Adam Gussow’s Whose Blues?: Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music and George Henderson’s Blind Joe Death’s America: John Fahey, the Blues, and Writing White Discontent were both published in the last three years, a time of Black revolution. As revisiting the politics of cultural appropriation and dismantling the violent construction of whiteness become increasingly urgent, so too does the study of histories of Black creativity and of the ways that whiteness has been historically constructed against and through ideas of Blackness. It is within these imperatives that I situate these two books. Each looks to roots music as a lens through which to deal with the shifting history of white longing for a particular, socially contingent idea of Blackness.
In Whose Blues? Gussow answers the question proposed in the book’s title by staging a debate between two positions that he calls “black bluesism” and “blues...