ground.' It has no words. It's hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological thinking; it doesn't serve at thee strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticise black or poor-white folk poverty has allowed us to rmain the kind of people who don't stop to wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves." His discussion of writing about blues, and the writing about writing about the blues, is pretty interesting. (https://ourblues.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/unknown_bards.pdf https://ourblues.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/unknown_bards.p... but all of his essays are great, I especially recommend the collection 'Pulphead')