[More so than any other genre, the blues addressed the misery of
black American life under capitalism. The work of the late historian
Paul Garon made an invaluable contribution to unearthing this
tradition’s radical roots.]
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HISTORIAN PAUL GARON DOCUMENTED THE BEAUTY AND RADICALISM OF THE
BLUES  
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Brittany Rosemary Jones
August 17, 2022
Jacobin
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_ More so than any other genre, the blues addressed the misery of
black American life under capitalism. The work of the late historian
Paul Garon made an invaluable contribution to unearthing this
tradition’s radical roots. _

Chicago blues musician Howlin Wolf (second from right) with other
blues musicians., Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

 

Paul Garon might have known more about books than anyone else in
Chicago. A founding partner of the Chicago Rare Books Center and owner
of Beasley Books, Garon, who died on July 25, 2022, collected and sold
first-edition copies on labor history, surrealism, leftist politics,
psychoanalysis, musicology, beat literature, and African American
studies for decades.

He was an important figure in socialist publishing and the city’s
counterculture scene, a longtime board member of Charles H. Kerr —
America’s oldest radical publisher — who even compiled their back
catalogue. His greatest love, however, was the blues. One of the
genre’s most knowledgeable and ambitious experts, he saw in the
blues the articulation of a specific subjectivity: that of the black
working men and women of America, unsung revolutionaries who took up
music as a valiant form of poetic protest. His four pioneering books
and distinctive Kentucky drawl, punctuating the hum of Chicago
bookstores and blues clubs, unveiled a radical history of this
country.

Born in 1942 to a physician and sociology graduate, Garon was a
Louisville native whose first encounter with blues music, at eighteen
years old, stopped him in his tracks. Upon hearing Brownie McGhee and
Sonny Terry in a record shop, the union of Terry’s raw harmonica
riffs and McGhee’s smooth vocals, he was hooked. He rounded up every
vinyl he could find, early 78s and LPs alike, and drove to Chicago —
the heart of the Midwestern blues scene, or as he called it,
“Bluestown, USA” — to watch his idols perform live. Thanks to
his encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, he landed a much-coveted
summer job twice at the iconic Jazz Record Mart run by Bob Koester.

The founder of Delmark Records, a label which played a vital role in
the folk-blues revival of the 1960s, Koester took Garon under his
wing. He bestowed upon Garon an extraordinary music education,
introducing him to countless artists that would figure prominently in
the books he would later publish on blues history.

Koester convinced him to finally move to Chicago full-time in 1967,
and one fateful afternoon that year, Garon bumped into Franklin and
Penelope Rosemont, founders of the Chicago Surrealist Group, at the
Industrial Workers of the World Solidarity Bookshop. Though they had
not yet crossed paths, the Rosemonts were familiar with Garon’s
essay “The Expanded Journal of Addiction,” a candid and harrowing
chronicle of his battle with heroin abuse that was published in the
London-based anarchist journal _Heatwave _the year prior.

This chance encounter was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that
was formed around a shared passion for blues music, which they
recognized as a poetic tradition “defined culturally and not
acoustically.” To them, the blues served a specific purpose within a
social context — it was a form of revolt, a rejection of white
capitalist ideology.

The Rosemonts were soon able to recruit Garon to the Surrealist cause
by aligning the subversive potency of the blues with the group’s
central tenets. Rife with Freudian symbolism yet emphatically
proletarian, the blues found a natural affinity with the revolutionary
spirit that underpinned Chicagoans’ revival of surrealism in the
name of the 1960s social movements. Together, the comrades founded the
group’s journal, _Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion_, with Garon,
penning “Blues and the Poetry of Revolt” for the first issue.

Beginning with a very surrealist (and very ’60s) paragraph that
likened the blues to a “flowing, feather-like chasm in front of
which we pause before beginning our ascent into that region of the
mind which contains the exploding germs of light which represent a new
life for man,” this seminal essay provided Garon with an opportunity
to publicly articulate his perspective. “The repressive norms of
this society, essentially white bourgeois norms, are rejected by the
black working-class bluesman,” Garon (more lucidly) expounded.
“The blues singer and his form of revolt preserved the critical
function of negation . . . by providing a poetic attack on the
superstructure of society.”

That same year, Koester referred Garon to a group of local blues
writers who were teaming up to launch a periodical dedicated to the
Chicago blues scene. The magazine became the legendary _Living
Blues, _the genre’s first American publication, with Garon as one
of its founding editors. Galvanized by the civil rights and Black
Power movements, the team was committed to contextualizing the blues
as a vernacular expression, integral to black American heritage,
engendered by the trauma of slavery, lynching, and general racial
discrimination.

In their minds, this history was becoming increasingly encroached on
by the well-off white artists who began appropriating the sounds and
style of the genre in great numbers during the concurrent folk-blues
revival. The _Living Blues _team replied to this industry trend,
which they feared both robbed black Americans of a unique cultural
tradition and threatened the political weaponization of the blues, by
adding a subtitle — “The Magazine of the African American Blues
Tradition” — and adopting a “blacks only” editorial policy.

This approach was not popular during a time when the genre was subject
to mainstream international attention and much outrage was directed at
Garon, who never shied from controversy as the most outspoken of the
magazine’s staff. Garon responded with a few polemic editorials:
“White performers have so much coverage and such high record sales
(compared to blacks) that their notion of being victims of
discrimination because _Living Blues_ doesn’t cover them is quite
laughable. As if Bonnie Raitt or Stevie Ray Vaughan were drowned in
obscurity because of _Living Blues’_ ‘racist’ policies!”

Garon never minced words. “The real truth is that with white
performers, the opinion of _Living Blues_ is a drop in the bucket
compared to the critical establishment that does care about them, that
does cover them, that does give out Grammy awards, and that does
decide whether they make it or not.”

His stance failed to convince some of the period’s other writers,
who found him unwilling to keep pace with new perceptions of the genre
and hoped its hostility to capitalist dogma would be seized by other
populations as well. Garon’s position as a white critic — within a
largely white editorial staff — also drew raised eyebrows. But his
commitment to the preservation of this original racial identity was
long-lasting, featuring again in “White Blues” (1993), his famed
contribution to the new abolitionist journal _Race Traitor_.

In the midst of this debate, Garon published two meticulously
researched blues history books in the 1970s alongside his continuing
projects with the Chicago Surrealist Group. His debut, _The Devil’s
Son-in-Law: The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw and His Songs
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the first — and today is still one of the only — biographies of a
1930s bluesman. Garon could only draw a rough sketch of the
performer’s life: despite Wheatstraw’s status as one of the most
influential figures of his era, a scarcity of archival material meant
few of his biographical details were ever known, and his lack of
recognition during the blues revival hardly helped. But the book was
less concerned with arranging a chronology of facts than advancing a
compelling argument in defense of the value of Wheatstraw’s
contribution to the blues. Interrogating his lyrics and variable
identity as the “High Sheriff from Hell” and the “Devil’s
Son-in-Law,” Garon inferred that “these designations gave Peetie a
sense of power, opposition, and resistance and it gave his listeners a
figure of great majesty with whom they could identify.”

Published in 1975, his treatise _Blues and the Poetic Spirit_ —
now regarded as canonical literature on the subject — broke new
ground by mining the psychological and sociological sources of the
blues. His entirely original portrait tapped into the genre’s
subconscious, swapping bourgeois preoccupations with talent for a
Freudian analysis that dissected lyrics as surrealist poetry,
extracting and analyzing symbols of eros, authority, magic, animals,
and nighttime. He found in the portrayal of alienated labor one of the
blues’ most prominent themes, “a strong and unmistakable desire
for freedom from toil,” and launched into an expansive discussion
that spanned Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, and André Breton.

Dedicating a groundbreaking chapter of the book to women’s
liberation, his treatment of feminism’s blues history found favor
with Angela Davis. When she shattered the rest of blues historiography
in _Blues Legacies and Black Feminism_, she extricated his discussion
on the topic from the rubble — only complaining that it wasn’t
lengthier. Garon remained invested in the potential of the blues to
elucidate women’s struggle, traveling with his wife, Beth, to the
South to piece together a second biography of an overlooked ’30s
performer, Memphis Minnie. Their pioneering account, _Woman with
Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues _(1992)_, _remains today one of the
few feminist-inflected studies of this period in blues history.

_What’s the Use of Walking if There’s a Freight Train Going Your
Way? Black Hoboes and Their Songs _(2006)_,_ Garon’s final book,
which was coauthored with blues writer Gene Tomko, explored the
largely neglected dialogue between the blues and union culture.
Hopping freight trains in search of jobs, many blues singers were
migrant workers during hoboing’s heyday, which stretched from the
mid-to-late nineteenth century to the Great Depression.

The reserve army of labor — socially detested, economically
indispensable — was one of American capitalism’s most undervalued
resources; in narrating the antagonistic environment these working men
and women faced, Garon and Tomko uncovered a pivotal moment in
twentieth-century labor history. From stories of toil in textile mills
and coal mines to thrilling tales of “getting by” (hobo slang for
an act of deception carried out to obtain free lodging, transport, or
food), these songs manifested their writers’ resilience and clever
outwitting of a system constructed to exploit them.

Often regarded today as antiquated, formulaic, or with a limited
subject range, the blues is experiencing a significant lull in
interest. But revisiting Garon’s expansive body of work with fresh
eyes illuminates that the spirit of the blues is more vital than ever.
Given the trend-based nature of the music industry, his historiography
invites a rousing counternarrative: that the blues are too subversive,
too radical, and too easily weaponized to be admitted back into the
mainstream.

Perhaps the current union boom and resurgence of the labor movement
will lead to a renewed recognition of the role that the blues played
in a revolutionary chapter in working-class history. When _Blues and
the Poetic Spirit _was reissued in 1996_, _Garon recalled his
original intentions for the project and posed a question:

I thought it was important to show how the blues represented an
authentic American poetic voice, a voice that used the capacity for
fantasy to kindle the spirit of revolt by placing the primacy of
desire ahead of the claims of reality. As it did this, it gave us a
graphic representation of desire’s frustration and a stark and
revealing look at humanity’s lot amid the clamor of advanced
industrial civilization. . . . Can the blues still perform this
function? Nothing could be more important at the present time.

BRITTANY ROSEMARY JONES is an art historian and writer.

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