ABSTRACT
PICTURE THIS: three males, one a Turk, one a Jew, the other an African American, are driving south into Louisiana in the late 1940s. They reach New Orleans, where they ignore “coloreds only” signs, sometimes at their peril, and drop into juke joints, bars, dance clubs, pool halls, anywhere they hear music. Incongruously, they sit, rapt, listening to barrelhouse pianists like Henry Roeland Byrd, or Professor Longhair as he is best known, and Blind Willie McTell, who has been singing the blues and occasionally religious numbers since the 1920s. No drums, no rhythm section, no electric guitars: the bluesmen down here stomp their feet to keep a beat; they pick and scratch rather than strum their guitars. A bass croak issues from these players. The two whites are going to try to persuade Byrd, McTell and other swamp blues players to record for their fledgling record label. Their success in drawing them away from the bayou will be the basis of their grand projet: to build a record company based on black music. Meanwhile, the black male is jotting down notes as he listens to the music; his job is to find a way of committing what is at root an oral music form to paper. He will transcribe and later recreate on record music that is characterized by its untrammelled spontaneity. The endproduct of the three men’s and their artists’ labors will be known as soul music.
