Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African-American Women.

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Indiana State University and St. Louis University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African American Review.The CD revolution of the past decade has helped to fuel an interest in traditional blues, both acoustic and electric, unequaled since the 1960s. As a result, 1996 has seen more books about the blues in print than has been the case for many years. Add to the list Austin Sonnier's A Guide to the Blues, a sometimes adequate, but often deeply flawed, introduction to the blues. More specifically, the thumbnail artist biographies which make up over half of this book's text are frequently so inaccurate and incomplete that their historical and biographical weaknesses greatly compromise their usefulness. Novices to the blues will assume to be true "facts" which are, in reality, incorrect, while long-time blues students and fans will be so frustrated by the sloppy documentation that whatever value Sonnier's theoretical and factual content may offer is frequently not worth the effort.Sonnier's original vision is admirable, as he strives to present a concise, distilled view of the blues to serve as an introductory volume for beginners and a condensed biographical and media reference for more seasoned blues scholars and fans. He opens with ninety pages (six chapters) that lay out the history of the blues, starting with African musical and social sources and then preceding through the evolution of African American music in the New World. His third chapter presents a solid overview of early blues history, including sections on the Mississippi Delta, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, the Piedmont area of the East Coast, and Chicago. The historical review continues with a chapter on the jazz-and vaudeville-influenced Classic Blues singers of the '20s and '30s. Sonnier's next overview chapter is a discussion of blues poetry as it reflects traditional African American religious beliefs, a theology born in the earliest years of the African American experience and blending West African animism withChristianity under names as diverse as Condomble, Santaria, Obeah, Voodoo, and Hoodoo. His discussion of this issue is very brief, running only eight pages, but it will be a fascinating introduction to the subject for readers whose only knowledge about traditional African American religion comes from Hollywood or pulp fiction. Concluding the introductory overview, A Guide to the Blues presents a six-page discussion of the role of the blues in shaping modern American music, including rhythm & blues, jazz, soul, rap, and rock 'n' roll. Unfortunately, discussions of the blues' influence on more far-afield musics, such as traditional hill music, country and western, gospel...