194 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 2  June 2012

Hadley as Don Diego de la Vega/Zorro). He manages

Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns, also to include entries on Cormac McCarthy, Ishmael
Supernatural and Science Fiction Reed, the poet Ed Dorn, Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice
Burroughs, William S. Burroughs, Richard Brautigan,
Elements in Novels, Pulps, Comics, Films, The Indian in the Cupboard, the role-playing game
Television and Games Deadlands, the manga series Captain Ken, the sexually
Paul Green. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., graphic Italian comic Djustine (and her battles with
zombies, vampires, and Diablo, daughter of Satan), the
2009.
1948 television series The Adventures of Oky Doky, the
1894 dime novel Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; or,
If you ever wondered “Did any stories set in the
Leagued Against the James Boys, as well as hundreds of
West or the Old West ever appear in the comic book
others. And yet, this is not a weighty, for-the-shelf ref-
Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen?” the answer is “Yes.”
erence book but a delightful, breezy volume one might
Actually, there were at least three: “The Fastest Gun in
read cover to cover. In doing so, however, one would
the West” (January-February 1955), “The Feats of
unleash old memories, or contemplate how anyone
Chief Super-Duper” (August 1956), and “The
could ever have had the time, interest, and research
Gunsmoke Kid” (June 1960). Or “What Italian gothic
inclinations to become familiar with so many diverse,
horror spaghetti western influenced Clint Eastwood’s
international, and historic entities connected to “in-
High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider?” According to
shoots” and offshoots of any popular culture form, let
Paul Green, it was Django il Bastardo (directed by
alone the Western, often considered one of the most
Sergio Garrone, 1969).
fixed, formulaic, and old-fashioned of genres.
In the extraordinarily useful and detailed Encyclo-
Green’s main source of livelihood has been as an
pedia of Weird Westerns, Green identifies horrific and
artist for Marvel UK, DC Egmont, Western Publishing
supernatural departures and twists over the last 150
Company/Golden Books USA, and other firms, which
years of the Western. There are “weird Westerns,”
perhaps helps explain his familiarity with the world of
which incorporate horror, supernatural, or fantasy ele-
comics, graphic novels, and visual media (although his
ments; and there are “weird menace Westerns,” which
awareness of literary figures and literary genres seems
resemble “weird Westerns” but conclude with rational
nearly as impressive). He has also written three other
explanations like the 1930s Westerns or serials and
books—Peter Duel: A Biography (2007), A History of
pulp fiction. There are “science fiction Westerns,”
TV’s The Virginian, 1962-1971 (2009), and Jennifer
which feature technology and extra-terrestrials; and
Jones: The Life and Films (with Robert Osborne, 2011)
there are “space Westerns,” which are often little more
—and he continues to supplement and update the
than “cowboys with ray guns” stories. There are
“Weird Westerns” listings with an ongoing blog, also
“Steampunk Westerns,” which are set in the Old West
called Encyclopedia of Weird Westerns (weirdwesterns.
but which incorporate Victorian technology and are
wordpress.com/).
philosophically similar to Cyberpunk’s sensibility
Green’s Encyclopedia covers considerable ground;
with regard to the transforming (and corrupting)
it may initiate disagreements while at the same time
aspects of technological intrusion; and there are “weird
invite additions, corrections, or deletions. But in either
Western romances,” which seem to boil down to “I
case, it is certainly deserving of recognition.
love you, Tex, but what are we going to do about the
–-Ray Merlock
ghost/spirit guide/demon/vampire/guardian angel?”
University of South Carolina Upstate
While the boundaries between these different cate-
gories often blur, and the categories themselves often
merge into hybrids, they nonetheless form the founda-
tion for Green to offer short, compact entries and Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music
numerous illustrations (photos, comics panels, covers), Photographs from the Great Depression
beginning with an entry on “Abraham” (the 1999 Italian Rich Remsberg. Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
comic book character Abraham Van Helsing, demon
2010.
and vampire hunter in the Old West of the 1880s) and
ending with an entry on the 1939 Republic Pictures 12- The imagery of the Great Depression-era United
chapter serial Zorro’s Fighting Legion (starring Reid States has become almost untouchably iconic, perhaps
 Book Reviews
because of their inherent power but not unimportantly
also as a result of elaborated and ongoing constructions
of social and historical import. Yet there seems some-
thing undeniably renewable and surprising in these
images, a freshness in their viewing that increases
rather than fades as the era becomes both more distant
and more strange to postmodern eyes.
Such is the case with these photographs produced
by the Historical Section of the Information Division
of the Farm Security Administration under the direc-
tion of Roy Stryker, a group which formed part of an
unprecedented federal government collection that
numbers close to 170,000 images. Driven by an interest
in visually capturing the rural experience during the
Great Depression in support of New Deal program-
matic and political agendas, Stryker assembled what
would later be recognized as a singular and astonishing
group of photographers like Ben Shahn, John Collier,
Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur
Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Carl
Maydans, and Jack Delano. These photographers were
charged with promoting agricultural life and the expe-
riences of common people. Though given no guidance
to capture the experience of musicians, these photogra-
phers nevertheless happened to create what Rich
Remsberg calls “the best visual documentation of ver-
nacular musical performance during this time” (xviii),
an achievement especially notable since among this
group, only “Vachon was the most enthusiastic about
music” (133). These images reveal how music making
saturated the experience of people across American
regions during this era. Indeed, one of the most striking
aspects of the images a reading of this book reinforces
is both the diversity and totality of musical experience
across space. The photographs reveal, with a keen eye
and rich contextualization, the musical being in the
world of whites and African Americans, secular and
religious, rural, small town, and urban Southerners,
northeasterners, westerners, and Midwesterners.
Remsberg argues that the images display “a power-
ful sense of the Old World vanishing” (xxii) as the
musical world of the United States during the Great
Depression was superceded by development and
change. For example, he considers a rare shot of a
street bluesman by Marion Post Wolcott to be “the
best documentation in existence of this important
phenomenon” (25). Remsberg links the renewed
photographic attention to the vitality of American
vernacular music as a development related to the
maturation of styles like hillbilly, swing, and jazz, and
195
the rise of regionalism in American visual art. He
praises the naturalism and intimacy of the photographs
as well as their sensitivity. Both the original FSA pho-
tographers and Remsberg believe that “showing people
in a social context has a tremendous humanizing
effect” (xxvi). This intent is clear in the set of photo-
graphs gathered in this book. Jack Delano’s image of
the family of Russell Tombs being moved by the army
(likely forcibly, though the caption does not say) from
its house in Caroline County, Virginia, is striking not
for the guitar leaning next to the door, but because of
the stark reality of peeling newspaper covering the
walls. The caustic image of school children in South
Carolina applying blackface for a performance is con-
trasted with a stately image from Georgia of African-
American children preparing for the same event. Rus-
sell Lee’s images of “Spanish-American musicians at
fiesta in Taos” and Dorothea Lange’s many views of
the Salvation Army band in San Francisco or of black-
face performers in California in 1938 lend a similar
capture of moments fraught with broader resonance
and reminders not just of time past but of the past as a
foreign country.
This book features some incisive contextual writing
on the photographs and the FSA, but it remains hap-
pily focused on the images themselves. It is organized
regionally, with separate sections for the Southeast and
the South, Louisiana, California, and the Southwest,
which Remsberg calls “the narrative core of the Great
Depression.” It also includes valuable and unexpected
images from Chicago. So many searing and famous
images of both poverty and music emerged from the
South and from the cities during the Great Depression
that attention to less intensely studied areas like the
Northwest, Plains, Midwest, and the Northeast are
welcome, as is the clear evidence of the stunning diver-
sity of musical expression of this era. The images here
challenge stereotypes of American folk and traditional
music in this era as isolated or solely backward look-
ing. There are numerous images of banjo players,
fiddlers, and guitarists, and of pawn shop windows
cluttered with such instruments. But we are also con-
fronted with brass bands in West Virginia, African
Americans (including one born a slave eighty years
earlier) playing the accordion in Maryland or in Geor-
gia, and a diddly bow player in Missouri captured by
Russell Lee. There are ukulele-playing migratory
workers from Arkansas, mission bands with dual-lap-
style Hawaiian guitars, and Creole girls playing a
triangular guitar.
196 The Journal of American Culture  Volume 35, Number 2  June 2012
Many of these photographs will be familiar to
those who spend time digging in the Library of Con-
gress online collection, where these pictures exist for
free viewing, or who have studied collections of
Depression-era field recordings, later revivalist retro-
spectives, or numerous reissues of field recordings. In
an afterward linking these images to the folk music
collecting of the era by the Seeger and Lomax fami-
lies, Hank Sapoznik also notes the critical usage of
these images by the New Lost City Ramblers, a key
catalyst to the folk revival of the mid twentieth cen-
tury. Given the availability of these images one might
be tempted to inquire into the utility of this book as a
collection presenting them as stand alone images built
on visual appreciation rather than as the centerpiece
of a detailed scholarly dissection. Yet Remsberg
clearly proves that the images speak for themselves.
Thus, this book falls happily on a recent continuum
of works including Steve Roden’s creative juxtaposi-
tion of photographs and recordings in I Listen to the
Wind that Obliterates My Traces (2011). Hard Luck
Blues ultimately stands as far more than a mere assem-
blage of the images; it is a carefully curated explora-
tion of the role of music in American life at the
moment both of its perfect capture and the tipping
point of its generalized fade to perceived obsoles-
cence, if not oblivion, in the early postwar era. The
photographs are valuable for context as well as con-
tent, and lose none of their authority when viewed as
individual works of art.
–-Daniel S. Margolies
Virginia Wesleyan College
Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in
America, 1850–1920
Peter C. Muir. Music in American Life Series. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Scholars have long debated the genesis of blues
music and its relationship to other forms of African-
American music such as jazz and ragtime. Peter C.
Muir’s Long Lost Blues untangles the many threads
that intertwined to create the popular blues idiom and
also recovers the links between folk blues and the pop-
ular production of sheet music and records in the early
twentieth century. Ranging well before Perry Brad-
ford’s “Crazy Blues”—often incorrectly identified as
the first recorded blues—Muir paints a much more
interesting and far less linear story of the blues.
As Muir points out, many scholars have dismissed
linkages between folk blues and the popular composi-
tions sold as sheet music and recordings before 1920.
Muir rigorously provides musical and textual analysis
that demonstrates the influence of folk blues on popu-
lar works, arguing that early popular blues emerged
from an “interaction of folk blues and Tin Pan Alley”
(30). Muir sees Southern black vaudeville around the
turn of the century as a key means of transmission of
the folk form to popular sheet music. He demonstrates
that Southern composers and publishers created works
that were far more rooted in the folk form, even after
Northern publishers had largely absorbed popular
blues into more predictable formulas. His chapter on
W. C. Handy’s work is especially enlightening.
As Muir himself mentions in his introduction, sur-
prisingly few scholarly works on the blues actually
provide detailed musical transcription and analysis.
One of the strongest features of Long Lost Blues is the
wealth of transcriptions—ninety-eight in all—included
in the work. These examples allow Muir to clearly and
convincingly articulate his arguments regarding the
influence of ragtime, jazz, and folk blues on the popu-
lar style.
While demonstrating that some of the genetic mate-
rial in popular blues came via folk culture, Muir also
highlights several major differences in approach
between the folk and popular forms, sometimes in
novel ways. In Chapter 3, “Curing the Blues with the
Blues,” he parses two general approaches to the cura-
tive power of the blues. Borrowing from the language
of medicine, Muir describes the “homeopathic”
approach, where the blues is cured by a strong emo-
tional outpouring of pain and sadness—blues cures the
blues because like cures like. In the “allopathic” mode,
the blues is dispelled through its opposite—upbeat,
lighthearted music, and especially through the physical
release of energetic dance. Muir argues that folk blues
almost always takes the homeopathic approach, and
explains why popular blues did not—the intense,
cathartic emotionalism of folk blues was alien to the
sensibilities of Tin Pan Alley Victorianism which shied
away from earthy and frank expressions of emotion
and especially sexuality.
Muir’s final chapter looks at what he calls “Proto-
Blues” and particularly the blues ballad form as repre-
sented by the “Frankie” song family. The blues ballad
is widely acknowledged as an African-American song
type that served as a predecessor form to the blues.
Muir’s central question here is why, in extremely rapid