CANR
WORK TITLE: JELLY ROLL BLUES
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.elijahwald.com/
CITY: Cambridge
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 309
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 24, 1959, in Cambridge, MA; son of George Wald (a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and antiwar activist) and Ruth Hubbard (a biochemist and educator); married Sandrine Sheon.
EDUCATION:Studied music under Dave Van Ronk and Jean-Bosco Mwenda; holds Ph.D. (ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, musician, and educator. Toured internationally and in the United States as a singer, guitarist, and saxophonist with various bands; wrote on folk roots and international music for various magazines in the early 1980s; Boston Globe, Boston, MA, world music critic, 1984-2000; has taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Boston College. Composer, singer, and musician for albums Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker (LP), 1984, and Street Corner Cowboys (CD), 2004; musician and instructor in The Guitar of Joseph Spence (DVD), 2011. Coeditor and coproducer of The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection: 1960-2000 (CD), 2000.
MEMBER:Authors Guild.
AWARDS:Grammy Award for best liner notes, 2002, for The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection; Otto Kinkeldey Award honorable mention, American Musicological Society, for Escaping the Delta; ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, for The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
WRITINGS
Author of foreword to Sweet Bitter Blues: Washington, DC’s Homemade Blues, by Phil Wiggins and Frank Matheis, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2020. Contributor to periodicals, including the Boston Globe. Author of performance/memoir blog Songobiography.
SIDELIGHTS
Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who has published several books and hundreds of articles, mainly on music-related topics. He began his career touring internationally as a guitarist and singer and has been writing since the early 1980s. Wald’s main musical influences are Dave Van Ronk, his mentor and former guitar teacher, and Congolese musician Jean-Bosco Mwenda, with whom he studied for several months in Congo. He is best known for his articles contributed to the Boston Globe, where he worked as the newspaper’s world music critic for over fifteen years.
Wald’s first book, Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers, was written with his mother, Ruth Hubbard, and was first published in 1993. Hubbard, a biochemist and former Harvard professor, supplies the theories and scientific data for the book, while Wald serves as writer and collaborator. The authors discredit the belief that there is a simple correlation between genes and traits, creating a solid argument against genetic reductionism. Wald and Hubbard insist in their book that “the myth of the all-powerful gene is based on flawed science that discounts the environmental context in which we and our genes exist,” and according to reviewers, they have succeeded in writing a scientific and technical book that is accessible to the average reader. Neil A. Holtzman of the New England Journal of Medicine called Exploding the Gene Myth “good reading for anyone who wants to learn more about the science underlying the quest for human genes and the political, social, and ethical implications.”
Wald’s next book, River of Song: A Musical Journey down the Mississippi, returns him to his area of expertise—music. This book is a companion to a PBS television series highlighting the origins of American music and was written along with the documentary’s director, John Junkerman. The two men traveled to nearly seventy locations along the Mississippi and interviewed more than 500 musicians, who tell their stories through music and biographical vignettes. The music profiled in the book includes everything from jazz, blues, and gospel to punk rock, Ojibwe Indian songs, and hip-hop brass band fusion. A reviewer from Kirkus Reviews reported that “the book offers both an engaging overview of modern American music … and a fascinating glimpse of the ways in which American music continues to reflect and to shape American life.” A thirty-six-song, two-CD soundtrack accompanies the book and documentary.
Josh White and Narcocorrido
Wald wrote the first major biography of renowned folk-blues artist Josh White, titled Josh White: Society Blues, which was published in 2000. In this work, Wald chronicles the life of a musician whose contribution to the folk music revivals of the mid-twentieth century had been largely overlooked until recently, following him from his childhood of leading blind singers around the South, to the 1940s and 1950s when he became a celebrated blues recording star. Wald also writes about White’s commitment to social activism and his lifelong struggle against discrimination, which often came through in his folk songs.
In Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, Wald traces the development of the corrido, a narrative song popular in Mexico and the American Southwest. Wald pays special attention to the narcocorrido, “a genre of ballad that glorifies gun-toting drug lords in a Mexican version of gangsta rap with accordions,” according to Library Journal contributor Dave Szatmary. Through reportage and interviews, Wald chronicles the history of the genre and profiles the musicians who write and perform narcocorridos. According to Nation reviewer Ilan Stavans, Wald “offers an enlightening rendezvous: Rather than dwell on the origin and varieties of this sort of ballad in a scholarly mode, he delivers a travelogue. For almost eight months he hitchhiked, with a guitar on his back, across the Southwest, northern and central Mexico, and down to Chiapas.” Stavans added that the author “patiently explores the half-accomplished modernity that colors northern Mexico, where the drug business has radically transformed people’s daily routine but has left untouched the sense of morality.” A contributor to Sing Out! remarked: “Wald loves Mexico, warts and all. Yes, a narcocorrido is a song which celebrates drug culture, plain and simple … and, yes, the drug smuggling that passes through Mexico is not necessarily a point of pride within Mexico. But Wald is a Mexiphile who is willing to be candid about the country’s lesser side.” “It’s a huge business, drugs, drug-fueled revolution, and singing about them, and Wald does a superb job of taking his readers into that world,” noted a critic in Kirkus Reviews.
Escaping the Delta
In his 2004 work Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, Wald takes a fresh look at the history of blues music and profiles one of its central figures. “Wald’s central theme is that, far from being an obscure folk tradition rescued by Alan Lomax and other white field recordists, blues was thriving, diverse popular music,” remarked Jeff A. Taylor in Reason. “Wald also expands on the recent welcome trend of knocking down the walls between different styles of music, revealing that musicians, black and white, country and urban, freely stole from one another for decades, to everyone’s benefit.” “In his narrative,” wrote New York Times Book Review contributor Eric Weisbard, “blues emerges as a variant of show business: performers worked different circuits, from vaudeville to tent shows, stealing moves and sounds to make sure that audiences got what they wanted to hear. Urban professional and rural folk sounds fed on each other in ways that can never be fully parsed.”
In addition, the author presents a biography of Johnson, the legendary guitarist and songwriter whose compositions included “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Love in Vain” and whose influence extends to artists as diverse as Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and the Rolling Stones. “Wald doesn’t treat Johnson directly until the middle of the book,” observed Booklist critic Ray Olson, “when he invaluably parses each of his recordings to disclose both borrowings and originalities.” According to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “Wald’s academic precision aids him in his quest to re-analyze America’s perception of the blues as well as in trying to decipher the music’s murky true origins and history.”
Riding with Strangers
Wald celebrates the joys of the open road in Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker’s Journey, his 2006 work. Wald details his cross-country trip from New England to the Pacific Northwest, recounting his meetings with a Russian truck driver, a used-car salesman, and a pleasant but persistent missionary, among others. He also offers a history of hitchhiking and provides a list of etiquette suggestions, including when to talk to the driver and where to stand to land a ride.
According to Library Journal contributor Joseph L. Carlson, the author “found to his surprise a largely untapped reserve of kindness, courtesy, respect, and friendliness. He emerges victorious with this look at a vanishing way of life.” “This agreeable memoir of cross-country adventures is full of good times,” commented Booklist reviewer David Pitt, and Judy McAloon, writing in the School Library Journal, called Riding with Strangers “a just-right combination of travelogue, culture peek, and hitching tips.”
How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll
In How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, Wald takes a revisionist view of the 1960s revolution in rock music. He suggests that the Beatles’ decision to move from being a band that concentrated on performances to one that distributed its music through recordings changed the way that Americans related to their music. “As late as the 1940s, pop music was what bands played when people went out dancing. The records were just what you listened to at home,” Wald explained in an interview with Laura Fitzpatrick published in Time magazine. “The Beatles were the first group to realize that pop had become records, and that they never needed to step on a stage again in their lives. That’s a huge shift, and [although] I think it would have happened without them, they were the catalysts.” “It takes chutzpah to suggest, in a text aimed at record geeks, that pop music began its decline with the invention of the phonograph,” stated online Paste magazine writer Nick Marino. “For much of the 20th century, [Wald] notes with cool detachment, ‘records remained relatively unimportant. We tend to give them a lot of historical weight because we still have them, but for their first half century they were considered brief, fuzzy snapshots of popular music, not the thing itself.’”
In fact, Wald argues, even if recordings did change American popular music, the Beatles’ arrival presaged a growing disparity between black and white music that, he asserts, was not as noticeable before the Fab Four cut its first LP. “Wald explains that the Beatles did in fact destroy rock ‘n’ roll by creating a schism between white and black music that’s only grown farther apart in the decades since the dawn of Beatlemania,” wrote Erik Himmelsbach in the Los Angeles Times. “Like many early rock bands, the Beatles were rooted in the music of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. As the band found its creative voice, they abandoned their early influences. The results included ‘the effetely sentimental ballad’ ‘Yesterday,’ a song that Wald claims ‘diffused’ rock’s energy and opened the door for milquetoasts such as Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Billy Joel, and Elton John.”
Other critics, however, point out that the Beatles repeatedly acknowledged their debt to rock ‘n’ roll icons of the 1940s and 1950s. “The Beatles adored rock ‘n’ roll,” explained London Guardian writer Jon Dennis, “and restored some authenticity and rough edges to a moribund pop scene dominated by shiny, safe teen idols. They celebrated their rock ‘n’ roll idols, including Little Richard and Chuck Berry, by covering their songs. But ‘black music was being recast as the roots of rock ‘n’ roll rather than as part of its evolving present.’ And as rock was taken more seriously, it moved further away from contemporary black music, which still focused on dance steps and hit singles.” “Increasingly, throughout the late Sixties and beyond, album-focused white rock music was presented as the sound of the anti-commerce auteur,” Martin James stated in a Times Higher Education Supplement review, “while black hit-friendly dance music was characterised as insincere pop fodder (which is paradoxical, as Wald observes in noting that the former approach promised far greater commercial rewards for the artist). In so doing, the question of whether music is for dancing or listening became a question about musical forms as racial markers.” “Wald laments that after the 1960s, although rockers continued to be influenced by blues and other African American ‘roots’ music, they no longer tried to keep up with current black styles—in part because they weren’t playing in dance bands that needed to be able to cover them. It’s an intriguing thesis,” explained Carl Wilson in the Toronto Globe & Mail. “Still, it’s always a bit suspect when someone tracks the start of a cultural decline to the end of their own youth. Here Wald’s eye and ear become much more selective, overlooking key counterexamples such as the 1980s crossover impact of Michael Jackson.”
Whether or not they disagreed with Wald’s contentions, critics agreed that How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll is an important examination of a major change in American popular music. “Wald organizes his material exceptionally well and tells the story logically and transparently,” declared George J. Grella, Jr., on the Brooklyn Rail Web site. The author’s “emphasis of thought, tone, and structure is focused on the past, not the break with it, so the book ends up as a provocative elegy for a history the author makes vivid, rather than an explanation of how the Beatles did anything. It demands not so much a history of post-Fab Four pop but a discussion of pop music that, like Costello’s, has remained true to its origins. But to criticize the book in this way is only to emphasize how worthwhile it is.” “If, as Bruce Springsteen suggested, Elvis freed our bodies and Dylan freed our minds, then the Beatles did both,” declared Louis P. Masur in the online PopMatters, “and in the process took aim at our souls. It was Dylan who first introduced the Fab Four to marijuana, and it was the drug culture of the ’60s more than any other single factor that forever changed what we heard and how we listened.” “Wald deepens the appreciation of American popular music by broadening its context and erasing the canonical lines that have made many boy geniuses specialists in the niche approach to criticism,” wrote Boston Globe contributor Carlo Wolff. “This is a work of celebration, not destruction.” “Wald,” concluded K. Ross Hoffman, writing for the Philadelphia City Paper, “makes a superlative tour guide—frank, funny and generous but judicious with his inclusions—and his book is a beguiling, blasphemous breeze.”
Dylan Goes Electric!
With Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, Wald provides a history and analysis of Bob Dylan’s transition from folk singer to rock musician. Historically, that shift is identified with Dylan’s first public electric performance (at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965). According to Walt, however, the shift preceded the occasion. The author places Dylan’s transition to rock within corresponding shifts in the music world at large. This includes a discussion of the evolution in the Beatles’ performances and in the work of musician and activist Pete Seeger. From there, Wald draws on critiques of Dylan’s oeuvre, and he interviews those who knew Dylan before, during, and after Newport.
Critics largely praised the volume, and a Kirkus Reviews contributor called it “an enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan’s music or persona.” John Harris, writing in the Guardian, was also impressed, asserting: “In not much longer than 10 minutes, as Elijah Wald puts it, Dylan triggered ‘the end of the folk revival as a mass movement and the birth of rock as the mature artistic voice of a generation’.” Harris went on to remark: “But Wald has a habit of exploring the complications and tensions that underlie received stories. … Dylan Goes Electric! both explains the huge array of subplots that fed into the Newport moment and undermines any idea that the story is clear-cut. It is a great work of scholarship, brimming with insight among the best music books I have ever read.” According to London Telegraph correspondent Helen Brown, “Wald is not anti-Dylan, any more than he was anti-Beatles in his book about them. He just has a knack for seeing things as they were, rather than as they’ve been spun since. Quoting from candid original sources, he does a terrific job of conveying the personal (let alone the musical) electricity of the young Dylan.” Brown concluded: “You wouldn’t think a forensic examination of a historic folk festival would make great reading, but Wald builds amp-crackling tension as he eliminates one preconception after another.” Offering further applause in her Spectator assessment, Dorian Lynskey advised: “Wald’s book catches light when it reaches Newport. Armed with dozens of primary sources and eyewitness testimonies, he vividly chronicles the whole weekend and unpicks a lot of enduring myths, but his real contribution to the history of this most divisive performance is not to take sides.”
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Jelly Roll Blues
With Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories, Wald takes readers on a tour along the more scandalous byways of popular music, especially the jazz and blues traditions. The word jazz itself is confirmed by a ragtime musician to have originally been spelled jass, a slang term for “screwing.” Tunes by the likes of Jelly Roll Morton (1890–1941) and others are found to have been loaded with carnal references (the name “Jelly Roll” among them) and curse words, with both lyrics and true titles sometimes withheld from the general public. Wald indicates that “The Old Chisholm Trail,” for example, includes over a thousand verses long considered unfit to print—and duly prints them. Way beyond risqué, the lyrics of “Winding Ball” circulated only through underground leaflets. In analyzing the origins and evolution of popular songs, Wald examines how intersections of ethnicities, genders, and social classes affected songs’ receptions and reputations.
A Kirkus Reviews writer affirmed that Wald “astutely” unveils the seamier side of musical culture as he “evokes a world of barrelhouse piano and honky-tonks that would make … a Weimar cabaret blush.” The reviewer praised Jelly Roll Blues as both a “pleasing–and often pleasingly salacious—stroll” through Americana and an “illuminating, deeply researched study of roots music.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Wald, Elijah, and Ruth Hubbard, Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1993, 3rd edition, 1999.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 1999, Mike Tribby, review of River of Song: A Musical Journey down the Mississippi, p. 118; September 15, 2001, Mike Tribby, review of Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, p. 177; December 15, 2003, Ray Olson, review of Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, p. 718; May 15, 2005, June Sawyers, review of The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir, p. 1627; April 15, 2006, David Pitt, review of Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker’s Journey, p. 22; June 1, 2009, Mike Tribby, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, p. 16; June 1, 2015, Mark Levine, review of Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, p. 9.
Boston Globe, July 3, 2009, Carlo Wolff, “Pop Revisionist Looks beyond the Charts,” review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY), June 28, 2009, Jeff Simon, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Christian Science Monitor, July 16, 2009, John Kehe, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, p. 25.
Dallas Morning News, June 14, 2009, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Express Milwaukee, June 3, 2009, David Luhrssen, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), July 4, 2009, Carl Wilson, “With a Lot of Help from Their Friends: Moptops Are Only One of the Icons Smashed in Revisionist Book on American Pop,” review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Guardian (London, England), August 22, 2009, Jon Dennis, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll; July 10, 2015, John Harris, review of Dylan Goes Electric!
Internet Bookwatch, May, 2006, review of The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
Jakarta Globe (Jakarta, Indonesia), June 1, 2009, Marcel Thee, “The Not So Fab Four’s Legacy,” review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 1998, review of River of Song, p. 1790; August 15, 2001, review of Narcocorrido, p. 1201; October 1, 2003, review of Escaping the Delta, p. 1217; March 15, 2005, review of The Mayor of MacDougal Street, p. 345; March 1, 2006, review of Riding with Strangers, p. 224; April 1, 2009, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll; June 1, 2015, review of Dylan Goes Electric!; March 1, 2024, review of Jelly Roll Blues: Censored Songs and Hidden Histories.
Lancet, August 28, 1993, Ian N.M. Day, review of Exploding the Gene Myth, p. 540.
Library Bookwatch, March, 2005, review of Escaping the Delta.
Library Journal, January, 1999, Michael Colby, review of River of Song, p. 102; October 15, 2001, Dave Szatmary, review of Narcocorrido, p. 79; January 1, 2004, Eric Hahn, review of Escaping the Delta, p. 116; March 15, 2006, Joseph L. Carlson, review of Riding with Strangers, p. 89; May 1, 2009, James E. Perone, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, p. 82; April 15, 2012, Ed Graves, review of The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, p. 94; July 1, 2015, Thomas Karel, review of Dylan Goes Electric!, p. 86.
Los Angeles Times, June 11, 2009, Erik Himmelsbach, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
MBR Bookwatch, September, 2005, Diane C. Donovan, review of The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
Nation, January 7, 2002, Ilan Stevens, “Trafficking in Verse,” review of Narcocorrido, p. 43.
National Review, March 22, 2004, “Who’s Got a Right to Sing the Blues?,” review of Escaping the Delta, p. 14.
New England Journal of Medicine, November 25, 1993, Neil A. Holtzman, review of Exploding the Gene Myth, p. 1662.
New Scientist, October 23, 1993, Lynda Burke, review of Exploding the Gene Myth, p. 38.
New Statesman, September 9, 1994, Marek Kohn, review of Exploding the Gene Myth, p. 40.
Newsweek, June 1, 2009, “Battle of the Bands,” p. 62.
New York Times, February 28, 2004, Ben Sisario, “Revisionists Sing New Blues History,” review of Escaping the Delta, p. B7.
New York Times Book Review, September 12, 1993, Daniel Callahan, review of Exploding the Gene Myth, p. 26; October 31, 2004, Eric Weisbard, “The Ancestors of Pop,” review of Escaping the Delta, p. 31; July 3, 2005, Dave Itzkoff and Alan Light, “Music Chronicle,” review of The Mayor of MacDougal Street, p. 12; July 12, 2009, “Roll Over, John Lennon,” p. 19.
Philadelphia City Paper, June 11, 2009, K. Ross Hoffman, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Publishers Weekly, March 8, 1993, review of Exploding the Gene Myth, p. 58; November 23, 1998, review of Exploding the Gene Myth, p. 52; November 3, 2003, review of Escaping the Delta, p. 66; January 16, 2006, review of Riding with Strangers, p. 44.
Reason, June, 2004, Jeff A. Taylor, review of Escaping the Delta, p. 57.
School Library Journal, June, 2006, Judy McAloon, review of Riding with Strangers, p. 195.
Sing Out!, summer, 2002, review of Narcocorrido, p. 124; summer, 2004, Andy Cohen, review of Escaping the Delta, p. 112.
Spectator, August 29, 2015, Dorian Lynskey, “It Happened One Summer,” p. 37.
Telegraph (London, England), August 18, 2015, Helen Brown, review of Dylan Goes Electric!
Time, January 11, 1999, Christopher John Farley and John Junkerman, “Sounding the Waters: PBS Explores the Music along the Mississippi,” p. 95; June 24, 2009, Laura Fitzpatrick, “Q&A: Did the Beatles Destroy Rock ‘n’ Roll?”
Times Higher Education Supplement, October 22, 2009, Martin James, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Variety, February 1, 1999, Phil Gallo, review of River of Song, p. 30.
ONLINE
Authors Guild website, https://go.authorsguild.org/ (April 24, 2024), author profile.
A.V. Club, http://www.avclub.com/ (December 8, 2009), Michaelangelo Matos, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Beacon Press website, http://www.beacon.org/ (December 8, 2009), author profile.
Brooklyn Rail, http://www.brooklynrail.org/ (December 8, 2009), George J. Grella, Jr., review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Chicago Reader, http://www.chicagoreader.com/ (December 8, 2009), Miles Raymer, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Elijah Wald website, http://www.elijahwald.com (April 24, 2024).
Fayetteville Observer, http://www.fayettevilleobserver.com/ (December 8, 2009), Jim Washington, “Josh White, Jr., Follows in His Father’s Footsteps.”
Keysound, http://www.keysound.com/ (December 8, 2009), author profile.
New England Journal of Medicine, http://www.nejm.org/ (December 8, 2009), author profile.
Paste, http://www.pastemagazine.com/ (December 8, 2009), Nick Marino, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
PBS website, http://www.pbs.org/ (December 8, 2009), review of River of Song.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (December 8, 2009), Louis P. Masur, review of How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Powells website, http://www.powells.com/ (December 8, 2009), author profile.
World Music Central, http://www.worldmusiccentral.org/ (December 8, 2009), review of Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music.
Elijah Wald has been a musician since age seven and a writer since the early 1980s. He has published more than a thousand articles, mostly about folk, roots and international music for various magazines and newspapers, including twenty years as "world music" writer for the Boston Globe. In the current millenium, he has been devoting most of his time to book projects, including volumes on such disparate subjects as blues (Escaping the Delta, Jelly Roll Blues) , Mexican drug ballads (Narcocorrido), insult rhyming (The Dozens), hitchhiking (Riding with Strangers), the folk revival (Dylan Goes Electric and Dave Van Ronk's memoir), and a broad social history of American popular music (How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll).
Before I started writing professionally, I toured as a guitarist and singer, spending the late 1970s and most of the '80s wandering around Europe, Asia, Africa and Central America, fronting a blues band in Seville, a swing duo in Antwerp and a rock band at the Grand Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka. (The agent had hired me as an Elvis imitator. It did not work out.) There was also a brief period playing alto saxophone in sailor bars, often while standing on tables in cowboy boots, and I've written about all of that and much more in my ongoing performance/memoir blog, Songobiography, which by now includes more than three hundred video performances.
As far as more formal gigging goes, I have toured coast to coast in the United States numerous times, and recorded an LP, Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker (I have lots of copies left, and ship in bulk, if desired) and a CD, Street Corner Cowboys, which is much, much better. (There is more about both of these projects at my music page.) I have also filmed an instructional DVD on the Bahamian guitar style of Joseph Spence, taught at various blues and guitar camps, am currently booking shows in the US and abroad, and have over 300 performance videos on my Songobiography blog.
As a musician (and to a great extent as a writer as well), my mentor was Dave Van Ronk, who gave me a year of guitar lessons and many years of staying up late at night, arguing politics and listening to records of everything from Bulgarian folk music to Bing Crosby. Dave was a brilliant and omnivorous intellect, and I did my best to capture his voice and a sample of his memories, wit and wisdom in The Mayor of MacDougal Street, which inspired the Coen Brothers' movie Inside Llewyn Davis. (There is information about some of his albums on the aforementioned music page.)
Along with Dave, I picked up stuff from various other musicians over the years, as well as learning a lot from records. (Mississippi John Hurt, Rev. Gary Davis, and Joseph Spence are my longtime guitar heroes.) The most interesting experiences of this kind include several years as sideman for the legendary Black string band master Howard Armstrong, numerous gigs with Eric Von Schmidt, and three months in Lubumbashi studying with the Congolese master Jean-Bosco Mwenda. I have a bunch of Bosco’s tunes online, and also guest on a CD by my friend Dominic Kakolobango. And I learned a great deal from Perry Lederman, whose posthumous CD is one of my treasures.
As a writer, I have mostly concentrated on music and musicians, with occasional forays into other areas such as culture, politics and hitchhiking. My books can be found on their own pages or on the writings page, which also has links to archived articles written for various magazines and during my years with the Boston Globe. (Unfortunately, in June of 2000, the Globe presented its freelance contributors with the demand that they sign away reprint rights, in all media and forever, to everything they had ever written, with no payment of any kind. Several hundred freelancers organized in an attempt to preserve our traditional rights, but in the end the Globe won a pyrrhic victory and we went our separate ways.)
I continue to work on book projects, to perform whenever possible as a guitarist and singer, and do some teaching at music camps and universities (currently at Temple University in my new hometown, Philadelphia), as well as traveling around to speak about the various subjects that I've researched over the years. My options in the latter regard have been somewhat improved by various awards, including a 2002 Grammy for the liner notes to the Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box, an honorable mention for the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for Escaping the Delta, and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
For those wishing to delve further into my past, I have pages of information and writings by my father, George Wald, who was a major influence both on my performing and writing, and on my life in general. And for a sidelight on my personal life, I recommend a visit to the page of my wife, Sandrine Sheon, who aside from playing fine clarinet is the world's most daring paper modeler and an astonishing ceramic sculptor.
Elijah Wald is a musician, writer, and historian known for journalistic and academic writing exploring musical styles within broader sociocultural contexts, as well as for original research on early blues, Mexican ranchera, and the folk revival (plus a book on hitchhiking and one on the African American verbal tradition known as "the dozens." In the early 1980s he began writing for the Boston Globe, eventually becoming the newspaper’s regular “world music” reporter. He has published well over a thousand articles and his dozen books include "Dylan Goes Electric!"; "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music"; "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues"; "Global Minstrels: Voices of World Music"; Dave Van Ronk’s memoir of the New York folk revival, "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" (the inspiration for the Coen Brothers’ movie, "Inside Llewyn Davis"); and "Narcocorrido', a survey of the modern Mexican ballads of drug smuggling, immigration, and political corruption.
Wald has an interdisciplinary PhD in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics, has taught at UCLA and Boston College, and travels widely as a speaker on the history and culture of popular music. His awards include a Grammy for the album notes to The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box, an ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, and special mention for the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey award. His recordings include an LP, Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker, and a CD, Street Corner Cowboys, and there is voluminous further information at his website: http://www.elijahwald.com.
Wald, Elijah JELLY ROLL BLUES Hachette (NonFiction None) $30.00 4, 2 ISBN: 9780306831409
A pleasing--and often pleasingly salacious--stroll through the annals of American popular music.
"If you don't leave my fucking man alone I'll cut your throat and drink your fucking blood like wine." So runs a tune by Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941), whose name contains a slang term for female genitalia. As music historian Wald, author of Dylan Goes Electric! and Escaping the Delta, notes, sexual terms abound in many distinctly American forms of music--even the word jazz itself, as Sidney Bechet, a ragtime musician, explained: "It used to be spelled Jass, which was screwing." Taking Greil Marcus' "old, weird America" several levels weirder, Wald evokes a world of barrelhouse piano and honky-tonks that would make the denizens of a Weimar cabaret blush, one in which musicians hesitated to make public the true names of the songs they played and where even the ballad "The Old Chisholm Trail" contained "1042 verses of which 1040 weren't fit to print." Wald prints even the most unfit passages and traces popular ballads far beyond the points of origin delineated by scholars and song-chasers such as Alan Lomax. One case in point is a song that would eventually become known as "Winding Ball," its prurient lyrics circulated in near-samizdat format until the 1960s, even as a scholarly publication noted of those words that "most collectors know but do not print [them]." Along the way, Wald astutely analyzes the intermingling of ethnicity, gender, and social class that shaped popular music, pointing out that much scholarship ignores the fact that Black audiences "danced square dances and waltzes and sang 'She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain' and 'Danny Boy,'" even as white audiences gladly adopted music born of "the raw speech of saloons, work gangs, and prison."
An illuminating, deeply researched study of roots music, decidedly not suitable for work.
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"Wald, Elijah: JELLY ROLL BLUES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784238587/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fdf063cd. Accessed 6 Apr. 2024.