Recent years have seen a minor explosion of published scholarship on blues music. In addition to the appearance of new editions of classics such as Francis Davis's History of the Blues, exciting new work by a number of scholars and critics has reinvigorated discourse around the blues in academic and journalistic circles alike. A survey of that literature demonstrates a variety of approaches. Taking just a few examples, the work of Elijah Wald and Ted Gioia centres on the role of individual performers in the definition and purveyance of the blues. Ulrich Adelt and Bill Minutaglio discuss locality and race representation in blues performance, and Paul Oliver explores the role of phonography in early blues.

Much of this work is consonant with arguments made by Marybeth Hamilton, Albert Murray and others who have advocated a model of blues scholarship divorced from romantic rhetoric of the blues as either the organic product of a handful of lionised individual performers or as an autochthonic tradition in need of curatorial protection. At first impression, Peter Muir's Long Lost Blues could be mistaken for such an approach. The title is resonant with common conceptions of folk blues as a vehicle for forgotten truths inaccessible by commercial transmission. However, in this case, as throughout the book, Muir speaks more specifically and demands to be read more literally. He clarifies his agenda:

Muir notes that, before the coalescence of the blues into a stylistically coherent folk genre, there existed a lively and productive trade in popular songs referencing the blues as such. It is these ‘titular blues’ – popular songs published between 1912 and 1920 and either titled or subtitled ‘blues’ – that are the long lost blues (plural) to which the title refers.

Stylistically, much of this music falls outside what we now consider blues, ranging, as Muir puts it, ‘from old-fashioned parlor ballads to hypermodern jazz’ (p. 2). Many of the book's musical examples synthesise elements of early blues with both black and white vaudeville, ragtime, minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley song forms. Muir argues that, in this historical context, the blues is a trope associated by its performers, listeners and critics with a wide variety of musical forms. Thus the unifying factor in this body of songs is rhetorical rather than stylistic.

Muir's primary methodology is analytical. His rewarding close readings of nearly 100 long lost blues demonstrate a gradual but incomplete stylistic coalescence of the blues around a combination of lyrical, harmonic and formal practices we often take for granted, including the blues' signature 12-bar structure.

Although period performances of some of this music survive in the form of wax cylinders, piano rolls or grooved media, many of these pieces exist only in the form of sheet music marketed toward domestic performance. As such, some of Muir's analysis is restricted to paper, and it is left to the reader to imagine performance context. However, Muir himself offers delightful performances of nearly all of his musical examples on the book's website, http://www.longlostblues.com, which suggest that this music is indeed ‘of independent worth’.

Outside of his blues scholarship, Muir is the director of the Institute for Music and Health in Verbank, NY. In one chapter, he draws on his studies in the area of music and wellness to explore the rhetoric of sickness and healing in discourse around popular blues. He identifies and contrasts several approaches to blues music as a cure for ‘the blues’, which he argues were central in both the marketing and reception of popular blues in the early decades of the 20th century. In a surprising turn, Muir then draws a comparison between blues and the performance of melancholia in the lute songs of John Dowland.

In later chapters, Muir explores the career of W.C. Handy and the role of locality in the production and style of popular blues. Muir's description of Handy's commercially motivated Northward migration (to New York by way of Chicago) recalls Louis Armstrong's similar trajectory a decade later. However, Muir notes that, while at first commercially beneficial, the effects of this move are quite different for Handy than for Armstrong. This is consistent with its discussion of locality, in which he argues that the creativity and appeal of popular blues composed by Southern musicians is attributable to their geographic closeness to the roots of folk blues.

In Muir's intermittent attention to questions of race, some may see missed opportunities to explore the significance of this largely unstudied body of music to more recent understandings of the blues as a black folk idiom. And although his work is thoroughly grounded in analysis and primary source research, Muir's engagement with other jazz and blues scholarship – at least with work on more recent blues music – is limited. Because little has been written about this music, it is interesting to imagine the impact this scholarship might have on prevailing historiographies of the blues. In this respect, Muir leaves his readers to consider the implications of his work. One is left wondering how to situate this work (and this music) in prevailing discourse on the blues.

However, in the end, Muir's Long Lost Blues is a work of extraordinary scholarship and a valuable illumination of a largely forgotten corner of American music. No doubt this study will prove to be a helpful resource for those interested in early 20th-century music publishing and phonography, text/music relationships in popular song, and the collision of ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ elements that Muir demonstrates is at the heart of the blues tradition. A recent collection of essays on the blues is entitled ‘Nobody Knows Where the Blues Come From’. This will likely always be true. However, in Long Lost Blues, Peter Muir gives us what until now has been a missing piece of the puzzle.