Do you know who this man is?
Unless you're familiar with Chicago's blues scene over the past thirty years, you probably don't. His name is Sumito Ariyoshi, better known as "Ariyo." He's been part of harmonica star Billy Branch's band for many years; before that he had stints with Jimmy Rogers and Valerie Wellington. Some have called him the best living Chicago blues pianist. He is a native of Japan.
Luckily for both of us, IUP is making my essay available for free. It's titled "Bien al Sur: Notes Towards a Genealogy of Blues Music's Global Spread." You can download it using the following link: http://bit.ly/BLUES_GSO
My essay is merely the tip of the spear: one sharp edge of a scholarly intervention that will, I hope, provoke greater interest in blues music's many and varied international contexts. For much too long, Americans have imagined that the story of the blues is essentially an American story. That is far less true in 2021 than it was in 1920.
Many of you, reading this newsletter, know I'm right about this, because you're citizens of the UK, Europe, South America, Australia, Asia, or Africa, or you're American expatriates living in one of those overseas locations. Some of you participate avidly in non-US blues scenes. Some of you, like Ariyo, Kid Andersen, Aki Kumar, and so many more, are non-US blues musicians who have come to America and made yourselves an invaluable part of the American blues scene.
I hear you! WE hear you. The table of contents for "Blues Music in Transnational Context" is posted below. Two of the articles focus on Africa; two focus on the UK; one each focus on Sweden and Japan, offering us capsule histories of those scenes along with fascinating profiles of Olle Helander, Peps Persson, and Ariyo. The final article is a memorably boisterous interview with George Elliott Clarke, Canada's leading black blues poet, a native of Nova Scotia who speaks not just for his Africadian (African/Canadian/Acadian) perspective but for a cosmopolitan vision of the blues as a universal solvent, a lyric poetry we all share.
In the final portion of my own article, I offer a quick, synoptic paragraph on each of these seven articles, so that you begin to get a sense of how the whole picture fits together. I'm immensely grateful to the handful of scholars from around the world (Senegal, India, Japan, the UK, Canada, and America) who share my belief that there's a newer, larger, and far more complex story about the blues that urgently needs telling. This issue would not exist without their insightful writings.
Although my article is free, the rest of the issue sits behind a paywall, as it rightly should. It is housed at JSTOR, a leading scholarly archive. If you're lucky enough to have access to a university library that subscribes to JSTOR, you're all set; if not, you can pay $20 to download the entire issue or download an individual article for $15. You can access the issue here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/globalsouth.14.issue-1
