Just because the whole area here is so poverty-stricken that no serious tourist industry has developed. There is no large scale blues culture in Texas today, at least the parts I've been in. People report that the blues they've heard in New Orleans are largely gimicky and not that good. Memphis blues bars are the same way in my experience.
Well, I don't have the on-the-ground experience that you do. But I did recently review
this book which makes it pretty clear that there's a hell of a lot of stuff, mostly little-known, going on in Texas today, and not just in Austin. Admittedly that book does slightly over-egg the pudding by including entries on "Texans" as dubious as B.B. King or Albert King but the real interest is in the vast number of featured artists who are very minor, some never recorded, keeping alive a distinctively Texan style of blues (or, more accurately, styles, since Texan blues has always been pretty varied).
I wouldn't describe it as "earthy and rural" here at all. Its certainly rural but "earthy" is about the last thing that comes to mind. The Delta is just so poor that there isn't much else here other than the blues. It just feels qualitatively much different to go into a shack on a plantation and listen to blues in a room where most of the other people there are old blues men, then to go to a blues bar in, say, Memphis, where is just a band in a normal bar full of college kids. Ok, maybe there's no real hard scholarly evidence that a bunch of old black folks on a plantation playing the blues and drinking together is more authentic then fishermen in hawaii or sled-driving eskimos in alaska or whatever you want to come up with, but it certainly feels that way to I and everyone else I know who's come from somewhere else and experienced the blues culture down here.
But don't you think that is is, partly, because people
expect the blues to be played by poverty-stricken sharecroppers with dodgy teeth in little shacks? It's just a replaying of the assumptions of the early white blues enthusiasts I mentioned, who all thought that the blues should be primitive and somehow "old" and speak with an unsophisticated, rural authenticity. In part this was because of assumptions about black people in general as somehow channelling uncorrupted artistic vision direct from Africa, unaffected by civilisation. (I don't mean to attribute that view to you, of course, but it was part of that earlier mindset.) They found evidence for this in the old recordings they listened to by selecting it, and completely ignoring cosmopolitan, jazzy blues artists such as Lonnie Johnson, hokum artists such as Georgia Tom, forward-thinking, urban, polished electric pioneers such as Tampa Red, white blues artists such as Jimmie Rodgers, and (the biggest oversight of all) anyone female, especially the enormously successful and cosmopolitan "classic" artists of the 1920s such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. To those early collectors "the blues" meant poor men from the deep South playing solo acoustic guitars and complaining a lot, and despite the fact that most blues didn't fit this category, they considered only this kind of thing the true, authentic blues.
In search of the blues by MaryBeth Hamilton is a fantastic account of how this happened, and how it resulted in the myth of "the Delta blues" that people today take for granted.
So the point is that poor old black men strumming guitars in shacks on the Delta were never
more blues than all the other ways in which the music existed. It's just that this aspect of the blues was later seized upon and exalted as the pinnacle of authenticity.
I just think... and maybe I can't convincingly argue for 10 pages about this... but I think that there is something to be said for historical preservation, and I have a decent amount of anecdotal evidence (no scholarly studies sorry) that suggests that the delta is more preserved with regard to its blues culture than elsewhere in the country.
Now this is a completely different argument - the Delta blues
today is more authentic than other kinds of blues or blues found elsewhere, because it has changed less. I don't know if it is true that it has changed less so I can't evaluate that part of the claim. I think you're right that it is a good thing to preserve the art forms of the past, but that doesn't make them better than what has developed later. If you think that then you do risk getting close to the views of Sam Charters, who in the 1960s lambasted those blues singers who dared to live in big cities, use electric instruments, and think about making a bit of money instead of living in little shacks twanging broken guitar strings like they ought to do.
Whether authenticity is a matter simply of unchangeability, I don't know. If it is then you get the odd conclusion that, say, Corey Harris is more authentic than Son House, because Harris is playing today the exact same stuff that House originally developed in the 1920s. So Harris is more authentic because he is less of an innovator than House was. But that seems a bit weird. Surely authenticity in music has less to do with how good you are at copying the styles of the people who came before you, and more to do with how your style reflects your own personality and experience of the world.
