Kevin Belford re-maps the history of American music with respect and styl

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Kevin Belford re-maps the history of American music with respect and styl
December 22, 2009
By K. Curtis Lyle
The St. Louis American

The beauty in local author Kevin Belford’s new book, Devil at the Confluence: the Pre War Blues Music of Saint Louis, Missouri, is that, essentially, he’s not trying to prove anything to the reader.

Although the book is filled with facts about the geography, demography, migration patterns and soul definitions – meaning, the word straight from the blues creators’ and players’ mouths – it’s really a love letter to the people who filled the many flowing streams that contributed to the confluence that he sees and feels.

Feeling is paramount to the book. Belford is a scholar of the blues, but he has – amazingly and generously – put his immense scholarship on the back burner here and let the spirit of the music and the horses that the spirit rides (the cheval, as the Haitians say) dominate the scene.

He opens the book with the explication of the meaning of the blues in St. Louis and East St. Louis from Miles Davis, who called these sister cities “country towns … full of country people” but who were “kind of hip in their countryness.”

Bluesman Walter Davis is quoted as telling writer and blues scholar Paul Oliver, “The blues feeling. I don’t know if one could describe it. Something that comes over you. That you feel.”

Henry Townsend describes the blues as,“a sort of thing that you kinda like to hold to yourself, yet you want somebody to know it.”

St. Louis Jimmy, who wrote the blues classic “Goin Down Slow,” says, “Someone’s in there feeling just about like you do.”

Belford rightly makes the strong point that the incredible stylistic diversity of the cities’ blues arrivals, transplants and departures made it a kind of stepchild to the classic American need to create an immediate brand for popular culture.

Belford notes the downside of being the confluence city: The city was never handed a handy tagline, like New Orleans jazz or Chicago Blues.

“The custom of using an area name as a music trademark is more branding than legitimate music analysis,” he writes, “and no one in the blues revival period assigned a ‘St. Louis sound’ tag for the city’s music.”

The entire history of St. Louis popular music, even beyond the blues, can be summed up in the seminal musical persona of a genius like Scott Joplin. In him you have a condensed history of American musical evolution from old styles of vaudeville, opera and marches that morph into ragtime. Joplin also composed the folk opera Treemonisha two decades before Louis Heyward and the Gershwins even conceived Porgy and Bess, let alone brought it to fruition.

Belford’s book is devotionally written. The prose is caring and exquisite, much like a cultural love letter. The narrative is compellingly presented with the author’s own original portraits of the artists whose stories he tells, giving it the appearance of a coffee table book. I don’t know of anybody anywhere who has ever treated the blues, in print, in this respectful of a fashion.

Each personage – from producer to club owner to blues giant to scene characters – is investigated, analyzed, probed in depth, placed in correct chronological and intellectual order. We are clearly told who did what when and what apparent difference it made – what effect it had on the history and social development of the music.

Belford takes us from the found art of Peetie Wheatstraw (“the Devil’s Son-in-Law, the High sheriff of Hell”) to the conceptual and musical importance, and even the admirable business acumen, of W. C. Handy.

Along the way, Belford challenges many items of conventional wisdom about the music with historical research and good common sense. Just as St. Louis has unfairly been relegated as a backwaters of the blues, however, a locally published book by a St. Louis author is not likely to garner the international attention it deserves. But if Belford’s research and reasoning could get anything approaching the play of Ken Burns’ documentaries or Wynton Marsalis’ pronouncements, the cultural discourse about American music would be shifted onto more solid and factual ground.

Belford is the author, illustrator and designer of this magnificent work. If you want to truly catch my drift, turn to pages 184-185. Singleton Palmer is to your left; across, on the right, is Miles Davis. Balancing these two great illustrations are vintage photographs of The Dixieland Six and Louis Jordan. All this set against pictures of two Okeh and two more Vocalion 78s.

Kevin Belford has made sure that everybody who made this music is cool; in fact, they’ve never looked so good.

“Devil at the Confluence” is available at all major bookstores (Borders, Barnes & Noble, amazon), Left Bank Books, Subterranean Books, Vintage Vinyl, BBs Jazz Blues and Soups, many smaller local bookstores and from the publisher at stlbooks.com.