Boom’s Blues: Music, Journalism, and Friendship in Wartime

Boom''s Blues stands as both a remarkable biography of J. Frank G. Boom (1920-1953) and a recovery of his incredible contribution to blues scholarship originally titled The Blues: Satirical Songs of the North American Negro. Wim Verbei tells how and when the Netherlands was introduced to African American blues music and describes the equally dramatic and peculiar friendship that existed between Boom and jazz critic and musicologist Will Gilbert, who worked for the Kultuurkamer during World War II and had been charged with the task of formulating the Nazi''s Jazzverbod, the decree prohibiting the public performance of jazz. Boom''s Blues ends with the annotated and complete text of Boom''s The Blues, providing the international world at last with an English version of the first book-length study of the blues.

At the end of the 1960s, a series of thirteen blues paperbacks edited by Paul Oliver for the London publisher November Books began appearing. One manuscript landed on his desk that had been written in 1943 by a then twenty-three-year-old Amsterdammer Frank (Frans) Boom. Its publication, to which Oliver gave the title Laughing to Keep from Crying, was announced on the back jacket of the last three Blues Paperbacks in 1971 and 1972. Yet it never was published and the manuscript once more disappeared. In October 1996, Dutch blues expert and publicist Verbei went in search of the presumably lost manuscript and the story behind its author. It only took him a couple of months to track down the manuscript, but it took another ten years to glean the full story behind the extraordinary Frans Boom, who passed away in 1953 in Indonesia.

Wim Verbei has been active in blues music circles for several decades. He was editor-in-chief of Mr. Blues, the first Dutch-language magazine about blues, and longtime editor of the prominent Dutch music magazine Oor (Ear). He has been producing a series of articles for the quarterly Block Magazine called ＂de Bluesbibliotheek＂ (＂The Blues Library＂), the bibliography and critical review of every book ever written on blues music. Scott Rollins has been a cultural entrepreneur for more than forty years. He has published three volumes of poetry and is translator of The Music of the Netherlands Antilles: Why Eleven Antilleans Knelt before Chopin’s Heart, published by University Press of Mississippi.