Topic: Bukka White book?

[tinpanallygurl]

I know t hat there are many talented writers here on Weenie, I admittedly am not one.  Has anyone ever thought of doing a Bukka White book?  With his cousin B.B. King still around as well as other family members and his relatively recent death (when compared with Charley Patton and some others) has anyone here ever thought about taking up the cause?

[wreid75]

I have asked several authors about this very thing (wont drop names to protect the guilty) and the general consensus is that it takes too much work for too little reward.  There is plenty of information out there to do a good long book and he had a complex enough character to be engaging.  I remember hearing that there are too few of us who are interested in their personal story and not just their music.  Some people just want to listen and that's cool.  Others want as much information as possible.  It is a labor of love and costs a lot of time, effort, and money to get a book to print if there is no reward.  I hope in the future we get one though.

[Mr.OMuck]

I wonder what the percentage is of people who've ever heard of, let alone heard the music of Bukka White? Probably less than 1% I'm guessing. I guess what would make sense is to raise his visibility first and then think about a book. Its bizarre that Columbia records chose only Bessie Smith & Robert Johnson to give the box set treatment to. Why that couldn't have been an ongoing program is beyond me, other than the Steve Jobs intrusion making all hard media semi obsolete.

[bnemerov]

This 1981 book (University of Tennessee Press) has 3 long bios, including White's of 62 pages (By David Evans and Jack Hurley). The McGee chapter (by the late Charles Wolfe) is superb.

Tom Ashley, Sam McGee, Bukka White: Tennessee Traditional Singers
 edited by Thomas G. Burton

best,
bruce

[Stuart]

I'll second Bruce's recommendation. Definitely worth reading--and owning--for the three biographies it contains. Looks like a paperback edition is in print:

http://utpress.org/bookdetail-2/?jobno=T00647.01.01

http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Ashley-McGee-Bukka-White/dp/1572334347

[tinpanallygurl]

Just wondering how many people here on Weenie would actually support an electronically produced book.  E-books have taken off in other fields and e-publishing is really growing.  My only concern is that the demo that is using this type of books is the under 45 age group.  If enough people showed interest I might consider trying it.  I would need some pointers along the way but this community has shown to be willing to give its opinions freely.  I would hate to dedicate a year or so to something and only have 100 people download it.  That would be the saddest thing ever

[claudecat]

Just wondering how many people here on Weenie would actually support an electronically produced book.  E-books have taken off in other fields and e-publishing is really growing.

Personally, I've grown to love ebooks and do most of my reading that way these days. And I'm reasonably old too (53). For the uninitiated,it can be as easy as just downloading an application or two (Acrobat Reader, which as a Linux guy I actually don't need, or the lesser known fbreader, which opens almost all ebook formats. Calibre is also nice, but more elaborate) and then downloading the books. Most will save your place in the book even if you lose power or something. Very handy.

[jostber]

Has anyone read this interview?

Project MUSE - ?Fixin? to Die Blues?: The Last Months of Bukka White With an afterword from B.B. King on Bukka White?s Legacy

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/southern_cultures/summary/v016/16.3.johnson.html

[bnemerov]

Hi jostber,
I went into the databank at the University where I have privileges, and read this. IMO it's nothing to get excited about, but worth a read if you can get access.

The author was a newspaper reporter for a small Massachusetts paper. White had flown to Boston for a week-long gig at a club and had a small stroke. He was in the Boston hospital recovering when the reporter had an hour with White. The article is mostly in White's own words, but not a lot of new information.

The most interesting part is when the reporter left his tape recorder running and left the room while White's doctor consulted Booker about his care after he would return to Memphis. The reporter gives this verbatim (from the tape) and doesn't realize that the conversation ----about White's possible outpatient care at one of two Memphis hospitals---is about a better hospital that treats  people who can pay and the city hospital that treats blacks and indigents. Booker is trying to tell the doctor, in an elliptical way, what the score is in Memphis.
White died a couple of months after returning home.

King's brief addendum (phone interview with the author at a later date) is terse and dispels the notion that Booker taught B.B. anything; or that the two were very close.

best,
bruce

[Mr.OMuck]

I just got kindle software for my iPhone, downloaded and read Suze Rotollo's memoir and am now re reading Mayor of McDougal St. I find it quite handy especially on the subway. As long as it works for me on the iPhone I have no plans to accumulate another electronic device. So yes to ebooks. I'm 62 btw.


Its a crime that a poet and musician of Bukka White's stature would not have expected the best care in returning to Memphis.
I have mentioned my idea, goal, mission of getting this music firmly established in the realm of "High Culture" rather than being seen as charming outsider art that's pretty good considering the "uneducated, ignorant, backwards hicks" who made it. The fact that Jazz is always included in any discussion of modernism (but curiously mostly as background music) and this music is nowhere to be seen has always infuriated me. On the other hand Andy Warhol, most famous and wealthy of then living artists (and arguably the most calculating and most deliberately vapid) died while in the care of one of the best hospitals in New York after a Gall Bladder operation! So ya' never can tell. But the point is that Bukka White deserved a higher degree of recognition than he got, and that would have made it more likely that he would have received better treatment. Apologies to those who've heard me say this ad nauseum, but I got to spend a day with him in '69 and found him to be a highly intelligent affable, and encouraging man.


If what i've written about this music being included when considering "high" culture resonates with you, you might want to start your thinking by compiling a list of 10 20th century artists that you admire in all disciplines and include where your favorite Blues musician might fit in terms of overall quality. Here's mine:


Joyce
Rev. Gary Davis
Matisse
Soutine
Stravinsky
Pollock
Issac Babel
Bukka White
DeKooning
Ingmar Bergman

For entertainment porpoises only! Catch me on another day and you might get an entirely different list, but as a way of creating a relative scale of value this is pretty good.

[bnemerov]

Hi Mr. OMuck,

I find this subject interesting and your "rant" engaging.
What I'd put out here for your consideration is this: High Art (or High Culture, if you like) and Low Art are really false categories and Booker and many others don't need the "elevation."

Consider what has been written about folk art. The German, 19th C., model was that a group of untrained commoners (i.e. a low culture), the volk, created a certain type of music, dance, sculpture, etc..art with quaint charm though of lesser value. This has pretty much been the model for academic "volklore" study until recently.

Of course this is nonsense. An individual creates---and it is his (or her) community that decides which creations it values and therefore keeps and passes on; an artistic creation that often survives (in one form or another) for so long a time that the name of the particular creator is forgotten.

Cave paintings, pottery design, the song that begins "Woke up this morning," were all first created by a person. If it's valued and kept and used long enough for the originator to be forgotten, it becomes "traditional."

As a creator of art, Raphael, painting for the Church community, isn't any better or worse than Booker White, "painting" for the rural black community. The difference is in the communities that assigned value their work, one of pathological record-keeping and the other more interested in the art than the artist.
If Booker hadn't committed some of his songs to disc, "Aberdeen Mississippi Blues" (or some modified version of it) might be considered Trad/PD by now.

So, to my way of thinking, the art is "high" if it serves its community well; is valued and kept.

And art, especially music, is so fluid that one of Booker's songs can slip out of Booker's community and be valued and kept by another-- the Weenie community. A tradition doesn't care who bears it.

"High" and "Low" communities? That's another discussion---about elitism, socialism or any number of other isms and how we're brainwashed in assigning value to various communities.

Just my thoughts on a rainy Sunday evening.

best,
bruce

[Mr.OMuck]

Nice. Well considered and all true. There is the "thing" itself which needs no validation if it is of sufficient strength to allow it to persist over time, and then there is the thing's credentials or provenance or pedigree. The advantages of having credentials i.e. shorthand for universal acceptance because an expert or experts have informed everyone in writing, that its a safe thing to like without seeming like an idiot, are manifold.
It could make people slightly more scrupulous about authorship, publishing rights, and such, it could increase the ability to attract a much wider audience, and frame the music as consciously made art rather than some sort of accidental primitive outgrowth of what even aficionados too often think of as a semi-primitive culture. "ReaL' Art attracts scholars and practitioners in greater numbers than "Folk", or its latest iteration "Outsider" art which has to be discovered at the margins, or is seen to have been relegated to second class status. It would also attract a concomitant increase in money for research, practitioners, concert series etc.
It is, in my opinion, also a matter of justice. Everyone is familiar with stories about Artists now firmly established in the cultural canon who's work had to be rescued, revived and reestablished in order for it to receive the full measure of appreciation it deserved. Few people are aware however that J.S. Bach was one of these. His work was relegated to the "too old fashioned to be of interest pile" until it was rediscovered most importantly by Felix Mendelsohn in the 19th century 200 years after Bach's death. Most people know that Vincent VanGogh died a resounding commercial failure, and is now the most famous and expensive Artist on the planet, but don't know that El Greco's work suffered a similar fate as Bach's until it was resurrected by 19th century Romantic painters like Delacroix. The list I made sites ten great artists born either in the late 19th or early twentieth centuries. Even though Matisse and Joyce have little in common they are lumped together in the broad category of the "Modernist" movement, a concept with limited intellectual value frankly, but important academic and economic use.
I'm making a bid for the great body of musical literature to emerge from Rural Southern Black culture during the same period to be included in that overarching category. I also believe that the idea that this music was as removed from the concerns of the "Modernist" world as is usually thought is probably erroneous and has more to do with the Arcadian ideal of people like Alan Lomax than the reality of people who were reading progressive newspapers like the Chicago Defender.

[bnemerov]

A detailed, thoughtful reply Mr. OMuck. Thanks.

I won't keep this  creeping-thread going--only to say good luck on your mission.

I have reservations that the validation by popular taste-makers was ever possible for Booker (though if Carl Van Vechten had trumpeted White's artistic virtue, maybe more money would have resulted and that would be nice; but maybe not).

Does he need it now? I don't know. Bob Dylan says good things about him. You like him. I like him.

In any case, White had cancer (advanced) and neither Memphis hospital, for any amount of money, would have saved him.

best,
bruce

[wreid75]

I would buy it and hell, I would help promote it.

[wreid75]

"I would hate to dedicate a year or so to something and only have 100 people download it.  That would be the saddest thing ever"

Well since only 6 people cared to comment you might be best served using your time doing something that would be adequately appreciated.  I could be wrong, maybe there are more people here willing to part with their hard earned cash than to respond to your post. 

[zantii]

In keeping with the original topic of this thread, some forum members may be interested to learn of a new book about the legendary Bukka White. More info here:

http://weeniecampbell.com/yabbse/index.php?topic=10588.0

[wreid75]

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Legend-Bookers-Guitar-Story/dp/1291920420

for some people the previous link doesn't work so I inserted another

[Shovel]

meanwhile, this clip is closing in on 2,000,000 views:



meme-fire.

[zantii]

Awesome 

There is also a fantastic video of Booker performing that song in Germany during October, 1967:

[StoogeKebab]

Awesome 

There is also a fantastic video of Booker performing that song in Germany during October, 1967:

Oh... the recording from the AFBF '67 album is my absolute favourite, absolutely incredible. The energy is amazing on it. Or then again the AFBF '72 has one where the audience applauds every time he takes the percussive break. All in all, amazing song and I crave every filmed version of it I can find, even a very brief off cut from some University of Washington Film - just gold.