Julia Simon's detailed and thought-provoking study of concepts of time in the blues utilises several case studies of individual songs and recordings to demonstrate a range of ideas relating to temporal experience and the representation of time. To the reader uninformed in the historical context of the blues, the book contains ample historical background to act as an introduction to post-reconstruction America, the Jim Crow laws and racial segregation, and how the blues emerged from these conditions and developed beyond them.

Simon's thorough approach to bringing notions of time to the analyses in the study is impressive: each chapter identifies a different ‘model or central concept for understanding time’ (p. 5). There are six distinct categories: ‘the narrated events [which she calls T1],  the narrative itself (T2), the performance (T3), the historical context of origin (T4), the context of performance (T5), and the tradition (T6)’ (p. 207). Whether it be time as referenced literally in lyrics, the linear shape and structure of songs, a sense of hindsight or historical context, or the way that the blues can become self-referential, these categories enable the author to undertake multiperspective analyses of key recordings and other material. Simon is the first to admit that some of her models are more obviously facilitating of her argument than others. The final category, the tradition itself, is acknowledged by the author as not obviously related to time, but ‘it nonetheless brings into play a historical tradition of composition that conditions the reception of the blues. […] [I]t does represent a distinct temporal level called into being by blues performance’ (p. 7). So time is shown to be a key trope in the blues as art, as performance and as mode of reception. Experiences related to time are examined as ideas that recur repeatedly in blues music. Waiting, being imprisoned or enslaved, looking back, looking forward, the feeling of working for a reward that never comes, or labouring for someone else's benefit (as explained in the section on Bumble Bee Slim's ‘Fattening Frogs for Snakes’) emerge as themes in many of the songs analysed.

In addition to the thoroughly worked-out system of analysis that she adopts, Simon brings an interdisciplinary character to the book. As a working blues musician herself, the sense of having been immersed in the material as a performer comes through in the text, as does a deep knowledge of the artists, recordings and scholarship of the subject. Not content with writing a study merely about music and lyrics, she deftly draws in consideration of performance practice and parallel analysis of issues surrounding reception as reflecting the African American experience under post-reconstruction conditions.

The dissection of the ways that sharecropping  –  the nature of labour contracts, the relationship between the growers and the sharecroppers, the comparisons with slavery  –  can be a filter for musical analysis is absorbing, even if it sometimes requires a certain poetic leap of understanding. Indeed, the author readily discusses the fact that the analogy is difficult to make concrete: ‘I cannot prove that temporal experience moulded by sharecropping or other material conditions in the Jim Crow South determined the form and content of the blues’ (p. 30). Still, her central idea that ‘time in the blues feels like other forms of time’ (p. 30) pervades the argument effectively, and makes her rather apologetic  –  but admirably candid  –  former statement seem unnecessary.

Rhythm and repetition are central to the arguments put forward. The analogy between protest or resistance and a vocal performer dissenting or pushing against the circular gestures of a repetitive musical accompaniment is employed with skill throughout the book, making use of case studies that present music, lyrics and context in an interrelated whole.

One of the few difficulties for the reader is navigating the various ‘times’, as listed above, which are labelled not by their properties or conceptual basis, but by numbers. While these are explained adequately in the first chapter, ‘Theoretical Considerations’, a less abstract system for identifying her strands of analysis might have helped, since the author usually has to remind us what the numbers refer to anyway. The text, furthermore, is dense in the way that only such a scholarly study can be, and thus might alienate the general reader keen to discover new ways of understanding blues music. Some scholars or musicians might take issue with the fact that Simon does not  –  on the whole  –  distinguish between the blues as folk song and the blues as commercialised ‘popular music’. Nor is there a particular shift in tone when examining the genre in terms of different geographical locations, urban or rural (again, the author acknowledges this and justifies it appropriately). Yet these are minor reservations; Time in the Blues impresses in its panoramic theoretical vision. Simon's range of aural and conceptual lenses through which blues can be heard and understood is remarkable.