Book Reviews
History Train: Joe Gioia and the Old World
Gimme a guitar that sounds like a train.
-- John Doe and Exene Cervenka
Gioia, Joe. The Guitar and the New World: A Fugitive History. Albany:
State U of New York P, 2013. 254 pages; bibliography; index.
In her essay “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of
History,” Jane Tompkins details her scholarly quest to understand some
facts about early American history. As she explains, she undertook the
journey for the practical purpose of preparing to teach a course in Colonial
American Literature. She demonstrates how such a seemingly mundane
academic exercise can easily lead to “an epistemological quandary” (103)
when faced with versions of history that sometimes cannot be reconciled.
As far down the poststructural rabbit hole as she descends, it is somewhat
surprising to find that her journey concludes with the following pragmatic
pearl of wisdon: “I must piece together the story of European-Indian relations as best I can, believing this version up to a point, that version not at
all, another almost entirely, according to what seems reasonable and plausible, given everything else that I know” (118). The familiar simplicity
of this ending is reinforced by the complexities involved in getting there.
Tompkins’s essay, in both structure and theme, serves as a useful context
for discussion of Joe Gioia’s The Guitar and the New World, a work that
also raises some epistemological quandaries on its own long, strange trip
through the history of American popular music.
One of the fascinating and problematic facets of Gioia’s book is
just how challenging it can be to characterize it. To be sure, it is a critical
history of the guitar in/and America. It is, however, also a personal memoir
about the author and his family in/and America. Those distinct subjects
and genres are meant to intersect, and, for the most part, they do. It is interesting to notice those similar notes of pragmatic wisdom that we find at the
end of Tompkins’s essay also being struck by Gioia in his conclusion, as
he concedes the gamble he has taken in attempting to tell so many stories
at once:
Looking back, it’s easy to draw undue connections, or perhaps
more accurately—create strange connections, between the con-
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fusing lines of one’s own life and the longer dangling threads of
history. This is how people live and make sense of anything, I
guess; the successful associations are the ones that endure. The
only thing that prevents those provisional constellations of fugitive and recollected events from being fantasies is how thoroughly they intersect with the lives of others—to what other folk
suffered and how they prevailed. Their stories should lend credence to our own. (215)
This concluding meditation on where he has taken us can serve, from a
critical standpoint at least, as a useful first step on the journey because it
reveals the book’s greatest strength and biggest weakness to be one and
the same, and it is likely that most readers’ judgments on the issue will
hinge on their willingness to remain in that space of negative capability
that Gioia’s “strange connections” inevitably conjure.
The central and recurring thread of The Guitar and the New World
concerns Gioia’s own story and that of his family, which is the focus of
the first and last chapters. The journey begins in Minnesota, where Gioia
decides to learn how to play the guitar and in the process makes the remarkable discovery that his great uncle Carmelo Gugino, a Sicilian immigrant who resided in Buffalo, was a luthier whose masterpiece was the
Gugino, an acoustic guitar that made a name for itself during the golden
age of jazz, today a vintage collector’s item. That first chapter sets the
stage for the series of dangling historical threads with which the Gioias associate throughout the book, for that initial chapter is not solely about Joe
or Carmelo; it is also about Orville Gibson and C. F. Martin, perhaps the
two most famous luthiers in history. It is about the guitar’s interconnected
European ancestries, and it is about the birth of the blues. The book fans
out in a series of concentric circles, like a sound wave, as if a single strum
of one of his uncle’s guitars started it all, which in Gioia’s case is literally
true.
In following the footsteps of his great uncle in Buffalo, Chapter 2,
“The Temple of Music,” paves the way toward what might be considered
the book’s thesis. The chapter is named after one of the exhibitions at Buffalo’s turn-of-the century Pan American Exposition, most famous as the
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setting for the assassination of William McKinley. Readers of Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation will find much of this chapter eerily familiar,
not just in terms of plot, but also for the ways in which the journey of historical discovery is itself an inherent part of the story. In his otherwise positive review of Vowell’s journeys through the assassinations of Lincoln,
Garfield, and McKinley, Bruce Handy searches in vain for the “Larger
Meaning” of the sojourn, and eventually settles on the compromise that
“it’s best to read this book for the journey, not the destination” (14).
By contrast, readers of The Guitar and the New World slowly but
surely see that Gioia has been serving these opening chapters as an appetizer, in preparation for the main course of “Larger Meaning.” The overall
purpose of retelling the story of the Pan American Exposition, with a focus
on the Native American presence at the Temple of Music, is to argue for
the indigenous origins of American roots music. Did this guy just suggest
that Native Americans invented the blues?! Yeah, pretty much, he did.
The book’s middle chapters trace various interconnecting songs
and stories in blues and country music back to Native American practice
and influence. Chapter 3, “Hey Hey,” is perhaps the best example of the
technique, where Gioia weaves the presence of the titular phrase in Native American chants through a “mystery train” of popular songs from
the McKinley era to the birth of rock and roll. The essence of Gioia’s
argument is “that what we now call blues and country music are divergent
branches of a single root, one indigenous to North America” (89). And it
is in the making of that case that one can spot its fragility, hanging as it
does by a series of dangling threads, and we see Gioia grasping at times
to tie them. For instance, in his discussion of Alice Fletcher’s late-nineteenth-century A Study of Omaha Indian Music, Gioia claims, “It does
not stretch credulity to suppose that several of the musical tropes Fletcher
observed among the Omaha people were common to most Native North
American societies” (112). Or, in his discussion of imitative train sounds
in American song, he conjectures that “mimicking trains may have been
the first reply Native people made to the presence of the enormous machines as they made their way through the country” (119). His reliance on
the conditional verb can at times “stretch credulity.”
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This is not to suggest that the thread breaks. Gioia’s re-visioning
of America’s six-string past is a worthwhile trip to take. For some, his
multifaceted work may seem too convoluted, too open-ended, raising more
questions than it can possibly answer. Yet the very questions that are raised
by this book, about interconnected origins and interwoven relationships,
are worth the asking and fascinating to ponder along with the author. Using
Tompkins’s criteria, this is a “reasonable and plausible” critical work
worthy of scholarly consideration; at the same time, it is an accessible
and enjoyable read. There is something here for the novice as well as the
veteran of popular music studies. Readers who are well versed in other
versions of American popular music history (Greil Marcus inevitably
comes to mind here) will find that some of the pathways are familiar. As
a case in point, the story of Harry Smith’s Anthology is recounted here.
Yet, even when he is tracing a path that is otherwise well blazed, Gioia’s
fugitive purpose of shining light on indigenous confluences of American
roots music ultimately, like so many great epic destinations, and blues
songs, brings it on home.
Works Cited
Doe, John, and Exene Cervenka. “Make the Music Go Bang. More Fun in the
New World. Elektra, 1983. Recording.
Handy, Bruce. “Dead Presidents.” The New York Times Book Review (8 May
2005): 7.14. Print.
Tompkins, Jane. “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History.”
Critical Inquiry 13.1 (1986): 101-119. Print.
David Janssen
Gordon State College
David Janssen, Ph.D. and professor of English, is the co-author of Apocalypse Jukebox:
The End of the World in American Popular Music and the Book Reviews Editor of Studies
in Popular Culture.
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