Myth-busting author turns blues history on its head

They are icons of popular music - the lone bluesmen whose lives were as rough-edged as the music that documented their hardship.

One of the most famous today, Robert Johnson, is even said to have sold his soul to the devil in a Faustian pact for his musical skills.

Over the years, their music has been seized on by historians and anthropologists, eager to place the bluesmen alongside such folk heroes as Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie.

But a new, revisionist history of the blues suggests that the most important blues musicians of the day were pop stars, following the latest trends in black music and performing whatever songs their audience wanted to hear.

More importantly, the most popular performers were women. The kings of the blues were really queens.

The newly published book by researcher and musician Elijah Wald suggests that the myths and legends - including Robert Johnson's pact with the Devil - surrounding many of the most famous blues singers are largely the creation of white music fans and critics from the 1960s.

More shockingly for hardcore fans, Mr Wald suggests that the Devil-dealing Johnson was an unimportant figure.

In his book Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, he writes: "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note."

The book claims that extensive research into the listening habits of black audiences in places like Mississippi during the 1920s and 1930s gives a greatly different account to that provided by works such as The Blues, a seven-part series produced by film director Martin Scorcese and broadcast on US television last year.

Mr Wald said the most popular performers of the day were people who are now all but unknown except to experts. And most were women.

Speaking from his home in Massachusetts, Mr Wald said: "In the early years of the blues - from 1910 to 1925 - it was all women, all female singers.

"Men came along later. They equalled the women in record sales, but the women were always bigger in terms of their acts."

Mr Wald claims that the performers were first and foremost pop musicians with an act to sell.

"It is only white audiences who will now sit down and listen to a bluesman just playing his guitar," he said.

"The blues was pop music, it wasn't folk music. It was re-invented retroactively as black folk music, which brought a new set of standards to bear on it and created a whole new pantheon of heroes.

"Suddenly the people who were the biggest stars were too slick to be real."

Blues musicians and singers such as Johnson, Leroy Carr and Bessie Smith were not field labourers, Mr Wald said.

"They were Sam Cooke, they were Snoop Dogg, they were Aretha Franklin. That's what we've forgotten, and that's what a lot of white blues fans don't want them to be."

Other histories of the blues have revealed that some of the biggest myths were created by white critics.

Last year's Robert Johnson: A History of the Blues traces all the newspaper articles about the guitarist and singer dating back to 1937.

The authors, Barry Pearson and Bill McCulloch, revealed that the legend about him selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads stemmed from a single interview given in 1966 by his friend and fellow blues musician Son House.

David Evans, one of the most respected blues historians and professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Memphis, said the dispute about Johnson's importance simply added to the myth of the musician, who lived hard and died at the age of 27, leaving only 29 recorded songs.

"Like Elvis and Hank Williams and other stars he can be all things to all people," said Dr Evans.

- INDEPENDENT