Schwartz — How Britain Got the Blues

Author: Roberta Freund Schwartz
Title: How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom
Year: 2007
Publisher: Ashgate (Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series)
Type: Academic book

How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom is a book by the musicologist Roberta Freund Schwartz, of the University of Kansas, published by Ashgate in 2007. It asks how and when the blues reached Britain, how it was received there and how it had found young British listeners by 1963. Her answer follows the music’s carriers: record recitals at jazz clubs, record shops and labels, the music papers, and the tours of visiting American musicians, from Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy to the package tours of the 1960s. She argues that the British blues revival began in the jazz world, among critics, collectors and discographers, and spread from there through trad jazz and skiffle to the young bands of the early 1960s.

Schwartz took her doctorate in historical musicology at the University of Illinois and has taught at the University of Kansas since 2001; she now directs its musicology division.¹ The Association for Recorded Sound Collections gave the book its 2008 award for best history in recorded blues, R&B or soul. Schwartz was that year one of the two co-chairs of the association’s awards committee, which chooses the winners.²

Most discussions of British rock and roll in the 1960s, Schwartz writes in her preface, “recognize the enormous impact of American blues artists” but often leave out how the music arrived and how it was received. The accounts that do take up its transmission “lack supporting details, such as where records were bought and sold and how blues knowledge diffused through the country without radio play, mainstream media attention or BBC sanction.” She also asks why the blues appealed to British audiences when “interest in the genre was declining in the African American community.”³ Its first British promoters, in her account, were the jazz world’s critics, collectors and discographers, “devoted and vocal champions of African American music whose educational activities initiated the British blues revival,” and the folk revival ran alongside them as a separate movement with “similar philosophical underpinnings.”⁴ Broonzy, who first came to Britain in 1951, “altered the landscape of British popular music,” she writes, “as surely as the Beatles did a decade later.”⁵ Seven years later the bandleader Chris Barber brought Muddy Waters over in October 1958.⁶

Arguments over authenticity followed the music through the British press. Authenticity and commercialism, Schwartz writes, “had long been at odds in British writing on black music,” and “No concession to commercialism” became “the highest praise that could be bestowed upon a blues singer.”⁷ The British cognoscenti “rejected market-oriented considerations because they believed commercialism was a corrupting influence on community-based folk music.”⁸ Once white British bands took up the music, some critics held them to the American standard, and Peter Checkland called their blues “a sad parody of the real thing.”⁹

Her preface follows the music back across the Atlantic with the bands of the British Invasion. The Beatles, she writes, “berated reporters for not knowing who Muddy Waters was,” and the Rolling Stones would not appear on the American program Shindig! unless Howlin’ Wolf was invited too.¹⁰ Her postlude argues that though the blues “did not retain its popular orientation in the 1970s, its stylistic elements radically and permanently influenced the language of both rock and pop music.”¹¹ The musicologist Allan F. Moore praised the book’s “scrupulous attention to sources.”¹²

Key contributions

• The question of how, when and through whom the blues reached Britain before 1963, answered from record recitals, shops and labels, the music press and the tours of visiting American musicians.
• The argument that the British blues revival began in the jazz world, among critics, collectors and discographers, with the folk revival running parallel to it.
• A history in stages, from jazz on record and Big Bill Broonzy’s visits through skiffle and the rhythm and blues boom of 1963 to 1965 to the British blues revival of 1965 to 1970.
• An account of British critics’ arguments over authenticity and commerce, from skiffle to the white British blues bands.
• The British Invasion bands as advocates who turned American audiences toward their own bluesmen.

See also

• British blues — the British scene the book follows from the jazz clubs to the blues revival of the late 1960s
• Escaping the Delta — Elijah Wald’s 2004 history of how the Delta blues canon was made
• Just around Midnight — Jack Hamilton’s 2016 history of how rock and roll came to be heard as white
• The transatlantic feedback loop — music carried between Britain and the United States
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music