'Like an Enormous Yes'

When my brother and I were growing up, books about the sort of music we liked – blues, jazz, country, some rock – were hard to find. Today, of course, the market is flooded with everything from fanboy gush to unreadable academic tracts. An exception in the sixties was the English writer Paul Oliver, who published, among other titles, The Story of the Blues, in 1969. Two suburban white boys, we were hungry for details. Who were these black musicians—Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt? They seemed more myth than flesh and blood, and Oliver relieved some of our ignorance. Philip Larkin begins his review of The Story of the Blues, published in the Daily Telegraph on August 9, 1969, like this: 

“Behind the blues spreads the half-glimpsed, depressing vista of the life of the American Negro. At almost any level the houses are shoddy; at worst, they are hardly more than lean-to sheds standing on dirt among weeds. The landscapes are the flat plains that border the national highways and are traversed by the south-running railroads, the Louisville-National, the Texas and Pacific. In the scattered townships the only recreation to be found is in the ‘Coloured Café’, with its beer and Coca-Cola advertisements and juke-box, or, in the grim chimney-packed towns, in the blues cellars, where there is hardly headroom for performers to stand upright.”

 

In his review Larkin chooses to concentrate on the miseries of the Jim Crow South rather than on the bluesmen and their music. One would love to hear his assessment, for instance, of Lightnin’ Hopkins, whose guitar playing he described elsewhere as “vividly pessimistic.” Larkin writes of the illustrations in Oliver’s book:

 

“A grim advertisement for Ramblin’ Thomas’s ‘No Job Blues’ [1928] is next to an Insect Life drawing of the boll weevil, the creature that devastated the post-plantation cotton crops in the early years of the century. Anyone curious about the blues, their players and the conditions that produced them, will find this book endlessly fascinating.”

 

As a poet, Larkin’s finest tribute to the blues and blues-infused jazz was “For Sidney Bechet,” devoted to the great New Orleans-born clarinet and soprano saxophone player (1897-1959): “On me your voice falls as they say love should, / Like an enormous yes.” Listen to Bechet’s achingly beautiful “Blue Horizon.”

 

Larkin was born on this date, August 9, in 1922 and died in 1985 at age sixty-three. His review is collected in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1971 (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985).