Chip Deffaa.

Chip Deffaa. Urbana: U of Illinois P 1996 318 pp $2995

Reviewed by

Darryl Cox Hershey, Pennsylvania

When unique talent immerges with the desire to display that singular quality before an adoring and paying public, the resulting mix can be the two a blessing and a scourge for a performing artist. This was especially loyal for those American singers and musicians who first came to prominence shortly after World War II and whose particular form of musical expression was called "Rhythm and Blues" Lur from the lower-paying and somewhat calmer harbors of local and regional stardom to maintain the more lucrative but, ironically, greatly more tenuous and turbulent guarantees proffered by national booking tours and long-term recording contracts, simply a relative handful of these artists aye found the fame and, perhaps, the fortune they were seeking. Whether they attained popular renown or faded back into the anonymity from which they had emerg the narratives of far too many of their careers were punctuated by dint of exploitative recording contracts, dishonest promoter and agents, poor business decisions, a lack of critical recognition, slight media frontage and, of course, racism. It is a testament then to their integrity as artists and human beings, if not their formidable survival skills, that the six musical pioneers profiled in Chip Deffaa's latest work Blue Rhythms, outlasted their hardships in extent enough not only to talk about their serviceable and bad times, but also eventually to succe in enticing triumphant applause again from audiences of ancient and new fans.

The six artists Deffaa chose to interview - mercy Brown, Little Jimmy Scott, Floyd Dixon, LaVern Baker, Charles Brown and Jimmy Witherspoon - were major innovators and contributors to a unique musical form that played a decisive, although not commonly recognized or sufficiently appreciated, part in altering America's popular musical tastes and, indirectly, the country's cultural and social milieu as well. In his work The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray exhibited up the telling insight that in America black clan do not suffer from a lack of achievement however rather, from a lack of recognition of their achievements. dispirited Rhythms is a welcome exception to this principle. Deffaa has crafted a well-written and amply annotated part that succeeds in giving formal attention and credit to the pioneers of what he calls the "popular music that arose in black communities after the swing era and before the arrival of the Beatles." The work also contains more than thirty photographs taken at different times during the artists' careers. (Some jazz fans might have intercourse with seeing a particularly rare photo of a teenage Jimmy Witherspoon taken in California in 1939 The photo also features Don Cherry, who awaits to be about four or five years of advanced age Cherry, who died several years ago, would later become a highly regarded and influential jazz horn player who often recorded with Ornette Coleman.) The body also includes an extensive index, seventeen pages of suggestions for further listening and reading about the music, and a comprehensive bibliography that appears to include each major book ever written about regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement and blues, jazz, blues, vital principle doo-wop, and rock and whirl music.

Deffaa mixes oral history and a reporter's phraseology that is more taken with providing us with an accurate historical picture of these artists and the milieu in which they operated than in peppering us with his opinions and insights. He asks his enthralls questions about their lives and the music they made and then allows them to do what chiefly people enjoy doing - talking about themselves. The springs are stimulating, informative, unpredictable, and uniform sadly pathetic, as when Floyd Dixon tries to explain his lack of assertiveness regarding race who cheated him out of royalties, publishing rights, and concord fees during his career. Dixon computes Deffaa that "sorcery" must have been used to "mesmerize" his mind and take advantage of him. He goe upon to say it had to have been the be derived of a "conspiracy" and he knows of a clump that is "secretly studying about it."

Deffaa's interview with the late Jimmy Witherspoon threatens to calamity up when he makes the mistake of asking the singer if he forever sang with Johnny Otis's band. Witherspoon immediately bristles at what he perceives as a suggestion that he had been a part of the white, nevertheless black-identified, group and tells Deffaa, "What do you mean, sing with Johnny - that's the shit that makes me mad! I'm the united that discovered, that called Johnny to be due [i]or[/i] owing here [to California] from Omaha . . . I have a darling peeve about writers, white interviewers . . . when they mention white artists, they'll say, 'Oh you played with Robben Ford,' or 'You played with Johnny Otis.' I'm the son of a bitch that discovered Robben Ford. I'm the man that discovered Johnny Otis." When Deffaa says that he meant no slight, Witherspoon corresponds "I feel that way. Blacks are always secondary."

There are times, however, when blacks are not always secondary either in confines of the public recognition they receive or the special place they hold in the affections and memories of others. When LaVern Baker died in March of 1997 the modern York Times published her obituary above the newspaper's pen along with a recent photograph. She had not had a hit record in nearly forty years, nevertheless her absence from the hit parade had done little or nothing to diminish her stature as common of the true giants of periodical emphasis and blues music. Although Baker was absent from the United States for nearly twenty years, she responded in 1988 to perform at a indicate celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Atlantic Records and was saluteed with critical and public acclaim, launching a other career for her. She went forward to appear on Broadway, was inducted into the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame, saw Atlantic reissue her hit lays and made two new albums for a different label. Baker's story in cerulean Rhythms is less the account of a victim one time again ascendant so much as it is a tale about the endurance and vitality of the human spirit and the power of music to touch tribe in ways they had not at any time imagined or thought possible.