Talk:Tin Pan Alley/Archives/2014

Tin Pan Alley and the Blues

Hi Beyond My Ken, you reverted my edit on Tin Pan Alley, calling my edit summary "plain silly". We may disagree about Tin Pan Alley and the blues, but I believe I can claim to have modern scholarship on my side. I recently made some documentaries for the BBC about the history of the blues. Among the books we consulted most heavily were Leaving the Delta by Elijah Wald, A Very Short Introduction To The Blues by Elijah Wald, Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, "Coon Songs", And The Dark Pathway To Blues and Jazz by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, and In Search of the Blues by Marybeth Hamilton. All these books agree that a distinction between "commercial blues" (e.g. St Louis Blues by WC Handy, Crazy Blues by Perry Bradford) and "authentic blues" is untenable. In our film, Scott Barretta, who co-created and co-curated the Mississippi Blues Trail [1] said, "What’s really significant about Handy hearing this music is that within a decade he was writing his blues tunes and making good money off of this music, so we often talk about blues as a folk music, but from its inception it was also commercialised."

I've taken the liberty of emailing you a lecture about the mythologies that surround the origins of the blues, given by David Evans, University of Memphis [2]. The relevant paragraph states:

"Moving from myths of blues origin to those of blues evolution we encounter a school of thought holding that some sort of pure “folk” or “country” blues became corrupted by popular, commercial, and urban influences. The first to express this view were folklorists in the 1920s, such as Howard Odum, Guy Johnson, and Newman White, who had done most of their blues collecting before the advent of commercial blues recording. They warned that the imitation of inferior commercial recordings by folk blues singers would lead to the rapid demise of the blues genre. These predictions proved false, but the myth of corruption persisted with writers like Rudi Blesh and Samuel Charters. The latter, in his influential book The Country Blues (1959), consistently found urban Chicago blues of the 1930s and early 1940s, as well as most modern electric blues, to be “cheap” and “derivative” in comparison to authentic rural blues."

These are some of the scholarly arguments behind my edit. Perhaps you could explain why you consider the views of Wald, Abbott, Seroff, Hamilton, and Evans to be misguided or "plain silly". Btw I agree with you about the virus of tagging WP articles. Best, Mick gold (talk) 12:14, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Let's take this one step at a time.

First, the technical part: You need to read (or re-read) WP:BRD. When your Bold edit has been Reverted by another editor, the next step, if you continue to think the edit is necessary, is to Discuss it on the article talk page, not to re-revert it, which is the first step to edit warring. During the discussion, the article remains in the status quo ante. So, starting a discussion here was good, reverting my edit was not the right thing to do.

But, second, it doesn't really matter, because I've thought some more about the change you made, and I have reconsidered and withdraw my objection -- no so much because of the scholarship you cite above -- although that played a part -- but because the sentence you removed was unsourced analysis which requires a source and hasn't had one for quite a while. Therefore, I've restored your edit, and, I hope, all is right with the world.

Best, BMK (talk) 23:20, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

BTW, I apologize for the "plain silly" comment in the edit summary, which was inappropriate. BMK (talk) 01:03, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi BMK, Thanks for your response and I note your advice re WP:BRD. All is right with the world, and I'll try to make further (sourced) additions to Tin Pan Alley article. Best, Mick gold (talk) 08:04, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Great, I look forward to your contributions. BMK (talk) 08:16, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Tin Pan Alley plaque?

I have walked up and down that stretch of 28th Street a dozen times and have never found the Tin Pan Alley plaque:

Is it still there -- and if so, where?

thx

>> The name originally referred to a specific place: West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, and a plaque (see below) on the sidewalk on 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth commemorates it.

173.68.197.13 (talk) 17:08, 10 October 2014 (UTC)