Is this a good use of scare quotes?

[Joanne M. Despres]

You would be able to judge the tone of the articles better than any
of us, Jesse, but I wonder if it's a case of simple guardedness
against the appearance of presumption in attributing the
acknowledgment of the singer's greatness to white intellectuals.  It
might be of a piece with the use of scare quotes to describe
Columbus' "discovery" of America, a sort of defense against the
suggestion that nobody of significance had ever seen the place
before.

Joanne

On 21 Jan 2006, at 23:22, 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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