Blues alive!

Death of Blues announced!

This article discusses some blues history and suggests that it is somewhat at a dead end.

Corpse reveals faint signs of life

I get frustrated by the "What is blues?" argument, but this time I'm going to start it. What do you mean when you say 'blues'?

In his old age, John Lee Hooker used to like to say "Blues is the truth". Not a fool, JLH, he knew exactly what the idiots he was marketing himself to wanted to hear. They wanted to hear something important - something hollywood.

Of course, the real answer is that blues is the local music of a small area of Mississippi, including the Delta, from where it has sadly now disappeared. Up in the hills where it still lives, it's the stuff that people without TVs sing along to, it's the stuff that gets played in locals to get the party rolling and the drinking started. You can sing along, you can dance. Like Irish fiddle dee dee, if it were anything else, it couldn't possibly be a real form of folk music.

So what is the stuff that Eric Clapton plays? You can't dance to it, because it's too lead-footed.. And I don't think you can strum it and have the whole bar-crew sing along. In fact, it's hard to imagine any bar owner in Mississippi booking Eric or his ilk. They'd be too scared of losing money.

It's pretty likely that what you thought of when I asked the question is probably one of two things - a fossilised dinosaur that lived and died in it's own time, limited by the technology and education of the culture it grew in, known as folk blues or acoustic blues. Charley Patton. Robert Johnson. Bukka White. Tommy Johnson. Listen to the records - they were great.

On the other hand, maybe you're thinking of the sterile rootless technocracy of white-boy guitar blues. This is known in the UK as R 'n' B or just as shit.

Think about it - R 'n' B in the USA means black person's music. It didn't freeze in the 60s, it grew and developed into the black person's music of today. But in the UK R 'n' B means 'that' music, which developed right here in the UK in the early 60s through guys like John Mayall, and taken down at recording studios like Blue Tone. Back it went across the Atlantic, and soon white boys of the Newport Folk circuit like Paul Butterfield had gone electric, and white anglo saxon middle class boys have been flogging it to death ever since.

What was it that drew them to the blues in the first place, I wonder? Was it an American sense of unease over a lack of 'credentials' in the growth and development of human endeavour? Here in Mississippi they found a truly indigenous folkish form, and it was American. They learned those early recordings, and they pushed the music forward technically and technologically towards a wider audience than RObert Johnson could ever have imagined. But they also pushed it away from it's roots.

I wonder if they noticed the earthy power and elemental forces contained in those early recordings? I don't suppose they had any inkling of what they were about to unleash onto the youth of the UK and then the USA. But the descendants of blues are rock and roll, psychedelic rock, punk and hip hop. All were youth cultures, challenging authority and the accepted sounds, uncomfortable to listen to at first, moronic, groove driven and dangerous.

We should be looking for a way that delta blues can rely on the past while striding forward into the future. But in fact, modern blues in the UK is sterile - not by the limitations of it's form, but by the careful exhaustion of blues as an artform by technically gifted musicians since the 1960s.

Big Bill Broonzy I never really liked Big Bill Broonzy. His records always seem so gentle, lacking the fire of other masters of folk blues. And yet he was the one who really got taken up by the Blues revivalists of the late 50s and early 60s. He was a permanent feature of the Newport festivals, and could play to college kids and smart city jazz clubs, dressed in his overalls and beat up straw hat. But another way to look at it, I've realised, is that he saw more cleary than most exactly what he needed to be so that he would never have to work a field again. He deliberately diluted his output to suit his audience, which in the long run might have lost him his place in history. But I don't think posterity or purity appealed much to early blues musicians, and I can't say I blame them.	Alexis Korner Originally, jazz combos in the UK would include a few blues standards. In fact, the American jazz musicians they admired knew their roots in blues, and often name-checked obscure songs which for them, were part of the traditional family furniture. To the UK jazz hipsters such as Alexis Korner, this turned into a hunt for obscure recordings and nearly unobtainable vinyl. But while Korner was trying to copy the fingerings on Blind Lemon Jefferson's early sides, a younger UK audience, coming from Elvis and early rock and roll records, had found a gold mine in the loud, blistering output of Chess records. Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, and John Lee Hooker appealed far more to the young Keith Richards than Skip James. Eventually the blues scene split - and Korner was consigned to history.
Son House When the young white folk taxonomists of the 60s searched out the original blues artists, they were disappointed to discover that, 20 years on from the classic early delta recordings, most of their idols of early american music had moved on. Electric guitars, drums and suits were the filling the jukes in Mississippi and the bars in Chicago, not hay seeds, banjos etc. But when they found House, they found a major blues talent who hadn't played guitar for 20 years. They carefully defrosted him, and he became the folk revivalists' 'true' bluesman.	Wolf goes to college The difference between the white conception of blues and the black could lead to some pretty cool misunderstandings. Any black person would have cited Wolf as one of the top blues performers of his day. In a gross error of misjudgement, someone booked Wolf to play a Harvard college in the late 1960s. Fortunately for us it's on film - Wolf prowls about the room like a bear among picnic-ers, scaring the college kids to death with his danger, his blackness, his blues.
Muddy WatersIt's a sad fact, but the story of Muddy Waters' two tours to the UK demonstrate the whole art of missing the point rather beautifully. Waters came to the UK in 1950s, lionised in his hometown as the prince of Chicago blues, and then at the peak of his powers. But the blues fans in the UK who bought the tickets to see this foremost performer were horrified - they expected the down home back porch acoustic blues thy had been listening to. The tour was a disaster, as Waters' telecaster slide riffs slashed across overdriven harmonica. Waters learned his lesson well - when he returne 10 year later he left the band at home, put on his boilersuit and strummed a few delta farm standards. By this time, the young guns of the UK blues scene had caught on to his Chicago records, and were disappointed by the sleepy low key folk blues.	The Stones If you listen to the early Stones records, before say Aftermath, it's clear that there was a gap between what they wanted to be and what they could do well. On the one hand, the dazzling pop singles. On the other, the turgid Chicago blues filler. They even went to Chess to make a record, so they could finally make a blues record thay could be proud of. But the only way they could make blues records work was by reworking them, and the more their covers differed from the bite and swagger of Muddy's band, the better thay got as records. And in the end I think they really did become inheritors of blues - the simple riffs, the repeated key lines buried in the cacophony, the terrific feel of the late 60s recordings peaks on Exile on Main Street. For me, this is a truly blues record, from the white boys.

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Death of Blues announced!

Corpse reveals faint signs of life