ALL BEAUTY IS UNIVERSAL:

I was 14 or 15 when I got my first harmonica. Two albums informed my nascent understanding of the blues. Harp Attack! featured four great harmonica players: Carey Bell, Junior Wells, James Cotton, and Billy Branch. The other album, a compilation, was The Slide Guitar: Bottles, Knives, and Steel. On this one, I first heard Bukka White, Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson, and Son House. This last performer's song "Pearline" haunted me, and still does. Son House's slide guitar playing felt both loose and tight, chaotic and ordered. Growing up in a predominantly white suburb, the only other person interested in the blues was also white. As a kid who was made fun of and didn't quite fit in, nothing seemed strange to me about finding solace in the blues. I was an outsider among my peers.

As I got older and was confronted with whether white people could really play the blues, I felt defensive at first and then questioned my own motivations and interest in the music. As a harmonica player, I wondered whether I was overstepping a cultural boundary. But I love playing harmonica.

In light of this background, I was excited to read Adam Gussow's most recent book, Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music. Like myself, Gussow's a white blues harmonica player, but considerably better-known. He formed half of the blues duo, Satan and Adam. The other half comprised Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee. Together they played on the streets of Harlem for about five years, and then toured around the U.S. and the world.

Gussow continues to play music solo or with his band The Blues Doctors, and he's also a professor at the University of Mississippi. As professor and musician, he wrote this book to explore two divergent approaches to blues music that he refers to as black bluesism and blues universalism. To summarize these contrary takes, Gussow matches each with a slogan. Black bluesism asserts this sentiment: "The blues are black music." And blues universalism can be summarized this way: "No black. No white. Just the blues." Gussow, with fluid dexterity, weaves through these two positions to show a more complex picture of blues history, despite each of these extremities having a piece of the truth.

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