BLUES: A leap in interest in pre-World War II acoustic blues

In mid-April, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story that might have been taken as a sign of a leap in interest in pre-World War II acoustic blues. It concerned the utterly obscure Depression-era singers Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. In fact, while John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” presented sensational aspects of the two women’s stories (a murder; closeted lesbian lives on the run), it had, at its heart, something else entirely. The unpublished information about the duo was tracked down in the early 1960s by the fabled, troubled blues researcher and record collector Mack McCormick and then clandestinely poached from his files by a research assistant. Constructed to maximize suspense, that storyand the peculiarities of white, educated blues obsessiveswas the element that justified the article’s prominence in a publication not otherwise known for introducing forgotten music by minor artists of earlier eras.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118560/blues-revival-histories-are-newly-popular-book-publishing