Above: Jerry Wasserman (right) interviewing Steven Sondheim. Photo courtesy of Jerry Wasserman.
I’m one of the lucky emeriti who have received subsidies for their scholarly work from the Emeritus College. When I retired in 2017 after more than four decades at UBC in the departments of English and Theatre & Film, I knew I needed a writing project. Most of my scholarly work had been in drama and theatre. Launching into a new phase of my life, I wanted to give my scholarship, too, a new direction. I had taught some courses on blues literature, published a few articles, even given a couple of talks at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. I love music but I can’t read it or play it, and am in no way trained in it. Naturally, I decided to write a book on music. The result, Life Could Be a Dream: African American Blues, R&B, Gospel and Doo Wop, 1946-56.
It began as an attempt to share with my friends some of the lesser-known music I had discovered on iTunes, where you can download collections of 100 or 200 blues, gospel, rhythm & blues or doo wop songs for $7.99 or so. Muddy Waters and B.B. King might be familiar but what about blueswomen Faye Adams and Big Maybelle? Dinah Washington and Louis Jordan are well known rhythm & blues artists. But have you heard the phenomenal Amos Milburn or Nellie Lutcher? Everyone of a certain age listened to the Platters, but wait until you experience doo wop artists the Honey Bears or the Chips. And the Golden Age of African American gospel is packed with remarkable voices and passionate harmonies that came as a revelation to me—the most powerful and beautiful music of that era by far.
Soon some historical and generic patterns began to become clear. Almost all the music with which I was falling in love had emerged in the decade after World War Two. Nearly all the artists were African American as were their audiences. Each genre had distinct characteristics, yet all were linked along what Amiri Baraka has called the blues continuum. And the postwar period on which I was focused coincided with the first decade of the civil rights movement. I had rich veins of music history and social history to mine. And I was determined to share my excitement about these artists and their work, many of whom have fallen into obscurity. The killing of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement took place in the midst of my research, and made me even more sure that I had to write this book.
Diving into the critical and scholarly literature, I quickly realized that this was both a large and relatively neglected field. To narrow the parameters, I decided to eliminate jazz, which has its own huge critical canon, and to limit my study to the postwar decade, 1946-56, which also happens to be the decade before rock ‘n’ roll conquered the world. In fact, the majority of studies of black popular music of this period valorize it as the roots of rock, the music that helped give birth to rock ‘n’ roll. I wanted to explore, understand and value the work on its own terms, for its own sake. I also discovered that the most important books on this music, comprising the critical canon, were forty or fifty years old. Could I provide a fresh take that might help redefine the field and restore the prestige of a phenomenal body of work that has fallen out of fashion? These were the elements that spurred me on.
Along with the critical and historical overviews that trace the evolution of each genre and the ways in which the racial politics of the era both inflected and were reflected in the music, I added a brief final chapter that illustrated how four of the great masters of soul and rock had cut their musical teeth in this era: Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Little Richard and James Brown. My background in textual analysis meant spending a good deal of the book analyzing lyrics along with the musical structures I learned to understand and appreciate. But my primary emphasis was always on the individual artists and groups, and by the end I had hundreds.
It turned out to be a kind of hybrid manuscript; I describe it as “equal parts scholarly study, popular survey, and fanboy tribute.” After shopping it around for a few months, I found an ideal publisher in McFarland, a North Carolina press with a large catalogue of books on popular culture, including music, that live along the margin of the scholarly and the popular. I began working with a sympathetic editor who required relatively minimal revisions to the text. But given my emphasis on the individual singers and musicians, I felt that something was still missing – the visuals that would help bring these remarkable characters to life. I needed photographs. That’s where the Emeritus College subsidies come in.
Learning the art and economics of photo costs and permissions was an education in itself. As I started to search out photographs, I found that some were in the public domain. I got a few wonderful such photos from the William P. Gottlieb collection in the U.S. Library of Congress Music Division. A couple more I was able to get for modest fees (under $100 each) from libraries, like a great shot of r&b shouter Big Joe Turner and his pianist Pete Johnson from the University of Missouri Kansas City and a beautiful photo of Helen Humes from Louisville’s Filson Historical Society. But as good as they were, those half dozen photos felt sparse.
That’s when I found myself searching through the catalogues of the two major photo-leasing companies, Getty Images and Alamy. Getty has the larger catalogue but their image licenses are expensive compared to Alamy’s. And when I discovered a discounted package on Alamy’s site—25 photos for just over $1000—I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I read their licensing information as carefully as possible, asked them lots of questions and ran the license by my editor to be sure I was purchasing the rights to use the photos inside the book in both print and digital formats on a worldwide basis. I won’t go into the details of the drama that ensued shortly after I paid their fee. But essentially, they told me that I could NOT use the photos in the book. After many back-and-forth emails and a not very subtle threat by my editor to have McFarland boycott Alamy in future, the company relented. As a theatre guy I don’t mind a little drama, especially with a happy ending. The book was published in May 2025 and I’m delighted with the way the photographs enhance the story the book is telling.
I was fortunate to be in a position to afford to pay for the photos out of pocket. But I’m immensely grateful to the Emeritus College for the confidence they have shown in supporting my work by subsequently reimbursing me for those Alamy photos. I loved my many years of teaching at UBC, and the fact that my UBC community still has my back even after retirement is a privilege I don’t take for granted.