Hospital blues: reflections on writing and hearing healthcare histories through blues and folk music performance

In recent years, scholars have investigated the sonic dimensions of healthcare environments. Less well explored, however, is the musical history of the hospital: how musicians sang about hospitals as social commentary or to narrativize their own experiences of hospitals and/or hospitalization. This short creative reflection looks back on my performance of blues and folk songs about hospitals at the Senses in Modern Health/Care Environments conference in Bristol in 2022. It asks how blues and folk songs about hospitals recorded in the twentieth century might recover how musician, patients, and musician–patients – particularly those from marginalized communities in the US South and Britain – experienced and perceived healthcare environments. As well as a short overview of the histories of some of these songs, this piece considers the value and ethics of musical performance as a means to researching, teaching, and understanding the histories of healthcare.