(Editor's Note-This is the fourth in a series
of reflective narratives written by members of
the H-Southern-Music Advisory Board. Those of
Bill Malone, Kathy Ogren, and Brian Ward can be
found on the H-Southern-Music homepage.

Professor Jeff Todd Titon received his Ph.D.
(in American Studies) from the University of
Minnesota, where he studied ethnomusicology
with Alan Kagan, writing his dissertation on
blues music. He is the author or editor of
seven books, including _Early Downhome Blues_,
which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, _Worlds
of Music_, _Powerhouse for God_, _Old-Time
Kentucky Fiddle Tunes_, and _American Musical
Traditions_. His teaching began at Tufts
University. Since 1986 he has been professor
of music and director of the Ph.D. program in
music -- ethnomusicology at Brown.

Below is Titon's account of studying the blues
within academia. He begins by examining the
literature that influenced the field. We at
H-Southern-Music welcome the feedback of list
members to Titon's commentary.)

On the books that proved influential in
establishing the academic nature of the field of
southern music:

I suppose some of the early books that took an
academic approach to blues included URBAN BLUES,
TOMMY JOHNSON, and CHARLEY PATTON (by Keil, Evans,
and Fahey, respectively), all published in the
late 1960s/early 1970s and based on the authors'
M.A. theses. Paul Oliver is an academic, and though
music isn't his academic teaching or research area,
his books on blues since the early 1960s show the
systematic and thorough approach of the scholar.

The first book on blues to be published from a PhD
dissertation, to my knowledge, was Bill Ferris's
BLUES FROM THE DELTA. My book, EARLY DOWNHOME BLUES,
written in 1971 and published in 1977, was the second.
It's not for me to say whether any of these books
were influential in establishing any academic nature
of the field of southern music. Certainly there
were some early books that I'd consider the work
of amateur scholars--those by Sam Charters, LeRoi
Jones, Mike Rowe, some others in the Studio Vista
series, and later Robert Palmer, along with the
writing in the various 1960s blues magazines such as
Blues Unlimited, Blues World, and, later, beginning
about 1969, Living Blues.

Incidentally, I use the phrase amateur scholar not to
denigrate their work at all, but really to place it in a
scientific tradition, as there's a long line of useful
amateur scholarship in many fields, music being only
one of them. (Others include ornithology and astronomy.)

Anyway, if I had to choose the book that was most
influential (forblues), I'd have to land on Dixon and
Godrich's discography, BLUES AND GOSPEL RECORDS,
1902-1942, which literally defined that field.

You might also be interested in a personal retrospective on
EARLY DOWNHOME BLUES, as some would claim it was one of the
early academic writings published on blues, though I can't
say that it was particularly influential. In the discipline
of ethnomusicology EARLY DOWNHOME BLUES has had some impact,
as it was one of the first to treat music "at home," so to
speak, rather than in some exotic locale. I was even
surprised to find, in a visit to Finland about 15 years ago,
that Finnish ethnomusicologists credited that book's treatment
of melodic grammar to have strongly influenced their  pursuit
of cognitive ethnomusicology, one of the themes of their
work--surprised and amused because I had abandoned that
approach (lost interest in it) and was already hell-bent for
musical ethnography and into my research for GIVE ME THIS
MOUNTAIN and POWERHOUSE FOR GOD by the time EARLY DOWNHOME
BLUES was published.

Moreover, though I've kept my hand in with blues, my academic
interests have collected elsewhere in the past 25 years--in the
directions of whooped black preaching, language (speech, chant,
and  song) in religious practice, old-time fiddle tunes,
lined-out hymnody, and various theoretical and applied issues
having to do with folklore and ethnomusicology.

Really, as I think back on it, it was the music and the people who
performed it, more than any books on music or on blues itself, that
influenced and encouraged me to write about blues so long ago, as
I  was both a graduate student and a performing blues musician at
the time (ca. 1966) I began to conceive that I might write my PhD
thesis on blues; and as at that time I was unaware of anything
written on blues per se that might truly be considered scholarly,
rather than popular, I felt, naively I suppose, that I might better
be able to make a contribution to knowledge in this pioneering
subject (for a dissertation, anyway) than with something I didn't
know as well. Of course I didn't know anything well, but I
figured I had to do something besides play the guitar, and I had
the scholar's itch.

I was enrolled in an American Studies doctoral program, with
emphasis in American literature, but I had also been taking
courses in American music, and in ethnomusicology--the AmStuds
umbrella was large enough to permit this. Thus I wanted to, and
did, write the first ethnomusicological dissertation on blues.

My academic adviser in American Studies discouraged me from
working on blues, by the way, saying by writing a PhD thesis on
blues I would in effect be committing academic suicide: no scholar
had written on the topic before, the music wasn't to be taken
seriously, no one would hire me, tenure would be out of the
question.

Knowing nothing of academic careers or politics, I really didn't
know what she was talking about and so I ignored her advice and
didn't worry about it. I just figured that it'd be useful to be
a pioneer and try to write about something I loved and had
access to. The future would take care of itself. If the academic
path didn't work out I'd do something else, though I'd always
be a writer and musician.

Luckily I found more sympathetic advisors in the music department,
including the ethnomusicologist Alan Kagan, and outside the
department,including the folklorist Archie Green.

By the time I completed the dissertation in 1971, I had realized
that a few other scholars were writing about blues--notably,
as I said above, David Evans, Charlie Keil, John Fahey, Paul
Oliver--but I was writing from a different disciplinary
perspective than they, and although I was concerned with some
of the same things they were--history, musical influences,
lyrics and their meaning--I also was interested in a number of
different questions than they were, such as an adequate musical
description of the genre, how to develop a generative grammar
of blues melody, and the cultural significance of race record
ads and what they revealed about white attitudes towards Blacks,
and the uses of race records themselves among the audience who
bought them in the 1920s, questions which no one to my knowledge
was trying to answer then.

By 1971 David Evans and I were corresponding with each other,
while I had met Fahey in California (but he was no longer
interested in blues scholarship). Like Ferris, Evans was
researching blues from an academic folklore perspective. I
admired Oliver's work from afar, and was unaware of Bill
Ferris's research until his book was published a few years
later. But I really didn't feel I had a model for what I was
trying to do--that is, I  felt I was trying to combine
ethnomusicology with American studies, methodologically, to
approach blues as music and culture; and what sustained me
the most as I wrote was the music and the blues musicians
whom I'd come to know over the years.

Regards,
Jeff

Jeff Todd Titon
Department of Music, Box 1924
Brown University
Providence, RI 02912-1924, USA
jeff_titon@brown.edu

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