Tom Rushen's description of the Garon book on Memphis Minnie got me to thinking. As he said, for someone to take a fun-loving earthy woman like Memphis Minnie and make a boring book takes way too much work. Too much Freud, or too much race/class/gender can make even the best of subjects a grind to read about.
At the top of my list of books to avoid is Jon Michael Spencer's "Blues and Evil." This densely written ramble through Spencer's own concept of blues never seems to get to a point other than that Spencer is uniquely qualified to write about blues and no one else, with the possible exception of Amiri Baraka, is. He routinely dismisses Paul Oliver, David Evans, and Bill Ferris as "Europeanists" and ascribes racist intent to their work.He approaches the blues from a "theomusicological perspective" and spends way too much time and effort explaining that he is qualified to write about the blues and its meanings simply because he is black.
He divides his book into five sections: an introduction, a conclusion, and tucked in between chapters on the Mythologies of the Blues, Theologies of the Blues, and Theodocies of the Blues. All are essentially unreadable due to his frequent anti-Oliver tirades and discussions of those great blues men Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. All-in-all, "Blues and Evil" is a mish-mash of pop psychology and religiosity posing as blues scholarship.
At the top of my list of books to avoid is Jon Michael Spencer's "Blues and Evil." This densely written ramble through Spencer's own concept of blues never seems to get to a point other than that Spencer is uniquely qualified to write about blues and no one else, with the possible exception of Amiri Baraka, is. He routinely dismisses Paul Oliver, David Evans, and Bill Ferris as "Europeanists" and ascribes racist intent to their work.He approaches the blues from a "theomusicological perspective" and spends way too much time and effort explaining that he is qualified to write about the blues and its meanings simply because he is black.
He divides his book into five sections: an introduction, a conclusion, and tucked in between chapters on the Mythologies of the Blues, Theologies of the Blues, and Theodocies of the Blues. All are essentially unreadable due to his frequent anti-Oliver tirades and discussions of those great blues men Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. All-in-all, "Blues and Evil" is a mish-mash of pop psychology and religiosity posing as blues scholarship.
