In Search of the Blues
"High Fidelityexcepted, books about record collectors are pretty rare, but here's one, and it's brilliant...An instant classic." --Record Collector"In Search of the Bluesrenders, in shimmering prose, superb field recordings of the blues searchers themselves, revealing why they searched, what they found, and how their humble, obsessed pursuits helped change the world." --Sean Wilentz"Marybeth Hamilton is a detective pursuing other detectives--the motley group of characters who, over the course of the twentieth century, bit by bit uncovered the mysteries of the blues--who are, as it turns out, both so many Schliemanns at Troy and so many blind men circling the proverbial elephant. Hamilton's story is riveting, her prose is elegant and concise, and her insights about the music, race relations, and the mechanics of cultural transmission are unfailingly acute." --Luc Sante"Though critical, Hamilton's portraits aren't one-sided. Rich bits of context--including memorable excerpts from Lomax's love letters--insure that we sympathize with the usually well meaning enthusiasts. The result is a challenging and surprisingly timely book:In Search of the Bluesserves as a reminder that even in the hip-hop era, white connoisseurship of black culture remains a complicated matter." --Time Out New York, 2/6/08"Wherever you happen to light in Marybeth Hamilton'sIn Search of the Bluesyou find Columbus--the discovery of America in the drama of Americans discovering each other.  It's no matter that it's the twentieth century, not the fifteenth--blacks and whites are strangers, so white people turn into detectives and black people into fugitives, shadows on the wall or hiding in plain sight.  In this book, you never know how any story is going to turn out, and as the story goes on the suspense builds up." --Greil Marcus