Marybeth Hamilton’s In Search of the Blues isn’t a search for the blues per se. More accurately, it’s a search for the people who searched for the blues—the people who shaped the narrative that has become inextricably linked to the music. Hamilton recognizes that this narrative is central to any understanding of the blues because it provides the framework for any contemplation of the music. The irony she uncovers is that the intellectual backdrop for this music heard as an expression of the Black Experience in America was largely written by people with dubious racial attitudes.

All the song gatherers and record collectors Hamilton focus on searched for the authentic or “real” blues, and that almost inevitably led each to the primitive—a music devoid of the craft and consciousness, which were interpreted as the sullying traces of modernity. James McKune championed Charlie Patton because Patton was so primitive that the language he sang in could barely be recognized as English. The racism implicit in that attitude eluded the song hunters, and it almost gets by Hamilton. Her general tenor suggests that she gets it, but she tells people’s stories with limited editorial commentary, certainly less than the complicated, charged themes beg for.

The history she tells is fascinating, particularly in how “Delta blues” came to be fetishized, but there’s an entire dimension to the story she leaves entirely untouched. The song hunters were all looking for the pure, the authentic, and the real. No matter what point in the 20th Century Hamilton focuses on, the blues aficionados felt the “real” music was made at some point in the not-to-distant past, frequently somewhere else, and that all music since was hopelessly compromised. Hamilton doesn’t comment on this, nor on the chimerical nature of “authentic” music—in any form—but you have reason to believe she made these connections. After all, every story she tells ends with the hunter, collector and self-styled ethnomusicologists finding a mirror of themselves, all telling the story of the blues in ways that reinforces the rightness of their beliefs. Needless to say, people who figure prominently in Hamilton’s book are rarely likeable, but they’re really interesting and they raise a host of interesting issues. In Search of the Blues is the sort of book that two friends need to read at the same time because there’s so much thought-provoking in the book that each reader needs someone to discuss it with.