Rewriting the blues  Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues
leaves Michael Moorcock looking for answers In Search of the
Blues: Black Voices, White Visions by Marybeth Hamilton  In
Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions by Marybeth
Hamilton 246pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99  The generally accepted
creation narrative about blues music, which most of us take, as
it were, as gospel, is that it came out of the fields around
cotton-rich Clarksdale in the Mississippi delta and the
whorehouse bands of Storyville, New Orleans. The earliest "race"
recordings, produced for a black audience in the 1920s, and the
prison recordings of John Lomax and his son Alan, give the best
idea of what this music was like to listen to in the juke joints
of the south. Records by country players such as Charlie Patton
and Robert Johnson illustrate how delta blues first sounded -
raw, irregular and hugely inventive. The first commercial blues
recordings were almost all by women such as Mamie Smith, Ma
Rainey and Victoria Spivey.