These are interesting enough, though to say that Negroes regard Christmas as a week-long debauch or that they suspect preachers of having an eye for drink and women is hardly to demonstrate that their society is utterly alien to ours. "Screening the Blues" takes up half a dozen minor blues themes, Christmas, preaching and preachers, the numbers game, Joe Louis, and obscenity illustrating them in much the same way from historical records. The present book reads rather like a lengthy footnote to his earlier book "Blues Fell This Morning," published in 1960 this was a moving tessellation of blues lyrics and exegetical comment arranged to show what the main themes of the blues were - work, railroads, love, and so on. Nevertheless, the music has its devotees, and Mr Oliver is one of them. Of the Civil Rights movement, of freedom marches, of anti segregation demonstrations and lunch-counter sit-ins, Black Muslims and Black Power, the blues says nothing." Not even about lynching. Mr Oliver admits this: as he says, the "stockpile of traditional phrases" serves as "an indispensable substitute for original thought." The blues has nothing of the calypso's vitality "national events and successes are seldom recorded political comment is to be found on a handful of blues, Jim Crow laws and poll taxes hardly at all.
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