Blues & Jazz Origins Shrouded in Myth

Nicola Gaeta’s new book, Black Beauty, explores the often-mythologized origins of blues and jazz music. The book delves into stories surrounding legendary musicians like Robert Johnson, who allegedly made a deal with the devil to master the guitar, and W.C.

Handy, who transcribed early blues forms. Gaeta presents these histories not as factual accounts but as oral traditions, acknowledging the contradictions and multiple versions that characterize their telling.

Buddy Bolden, considered by many to be the inventor of jazz, never recorded any music, leaving his legacy reliant on secondhand accounts. The book also examines the controversial deaths of Sam Cooke and the eccentric persona of Sun Ra, a jazz artist who claimed to be from Saturn.

Gaeta highlights a largely forgotten 1969 Harlem music festival, dubbed the “Black Woodstock”, that drew 300,000 attendees but remained unrecorded for decades. The author suggests that the history of Black music remains a fragmented narrative, open to interpretation and debate.