Jeff Todd Titon’s Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis ranks as one of the most important analytical studies of the blues, examining the music in an incisive and interconnected web of contexts, including social, lyrical, musicological, and commercial. Titon’s grasp of the blues is extensive, not only as an academic and professor with a Ph.D. in American studies but also as a record collector, writer, and musician who played with or interviewed blues and gospel performers. “Downhome blues,” in his definition, “refers not a place but to a spirit, a sense of place, evoked in singer and listener by a style of music” played in cities as well as in the country. First published by the University of Illinois Press in 1977, Early Downhome Blues was updated in a second edition from the University of North Carolina Press in 1994 with Titon’s reflections on changes in the blues landscape and in perceptions of the blues.
