Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues recasts the elevation of the raw, "primitive" blues sound as a form of American orientalism. Hamilton deconstructs the myth of the solitary Delta-blues drifter, but ultimately focuses on the collectors and musicologists who idealized that lonesome figure. In the process, she opens up critical questions that are too often taken for granted when discussing the music's origins.

The author begins by tracing the development of academic field studies in the early 20th century. Forays into the Deep South consisted of interviews, oral histories, and recordings of rural black musical culture. Aural "explorers" such as Howard Odum and Dorothy Scarborough sought to capture a static and exoticized ideal of the noble savage, a figure they believed was being tainted by commercial and urban sensibilities, the popularity of records, and a shift away from agricultural toil.

These studies by white outsiders prized unpolished voices for their supposed "purity" and reinvented the history of African-American music in the process. The selective affinities took even deeper hold with the rise of the genre's second wave of evangelists — namely, record collectors. Though the early chroniclers of the blues denounced collecting as a commercial exercise, the practice came to define the blues canon — and resulted in enduring fame for such characters as the oft-imprisoned and twice-convicted Leadbelly.

Though In Search of the Blues is both interesting and engaging, Hamilton is uneven when analyzing her research and doesn't fully elaborate on the implications of this revisionist history. She traces how Robert Johnson's devil at the crossroads meme diffused from a record-collecting "Blues Mafia" into the full-on blues revival of the '50s and '60s. But the reader is left yearning for a discussion of the same thorny issues of race and cultural ownership, which remain volatile today.

-Kai Hsing