Whose blues? : facing up to race and the future of the music / Adam Gussow.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Starting the conversation -- Blues conditions -- Blues feelings and "real bluesmen" -- Blues expressiveness and the blues ethos -- W.C. Handy and the "birth" of the blues -- Langston Hughes and the scandal of early blues poetry -- Zora Neale Hurston in the Florida jooks -- Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Southern blues violences -- The blues revival and the black arts movement -- Giving it all away: blues harmonica education in the digital age -- Turnaround.

"Mamie Smith's pathbreaking 1920 recording of 'Crazy Blues' set the pop music world on fire, inaugurating a new African American market for 'race records.' Not long after, such records also brought black blues performance to an expanding international audience. A century later, the mainstream blues world has transformed into a multicultural and transnational melting pot, taking the music far beyond the black southern world of its origins. But not everybody is happy about that. If there's 'No black. No white. Just the blues,' as one familiar meme suggests, why do some blues people hear such pronouncements as an aggressive attempt at cultural appropriation and an erasure of traumatic histories that lie deep in the heart of the music? Then again, if 'blues is black music,' as some performers and critics insist, what should we make of the vibrant global blues scene, with its all-comers mix of nationalities and ethnicities?"-- Provided by publisher.