The fickleness of blues history.

From a contemporary viewpoint you'd like to think that your blues history was written by people following a logical and consistent path of structured history collection, detailed research and impartial recording. What you get is the initial good-intentions of competing amateur seekers of 'truth' ultimately becoming fixated, self serving, and overcome by greed and mental health issues.

Astonishingly, one of these 'authors' actually delays, by a considerable period, the release of information and music by the very person they are supposed to be highlighting. Family descendants were tricked out of potential royalties and, sadly, one of the other potential key contributors was beset by long-term mental health problems. These were, apparently, of such a nature that only an edited version of McCormick's manuscript could be released. I found all this almost unbelievable.

There's an interesting foreword and afterword about the challenges and complexities of trying to get even this 'redacted' volume to print. By the way, there's not much actually about Robert Johnson in this book. Read something like 'Up jumped the Devil' or 'Escape from the Delta' (brilliant book) if yoy want to know about RJ and the Mississippi Delta. Excellent narration.

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