Introduction

The archival discourse is central to our developing understanding of blues music and blues culture as an unfolding cultural phenomenon. Drawing on the work of theorists Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Ernst, this chapter examines the development and continuing evolution of the blues archive in the digital age, and considers the role of the internet in creating repositories of public knowledge of blues music and blues culture.

For blues music and blues culture, it is the collection of recordings, oral histories, photographs and journalism that form the corpus of texts that can be referred to as an archive. Private collections of 78 rpm phonograph records, LP reissues, sepia photographs and theatre handbills constitute our understanding of the culture of a subaltern class of African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century. Subsequent arrangements of these artefacts juxtaposed with the ethnographic field-recordings and notes of folklorists such as Howard W. Odum, Guy Johnson, John Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Lawrence Gellert constitute the library of materials that inform our understanding of the blues, and it is the provenance of these documents alongside the subjective and revisionist interpretation of generations of amateur and professional sociologists and musicologists which shape our developing conception of blues music and blues culture.

As a central question for this chapter - when the interplay between texts is facilitated by digital media, to what extent is the narrative and historical reality of the blues produced as much as reflected? The once privileged historical permanence and stability of the physical archive is ruptured by increased access to a profusion of digital and digitised texts, removed from their

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context and subjected to new interpretive and knowledge-producing practices; as philosopher Jacques Derrida asserts “…archivization produces as much as it records the event” (1995, p. 17). Distinctions between author, reader, archivist, collector and scholar are blurred in late- and post- modern digital spaces as content is uncoupled from media and formed into semi-autonomous assemblages. In other words, as computer-users are increasingly able to construct meaning from diverse digital material which purport to represent primary sources, how should we consider the blues archive - which is itself the production of a subjective corpus of mediated texts?

This chapter explores the origins of the blues archive from the work of Howard Odum and Guy Johnson, through the folkloric ethnographies of John and Alan Lomax on behalf of the Library of Congress and examines case-studies of contemporary collectors and archivists Joe Bussard and Robert “Mack” McCormick; in the case of the latter, this is a case of what media theorist Jussi Parikka describes as “the double-bind of the modes of storage and transmission between old media and new media cultures” (2013, p. 2); in other words – just because information and artefacts exist, there is no automatic entitlement to access. Conceptions of the archive proposed by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Ernst are employed to illustrate the mediating influence of technology and the internet as an archival resource, with specific reference to named case studies, and the online archives of the Real Blues Forum, in order to illustrate the different uses of collections and archives in blues music and blues culture.

Theories of the Archive

Traditional conceptions of the archive are often based around the notion of a physical space whose tangible contents and records are maintained by dedicated historians and archivists, individuals tasked with establishing and preserving the narrative context and provenance of the texts in their care. As political theorist Irving Velody writes, “As the backdrop to all scholarly research stands the archive. Appeals to ultimate truth, adequacy and plausibility in the works of the humanities and social sciences rests on archival presuppositions” (1998, p. 1). This figuration of the archive indicates the faith placed in stored texts as the ultimate authoritative representation of the past;

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the intellectual powerhouse which contains the raw materials of a given scholarly discipline, culture, society or civilisation and its systems of thought. In antiquity, the library at Alexandria is depicted as one of humanity’s earliest centres of focused learning and scholarship, whilst modern conceptions of archive and archival administration originate in revolutionary France with the founding of the National Archives in 1789 (Ferreira-Buckley, 1999, p. 578). Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault rejects the figuration of the archive as “…the library of all libraries” (1972, p. 130), or “…the sum of all texts that a culture has kept upon its person as documents attesting to its own past” (ibid., p. 128-129), preferring the more abstract notion that “[t]he archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the existence of statements as unique events…composed together in accordance with multiple relations” (ibid., p. 129). This conception allows us to see the archive as a space – real or virtual - where truth is contingent and subject to negotiation; a view which coincides with Will Straw’s observation that record collecting is a “…controlled economy of revelation, a sense of how and when things are to be spoken of” (Straw, 1997, p. 8).

Growth in the academic study of popular culture has led to the expansion of materials deemed appropriate for research library and archive collections (Manoff, 2004, p. 13). This notion is helpful when considering the primacy of sound recordings in the formation of the archive of blues music and blues culture, and the importance placed on such recordings by collectors of ‘race records’ from the middle years of the twentieth century. Derrida (1995) indicates that the methods for transmitting information in fact shape the nature of the knowledge that can be produced by an archive and interpreted by its users, an echo of Franz Kittler’s suggestion that “[t]echnologically possible manipulations determine what in fact can become a discourse” (Kittler, 1990, p. 232). Specifically, Derrida states that the archive is shaped by external social, political and technological forces; if the archive cannot or does not accommodate a particular kind of information, then it is effectively excluded from the historical record. This approach to the “archivization of knowledge” (Derrida, 1995, p. 11) is of particular importance when discussing electronic and digital media texts

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in relation to blues music and blues culture – where the creation of narrative and canonicity is achieved through a catalogue and taxonomy of early recordings, and as Parikka indicates “…obsolescence is persistent” (2011).

In summary, Derrida and Foucault offer differing, yet complementary, conceptions of the archive. For Foucault, the archive “…is the general system of the formation and transformation of

statements” (p. 130), implying an inherently structuralist framework within whose bounds knowledge is created, developed and exchanged. In other words, for Foucault, libraries, archives and museums are fundamental participants in the discourse, whose utterances and gestures can be described as “truth-giving”. Derrida on the other hand focuses on the ontology and limitations of the artefacts which constitute and define the archive as a conceptual whole (Derrida, 1995, p. 17).