Big Joe Williams, American Folk Blues Festival, Hamburg 1972 Source=http://www.flickr.com/photos/heiner1947/4388600906/sizes/l/in/set-72157623509439544/ |Author=Heinrich Klaffs |Date=1972
The blues were conceived in aching hearts …
W.C Handy
It’s an iconic image. One that nearly everyone knows. The rag tag drifter with the guitar slung over his shoulder, kicking up dust off of a clay-colored road as he moves on down the line to the next town. A place where he could sit under a shade tree and gather a crowd while playing his guitar, contorting his face in a tableau of emotional, and sometimes physical, pain as he moans and wails the deep ache of his plight to anyone and everyone who will listen. Or maybe you see him there, a painfully thin man with close-cropped hair covered with a snap-brim. He wipes the sweat off his face with a hanky and takes his place near the front of a juke joint. He stubs out the hand rolled cigarette under his work shoe and sings the songs of despair.
But the truth, like most truths, lies somewhere in between. For the majority of African-Americans at the end of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, their lives were hard. Hard in a sense that most of us will never know or be able to relate to. These people were the disenfranchised and the ‘blues’ were the soundtrack to their lives.
These were the bluesmen, the original bluesmen. Some may say the only real bluesmen.
W.C. Handy is often credited with ‘discovering’ the blues late one night at a train depot in Tutwiler, MS in 1895. The story has been told so many times that despite the doubts about its veracity, it is accepted as a truth. The way the story goes, Handy, a well-regarded composer and bandleader, was sitting in the train depot. He was nodding off after waiting for his train that had been delayed for nine hours, when a man, a drifter of sorts, his clothes in rags, his feet ‘peeping from his shoes’ and carrying a guitar sat down next to him. According to Handy, ‘His face had on it the sadness of the some of the ages’. He had a guitar with him and he began to play an eerie tune, sliding a knife blade along the strings to accentuate his keening vocals. According to his autobiography published in nearly 50 years after the encounter, this was a turning point in music for him and in turn, a turning point in American music for the next 60 years.
But despite their history and their importance as the backbone to rock and roll, do the blues still exist? If they do, do they mean anything anymore? It’s a question that has bothered me for quite some time now and one that I have been trying to answer. After a lot of reading and listening and discussions with people I think the answer has to be not really. If the blues aren’t dead, the priest has been called.
If you spend some time reading about music history in general and blues history specifically you can’t walk away without learning a few things. First and foremost the blues were born and bred out of frustration of situation and the desperation of the people who played it. In a post-Reconstructionist world, a time when African-Americans had been freed from physical slavery and essentially moved into economic shackles, the blues, the true blues, were a voice to the marginalized. The music was simple, an AAB, 12-bar structure laying the groundwork for the howling anger, pain and sadness of the players soul.
The music that flowed out of the Delta was not meant as a celebration. It was really nothing more than the voice of the broken spirit of the people trying to eek out a living under some of the harshest and most brutal conditions known to modern American society. The works of Dorothy Scarborough, Zola Neale Hurston, Howard Odum and father and son Lomax will reveal much of the ugliness found in a Jim Crow south while they were searching for and opining on ‘race records’ and ‘field recordings’.
And despite what has been popularized by modern mythology, the trips into the field by Lomax and Odum were not for the purposes of finding the music. They were cataloguing for the Lomax’s and a sociological and anthropological excursion for Odum. The music was seen as ‘raw, primitive and tied to the earth’ and to some degree, seen as a novelty, an amusement of sorts, and a spectacle. And it wasn’t this music that found it’s way to white audiences for many years.
Those early Delta blues were not what was selling. It’s not as if any major record labels were even recording them at the time. ‘Race records’ however were a different story. Ma Rainey, Victoria Spivey and Bessie Smith had, by the late teens and early twenties been recording these racy, good time ‘blues’ and selling them by the thousands in the black neighborhoods. Many sociologists and historians draw the parallel to the fact that in the early days of the last century, a mass black exodus had occurred and folks were leaving the Delta in droves. In the years between 1910 and 1920, the African American populace grew by 500% in Chicago alone. Moving from the field to the factory, the urban African-American began to live a more urban lifestyle including owning one of the most popular forms of entertainment, the phonograph. The popularity of ‘race records’ in black neighborhoods astounded the record companies who, like all good businessmen, know that they had to capitalize on this formerly untapped market.
And this is when things changed.
Armed with portable recording equipment, the labels launched as many engineers on the road as they could. These road crews ventured out and hit the back roads seeking out the ‘black music’ to get it onto acetate as soon as possible. And in doing so they discovered the blues ‘forefathers’ that we venerate today. Charlie Patton, Son House, Skip James and the now legendary Robert Johnson, now household names amongst blues fans (and music fans in general) were recorded. But what is interesting to consider is that in 1941, as anthropologists visited the Delta and various jukes and bars along the way, when they checked the jukeboxes, the ‘blues’ was not the only music the locals were listening to. They were listening to the same music that their more urban northern cousins were listening to; Fats Waller, Louis Jordan and Louis Armstrong as well. The jazzy urban music pointed to the future, the blues pointed backwards towards a past most had very little interest in revisiting in nothing more than memory.
When the blues had settled into Chicago and other major metropolitan areas (with World War Two waging, the need for manpower in factories helped escalate the wage and lifestyle of the laborer), the music, like the people, began to develop a more updated sensibility. There are plenty of arguments over who brought the electric guitar to the blues and this far down the line it really doesn’t matter for anything more than just an interesting piece of musical history. The electric guitar was a necessity for the blues. To be able to be heard above the din of a crowded bar, well, it was a natural. Interestingly, the electric guitar lent itself well to the blues. The string bending wah of the electric blended perfectly with the wail of the vocals. But that aside, the music changed. The players weren’t in the fields; they were in the factories, on the loading docks and driving trucks. The blues evolved to reflect the people it was trying to reach. The lyrics were updated to comment on the trials and troubles of the times.
The blues became something very different from its humble and rural origins.
And in this incarnation the blues continued to flourish off of the segregated national radar during the 40’s and 50’s. The argument can be made that the blues were instrumental to the birth of rock and roll. Elvis borrowed heavily from the blues that surrounded him in his youth in Memphis. You can’t listen to the early rock of the 50’s and not hear the echoes of those blues players. That time frame brought us some of the most prolific and amazing players of the genre; Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, The three Kings (B.B., Freddie and Albert) and a host of others. But again, the music was changing – lending a soundtrack to the tensions of the Civil Rights movement. A lot of younger African Americans saw the blues as a sad reminder to an ugly history of bigotry and segregation and distanced themselves from it.
When the blues were ‘discovered’ by white café society and by the educated, suburban youth the blues had become what they are today. A musical anthropological exhibit in a museum somewhere. The British bands of the time found something in the music that most Americans had forgotten and brought it back to our shores in droves. The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and countless others in interviews, brought up the names that so inspired them and brought those players into the limelight for perhaps the first time in their careers. These bands took the blues and although they paid homage to these players and their music, eventually moved on. Again, music was evolving to keep pace with the human condition and what it was to represent.
Back home in the U.S. rock bands grabbed ahold of the blues mythos and touted the players from years before as the ‘true essence’ of rock and roll. Blues bands, boogie bands and blues rock bands popped up everywhere. And it was great. Chicago, Memphis and Austin became a Mecca for just about every kid with a guitar and an edge and an attitude. Legends were born (i.e. the Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads at midnight for his guitar prowess – that story was first told in the early 1960’s by Son House. This particular ‘soul selling’ myth was told about another early bluesman, Tommy Johnson. But it doesn’t matter since both were country versions of the classic Faust story). Older blues players were brought on stages at ‘blues revivals’ and coffee houses and occasionally as opening acts for rock bands of the day. Legal battles were launched and fought to secure royalties for the early progenitors of the genre and their families. For a while, the blues were brought back into the musical fold, rolling right along almost at the exact same time that Civil Rights were being fought for in American politics. But as the old blues players passed away, the magic seems to have faded. The surviving players (with a few exceptions) faded back into obscurity. And the bands that had championed them had to change again to keep up with contemporary tastes.
Every so many years or so the ‘blues’ stage a minor comeback. A player or two will appear playing a modern version of the blues. In the late Seventies and into the mid-Eighties, Stevie Ray Vaughn erupted with a version of Texas blues pyro techniques and again the blues were back. After his untimely death, it again faded into the background. John Mayer, Kenny Wane Shepherd and Johnny Jang appeared as blues players for a while carrying on the tradition but what has become a all to common theme, they essentially abandoned the blue dream in an effort to become commercially viable.
And here in 2013 where are the net generation of blues players? They’re out there; young folks playing a hard electric blues to a vanishing audience. They will follow the road for a while until it becomes obvious to them that the blues have become nothing more than a musical novelty. Sure there are still players out there playing and recording those occasional old Delta tracks but are there any authentic bluesmen?
I doubt it.
The blues were a musical reaction to a time. Does that mean that we can’t get and appreciate the blues now? Yes, we have taken the term the blues and turned it into a feeling; a general sense of malaise for the modern man. So sure, we can have the blues now but they will never be the blues as they were meant in their early days. The blues of working in the mailroom at a giant corporation and not being able to afford the next generation iPad differs from not knowing how you will feed your family since the crops have failed. Having a girl turn you down for a date differs a bit from ‘having the Hellhounds on your trail’. But that ache in your heart and your desire to rise above it remain the same.
So in my opinion, the original, hard life, acoustic blues are dead. But long live the blues of the modern man. Our blues are different from those who invented the genre and our grandchildren’s blues will be different from ours. They will sound different but they will feel the same.
The blues are dead, long live the blues.
[FONT=Tahoma]"All I can do is be me ... whoever that is". Bob Dylan [/FONT]