The remarkable increase in recent years of work on the cultural and sociopolitical contexts of African American music has usefully extended the range of American studies. The historicizing impulse behind much of this work has been particularly useful in dealing with blues music, in that increased awareness of its complex social and cultural origins has allowed us to move beyond not just the racist dismissals of earlier times but the later romanticization of the blues in and after the Blues Revival. In his valuable, carefully researched addition to this growing field R. A. Lawson traces the changes in the conditions of African American life under Jim Crow restrictions and shows how blues music reflected and responded to them in the first half of the last century. Blues has often been seen as an intensely individualistic music, arising out of the particular limited forms of individual freedom (of movement and sexuality) in the post-Reconstruction period. This has been contrasted with the communal nature of the earlier spirituals, which were an expression of the slave community. Lawson builds on this framework, but shows how in the first half of the twentieth century the changes in fortunes of African Americans (including participation in two wars and mass migrations to the North) were reflected in a different sense of identity and community, and he argues that the blues has been a flexible enough form to be able to adapt from a “me-centred” form and express this collective “we” identity.

The bulk of the book is a detailed account of the texture of African American life under various forms of segregation and discrimination, first in the South and then in the northern cities and in the armed forces, and it is particularly good at using a much wider range of songs and artists to show how the blues reflected the feelings of the black communities. In this way it usefully complements the emphasis in recent work on the role of white collectors of the blues, and the role of the left in supporting it. While Lawson does refer early in the book to female blues singers and their commercial success, almost the entire emphasis here is on male artists, and it is not entirely clear why. If the implication is that the women's songs provide a less accurate or more mediated expression of black life then this needs to be argued out. (Why no mention of Bessie Smith's “Backwater Blues,” for instance, when talking of the response to the floods?) Certainly some discussion of the differences, and whether attention to women singers over the same period would provide similar themes and patterns to the ones Lawson finds in male singers, would be helpful.

Lawson begins with the well-known story of Leadbelly and his rise to fame, but then more unusually traces the careers of Big Bill Broonzy and Peetie Wheatstraw among others, and he cleverly threads references to these musicians through his chapters. It is also very refreshing to see attention payed to lesser-known songs dealing with topical events or issues, as in his interesting account of “Red Cross Blues” and its many versions.

In his overall approach Lawson is at pains to try and steer a course between previous commentators, who have presented blues as a culture of apolitical accommodation or of assertion and resistance. In his view the blues told stories that were “culturally oppositional,” in that they were opposed to white dominance but also at odds with the Christian and bourgeois values of acceptance and respectability. He calls this a “counterculture” and sees it as able to express its values through African American traditions of coded and indirect expression, but crucially he sees it changing with the move to the North and the increasing engagement of African Americans with the values of mainstream America – as consumers, factory workers and soldiers, and the growing awareness of their rights as Americans. The wealth of detail he draws on in arguing his case allows Lawson to give us a nuanced and absorbing account not only of the blues but also of the changes in the lives of the ordinary African Americans who sang and played them.