Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966. Published in 1991 “with a new Afterword.”
Urban Blues was an eye-opening, progressive look at the blues when it was first published in 1966, and though much has changed in the blues world since then, many of Keil’s astute observations remain relevant to blues of the present and future. Previous books on the blues had taken a historical bent, chronicling the past and focusing mostly on pre-World War II artists and songs. Keil brought the story vividly up to date as he delved into the lives and music of contemporary blues singers and their roles within African American culture and society at large, paying special attention to artists like B.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Junior Parker, who were all performing to predominantly black audiences. B.B.’s career would change radically within a few years, which makes his, and Keil’s, 1966 assessments of his future all the more interesting in retrospect. Keil analyzes it all from musicological, sociological, political and economic perspectives, even adding a “psychosocial” chapter on the African American “identity problem” and interpretations of other blues authors’ works. His outline of blues styles at the end gave definitions to all shades of the blues, and the book title in itself established “urban blues” as a permanent term in the blues lexicon. In the “Afterword” appended to the 1991 edition, Keil does not attempt a comprehensive update of blues history although he acknowledges books written in the interim, giving special praise to David Ritz’s “as told to” autobiographies. Instead, the Afterword deals more with broader issues of race and society, beginning with a section entitled “I Am White”—because many readers assumed, from his sometimes angry political tone and his inside knowledge of the scene on Chicago’s South Side, that he was black. Perhaps the greatest disappointment with Urban Blues is that Keil never wrote a second blues book, turning his attention to other American Studies topics as a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. But, then, Keil said what he had to say in 1966, and said it convincingly.
–Jim O’Neal
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