mBOOKSm MUSIC: From minstrelsy to Mick Jagger

THE HISTORY OF THE BLUES by Francis Davis, Secker & Warburg pounds 17.9 9

FOR anyone who thought the world needed another history of the blues about as much as it needed another TV series set in a hospital, Francis Davis's fascinating book will come as a welcome revelation. Flying in the face of a forbiddingly encyclopaedic title and somewhat shaky provenance - as a companion volume to an American TV series - this engaging and thoughtful work turns up plenty of fresh ground in what seemed a well- ploughed field. Davis asserts that what most needs to be added to any definition of the blues is the proviso "not always", and this is no cop- out, but a signpost to the place where the music's myths and legends intersect with historical reality.

Just nine years separated Geronimo's surrender from Edison's invention of the phonograph, and the record player came first. With this and companion insights into the development of the camera, food preservation and cotton- picking technologies, Davis argues convincingly that far from being the last "pure" folk art, untainted by science and commerce, the blues was actually the form of entertainment whose development most closely paralleled the emergence of a mass culture.

Modest in the best sense - not in having small ambitions, but in acknowledging that he starts out further from the heart of his subject than such celebrated blues boffins as Samuel Charters and Peter Guralnick - Davis makes distance a virtue. Eschewing the flowery language with which others have tried to capture the spirit of the music, he makes it easier for us to understand its achievement in continuing to move him. He blends personal testimony - from cherished encounters with aged bluesmen to chance car radio epiphanies - with scholarly research, combining a real feel for blues lore with an awareness that the simplifications of legend can render great stories less as well as more compelling.

The spirit of intellectual curiosity that is this book's greatest asset

even extends to its mythic grainy pictures. "We like to imagine that we can 'hear' the blues in these photographs," Davis asserts, "just as we like to imagine that we can 'hear' in the oldest country blues the blisters and stooped backs of the men and women singing them", before going on to remind us (and himself) that "though the blues had evolved from the shouts and chants of men and women at work in the fields, it was the goal of most blues performers to stay as far away from that sort of work as possible."

The bluesmen and women whose stories are told so well here were social outcasts as much as they were heroes, as prone to disfavour with the forces of law and order as the gangster rappers of today. And as with subsequent rock legends, the untimeliness and violence of their ends - Bessie Smith killed by not one but two car-crashes, Robert Johnson poisoned, Blind Lemon Jefferson frozen to death in a snowstorm - has often been in direct proportion to the sacredness of their memory.

Some of Davis's best work is done in one of the most disreputable backwaters of blues pre-history, the complex and alarming 19th-century phenomenon of minstrelsy, wherein white performers would darken their faces with burnt cork to ape black musical traditions in a grotesque parody that was at once travesty and tribute. Davis cites the extraordinary case of the first black minstrel, who was himself expected to black up, and whose billing promised not just "imitation of white minstrels" but also "imitation of himself". For all its unsavouriness to present-day sensibilities, minstrelsy, he argues, provided "an entry into a world in which black could be white, white could be black, anything could be itself and simultaneously its opposite".

The resonance of this bizarre tradition extends to the present day, and not just in Davis's uncharacteristically catty definition of Mick Jagger as "the most famous of contemporary minstrels". It is hard to resist the notion that the terrible saga of another, still more famous, MJ might actually be minstrelsy going backwards. And it is one of this book's most intriguing and potentially controversial contentions that the course of the blues might have been shaped by the desires and expectations of white as well as black audiences from the very beginning.

The blues, Davis argues, "happened as a result of one group of people being forced to enter another's history". It's the same with current and earlier blues revivals, "but in reverse and by choice". In making this case, and especially in doing so without compromising the aesthetic grandeur of his subject matter, Davis goes a long way to explaining why while black Americans have largely switched allegiance to other forms of musical expression, so many whites continue to savour "A love affair whose fulfillment depends on remaining unrequited".