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From the Horses's Mouths

Since it’s nearly impossible to read John Sinclair’s Delta Sound Suite Fattening Frogs for Snakes without succumbing to the temptation to listen to some of the music Sinclair chronicles and celebrates, as I work on this review, I am playing The Essential Sonny Boy Williamson (1993) on Chess, specifically “Help Me,” one of Sonny Boy’s ominous rolling blues that features his patented combination of vulnerability, impatience, and menace. Later in the afternoon, I’ll move on to Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and Mississippi Fred McDowell, among others. Be prepared to spend some serious cash on CDs if you read this book, since Sinclair’s feeling for the Delta blues is expansive and infectious. The desire to hear the voices of various first or second generation Delta bluesmen telling the story of the blues on their own terms must have been one of the basic motivations for this book, since that basic narrative strategy—getting the news straight from the horse’s mouth—is one that Sinclair puts to good use throughout. In nearly every piece here, the poetry contained in the speech patterns of these rural singers—similar to the poetry employed in their songs—is given prominent place. The book as a whole is an interesting hybrid of affiliated forms— part narrative/lyric poetry, part blues scholarship, part oral history—but it is the stories themselves, presented mainly in first person or eyewitness accounts, that make up the heart and soul of Sinclair’s suite. Sinclair is interested in carefully delineating the social place of the blues, where the blues came from and the role the music played in the daily lives of the black field laborers of the Mississippi Delta. Poems like “Country Blues” and “Some of These Days” painstakingly recreate the social dynamic of a particular time and place, and let readers see the necessary social role blues music played in the lives of an oppressed and maligned people with little opportunity for relaxation or release. This inevitably leads to a discussion of how political blues music has always been, something Sinclair never lets readers forget: