Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues.

Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues. By Roger Wood. Photographs by James Fraher. Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture, no. 8. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. x, 345. $34.95, ISBN 0-292-79159-3.)

Writer Roger Wood and photographer James Fraher have collaborated for a decade to document the twentieth-century history of African American music in Houston, particularly in the post-World War II period. Down in Houston represents the culmination of their impressive effort to date. The University of Texas Press has presented their work in an attractive large-page format on heavy, glossy paper and has carefully correlated the placement of photographs with the text. This book is a pleasure to handle.

As Wood points out, Houston has always been a business-dominated, forward-looking city whose corporate and elected leaders have shown little regard for preserving its past. Sudden, rapid growth in the last century and the convenient absence of zoning laws allowed the city to expand in a classic urban sprawl. Prosperity and jobs drew rural workers from the city's hinterlands, including many African Americans who settled throughout the metroplex in communities of small frame houses. Schools, churches, and mostly one-room blues bars in these neighborhoods combined to nourish a culture rich in music that produced a steady stream of talented African American instrumentalists and vocalists. Wood's narrative is anchored in the numerous oral histories he did with these artists, many of whom are portrayed in Fraher's evocative photographic portraits.

The scattered demographics of black Houston and the small-scale economics of most blues bars limited the careers of many black musicians in Houston. Sortie formed or joined bands to tour nationally and internationally, but often they were not associated with Houston. and so the city failed to gain recognition as a major music center. Nevertheless, Wood maintains that from the 1950s through the early 1970s a local African American entrepreneur founded record companies (Duke and Peacock) that, until the later rise of Motown Records in Detroit, were the nation's top African American recording studios. Alas, during this very time, desegregation, urban renewal, and the changing musical taste of younger audiences sapped the soul of Houston's blues culture. Today the number of surviving blues venues is steadily declining, and the artists themselves are a dying breed.

Throughout this richly textured book, Wood mixes the historical with the musicological, is attentive to the important contributions of both women and men, and suggests how class differences within black Houston produced different kinds of blues. One resource not utilized in this volume is the "Black Music in Houston Collection" housed in the Houston Public Library's Metropolitan Research Center. This collection includes rare period photographs of some of Houston's premier blues artists and legendary venues. This omission notwithstanding, Down in Houston is a substantial addition to the hard, good work that Alan Govenar, Lorenzo Thomas, and others have published about Afro-Texan music and cultural history. And it is in the tradition of the valuable documentary work pioneered by John A. Lomax for the Library of Congress, the oral history work accomplished by those who interviewed elderly ex-slaves during the New Deal, and the Great Depression photography of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

Texas Southern University

HOWARD BEETH