Reconsidering the Blues: A Cakewalk Down the Color Line

The history of music in America is long and complex. Persons of all races and colors have contributed to the birth of Blues, Jazz, Rock and Country. Ideologues of both races have attempted to ascribe the creation of these musics to one race or the other, in defiance of clear evidence. People such as Kid Ory, Yellow Nunez, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Patton, the Chatmon Family were, in modern terms, clearly of mixed heritage.
This very quality helped them create a music that was neither European nor African, but partook of both continents, with admixtures from almost every culture on Earth.

It is time to reconsider the Black and White dichotomy, to realize that the creation of American music, just like the creation of America itself, was a collaborative work.

Not an easy collaboration, nor a painless one, but an actual one. Just as a composer and a lyricist may not have been able to speak to each other, yet managed to collaborate on deathless works, the American Collaboration, for all its flaws, was a unique and world-shaking event, unparalleled in human history.

This book is a first attempt to describe that collaboration.