Is this a good use of scare quotes?

[Laurence Horn]

One factor may be the release in 1998 of the album called
"Rediscovered".  (I'm not sure whether its official name is
"Rediscovered" or "Mississippi John Hurt Rediscovered"; amazon seems
to be claiming it's the former:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000009NLR/sr=1-5/qid=1137941445/ref=pd_bbs_5/102-8982966-7175369?%5Fencoding=UTF8
.)  So '"Rediscovered" musician' post-1998 might (also) allude to the
musician associated with the "Rediscovered" CD.

Larry

At 11:22 PM -0500 1/21/06, Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
>I've been listening lately to a lot of Mississippi John Hurt.
>Hurt was a bluesman who lived in Mississippi, working for
>meager wages as a farmer, and playing guitar at occasional
>local events. In 1928, a record guy was led to him (the guy
>had come to find country singers, and two (white) guys said,
>"You've gotta go hear Hurt"), and he recorded eight songs in
>Nashville, and then came to New York and recorded twenty
>songs.
>
>They didn't really sell, and the Depression clobbered much of
>the business in country/blues records, so Hurt worked on farms
>as a hired hand. In the late 1940s, people tried to find him
>and couldn't, and assumed he was dead. Then in the early
>1960s, Tom Hoskins, a young folklorist, followed a
>biographical lead in one of Hurt's songs and just went to a
>town that he had sung about, and lo, there he was, age 71. He
>was brought north, played sensationally at the Newport Folk
>Festival in 1963, made more records, was revered by loads of
>people (Dylan being the most prominent), and died in 1966,
>thrilled rather than embittered that his career had finally
>established itself after so long in obscurity.
>
>I've read several essays about him and reviews of his music in
>reference books in my collection, and here are a few curious
>comments:
>
>1993 F.-J. Hadley _Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD_ 104
>Hurt's recordings after his celebrated 1963 "rediscovery" by
>the folk music crowd and the national press are possessed by a
>characteristic genteelness.
>
>1998 N. Walters & B. Mansfield _MusicHound Folk: The Essential
>Album Guide_ 384/2 It reads like a fairy tale or a Hollywood
>script: "...'Rediscovered' musician takes folk world by
>storm."
>
>1999 J. Swenson _Rolling Stone Jazz & Blues Album Guide_ 339/2
>Hurt wold be "rediscovered" by blues scholars in the '60s,
>leading to acclaimed recordings and performances, prospects he
>had rejected 50 years earlier.
>
>2001 I. Stambler & L. Stambler _Folk & Blues_ 286/2 Soon after
>Hurt's "rediscovery," he began to make new recordings.
>
>2003 V. Bogdanov et al. _AllMusic Guide to the Blues_ 267/1
>_Today!_ is Mississippi John Hurt's first and finest studio
>release since his "rediscovery" on his Avalon farm by
>folklorist Tom Hoskins in 1963.
>
>So, to get to the point: Why the scare quotes around
>"rediscovery"? It seems to be an absolutely accurate use of
>the word. This wasn't some case of the white intelligentsia
>eventually realizing what had been known to "the people" for
>decades. He really was vanished, he recorded nothing for 35
>years, no one knew where he was. Now, if it has been "His
>'discovery' in 1928 by OKeh Records...", _maybe_ that would
>have been all right--he had been known in a very small local
>circle, and was brought to a (somewhat) larger audience.  And
>if "discovery" had been applied to the events of 1963, that
>would be a deserving use of scare quotes--he had been known
>beforehand, and his 1928 record was a collector's item praised
>by aficionados, so to present the later work as a "new"
>discovery could merit typographical irony.
>
>But this? If the word _rediscover_ has any meaning at all,
>it would seem to apply to this situation perfectly. The
>scare quotes strike me as an attempt to mock his later fans
>by denigrating their commitment, and, of course,
>to allow the writer to express his (these writers are all
>male) superiority by thus insulting those who came to Hurt
>after 1962. (The facts that Hurt was apparently genuinely
>thrilled and touched at his later fans, and that the music
>of his later career was equally outstanding as his early
>music, should not matter.)
>
>I know, I know, I should find something better to do with
>my time.
>
>Jesse Sheidlower
>OED
>
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