Experiencing The Blues
See I have got up out of bed an’ played the thing. Played the blues? When I got satisfied, I put it down, wen’ on and went to bed an’ went to sleep. You see, it was off my mind.
Mississippi Fred McDowell. (20)
After my mother died. I found it an uplifting thing to sing the blues. At a certain level it’s just a relaxation; at another it’s meditation or even medication. I still lose myself for hours in a normal working day just doing fun things on a guitar. It only takes a spark to light the fire: I can be holding a conversation and be playing and not know I’m doing it. Once the memory bank hits on something it’s another hundred songs.
Georges Adins, who went to meet John Estes in 1962, wrote:
His voice cries and moans – his singing has the ring of actual reality and deep truth…filled with intense anguish, a fierce sorrow...He is unhappy and unfortunate and has nothing else but his voice and his guitar to tell us about the desolation and loneliness which a blind man feels.(21)
This is the experiential view of the blues: a feeling expressed as a musical soliloquy rather than a specific form of music. Blues is described in other ways too. People talk about its origins in ragtime, early jazz, religious songs, minstrel, popular, folk and so on and its characteristics and functions: pentatonic melody, typical chord progression, call and response. Call and response songs were an important influence in the development of the blues. These old work songs in which someone would sing and all the other workers would sing a response, gave a rhythm to the work as well as bonding the workers. “Old Alabama” – a prison song recorded at Parchman in 1947 – (22) gives a very powerful impression of call and response punctuated with what sounds like the fall of the whip. The percussion is actually listed as “axe strokes”.
You hear echoes of this dialogue in the songs of Blind Willie Johnson. His wife Angeline sang a rather feeble answer-back on his 1930 recording of “John The Revelator”. In “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” the plaintive melodic guitar answers the harsh voice and in “Dark Was The Night” Johnson sings and responds as if comforting himself. Charley Patton’s dramatic, rhythmic rendition of “Down The Dirty Road” (1929) has the singing voice answered by spoken words.
It’s all very well to know about these songs but when you realize the implications of their origin in the toil of a whole people, it adds emotional impact.
No Longer The Country Blues
You know a musical genre is relevant when it spreads prolifically. The country blues spread throughout the South and also to cities in the South and in the North. There are blues known as Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, Texas, Piedmont, Louisiana, Western, East Coast, Swamp, New Orleans, Delta, Kansas City, Atlanta and St Louis. Each region developed its own flavour. By the Twenties, with mechanisation on farms, there would be unemployment and social upheaval as rural workers moved to the faster pace of life in the North – its urban tensions exacerbated by this influx.
When the country blues moved from the cotton states where the majority of black people lived to the mass manufacturing cities such as Chicago and Detroit, it changed and a lot of the features of the early blues music were forgotten. Both the country blues and the urban blues are based on the twelve bar structure but the former is more characterized by melodic structures, whereas the latter is more closely associated with twelve bar blues, as is most of slide music. People regard the twelve bar blues “I woke up this morning” strand as being the definitive blues and this is what led to rhythm and blues in the Fifties.
I would put the urban blues as starting in the Thirties. If you change the climate, the pace, the technology and the economy this is reflected in the music. Once things move on the music evolves. There was a social and economic demand for more and bigger venues to accommodate large audiences; in response to this the resonator guitar – which had a short reign between the wars – was developed to give greater volume in large spaces. For the same reason blues shouters such as Jimmy Witherspoon came into being. The intimacy of acoustic guitar playing was coming to an end. If you’re working in a band, it doesn’t take long to know what the audience likes; you respond with the beat they favour. You might modify the emphasis in quite subtle ways but it’s cumulative.
It’s no longer the country blues. How can it be? This is Chicago. This is New York. This is Detroit.
This is how music changes – in response to the audience – which in turn reflects the society from which it comes and this is how the original forms can be lost. Some people feel regret for this and yearn for a lost golden age which may or may not have existed. When all’s said and done, although we should take the music seriously, we shouldn’t be too solemn about it. Like all popular music the country blues was of the moment. Perhaps what we should really mourn are those musicians who didn’t get the chance to record or whose recording perished. Who knows what has been lost? The precariousness of musical treasure is well illustrated in the story of Blind Willie McTell’s last session tape. Ed Rhodes, a white guy who ran record stores in Atlanta in the Fifties, persuaded McTell, then in his sixties and busking in parking lots, to do some recording. This amateur recording was the only tape not to perish when Rhodes discarded his tapes and sold his recording equipment. Strangely enough, the photo of the young McTell we all know survived obscurity in a bin outside the premises of an avant-garde magazine. These precious things survived by the skin of someone’s instinct. (23)
In 1936 Charlie Christian used a jazz guitar with an electric pick-up. The resonator’s days were numbered but wouldn’t come to an end till the electric guitar came into widespread use. Meanwhile, progress in guitar technology was halted by World War Two which focused all engineering efforts onto the war effort . This happened with Rickenbacker, Gibson and National. Although the solid body electric guitar was developed in the early Forties by Les Paul and popularized in the late Thirties and early Forties by T-Bone Walker, it wasn’t until after the war that manufacture of the electric guitar began to supersede all other types in the world of pop and blues. By the late Fifties every teenager wanted one.
Me? I wanted a resonator.
I do mourn the golden age of country blues. In a world where it is an anachronism, the hardest thing is to educate other musicians that it has a distinctive quality and is not just a pedantic or a pedestrian beat; that it has range and subtlety and makes large demands on the performer to exploit as fully as possible the use of voice and acoustic guitar. Unfortunately this is largely unknown or forgotten. Twelve bar ‘dumpty-dumpty’ music as associated with the urban blues is probably the worst thing that ever happened to the blues: so much of it is banal crap. That goes for all popular music after the Fifties while I’m on the subject. The original blues has been so watered down that it’s lost its potency. It’s been corrupted by commercialization and severed from its roots. I’m not just talking about black performers. Jim Reeves singing at the Carnegie Hall had balls. His other music was saccharine country pop.
But it sold records.
Yet the early blues singers had so much more to offer. Take a fairly random example: Scrapper Blackwell. People tend to talk more about his musical partner Leroy Carr yet what he could do acoustically was subtle and sophisticated. His guitar playing was influenced by the more varied inversions and chord progressions demonstrated by Leroy Carr’s piano-playing. Using both acoustic and jazz conventions, you get nice little jazzy inversions then the next moment he’s playing what a rock star would play – decades before it happened! One of the albums I inherited from Bert Bellamy: Mr. Scrapper’s Blues, (24) the cover showing him playing an economy Kay guitar, has a couple of instrumentals which display his virtuosity and attitude. He keeps them abstract by calling them by the key in which they are played, and explores the possibilities from bass runs to lyrical passages high on the treble strings, or he will use a staccato strum for dramatic effect so that a musical doodle becomes a classic little jewel. “‘A’ Blues” has an interesting jazz inversion in D9 in it. I
am totally impressed by this musician.
The Country Blues And Europe
In the Sixties the country blues had a rebirth in Britain and Europe but as in America the interest came largely from white, educated people. Possibly because black people associated the blues with their oppressed past, their musical interest gravitated towards the glamorous pop music and role models produced by Tamla Motown. But you could still hear that train a-comin’ in the music of Jimi Hendrix, especially in his acoustic tracks and it whistles relentlessly through “Voodoo Child”. And the rhythm that survived slavery finds its most potent expression in rap.
Modern Blues And America
If you’re into modern blues it is much better done in the United States than anywhere else. The Chicago blues is fast, rhythmically strong, emphasizing beat rather than melody and focusing on group performance. Today’s white blues performers play a more complex style than the black country blues players did, the exceptions being Blind Blake, Kokomo Arnold and Lonnie Johnson. When I performed at The Annual Labor Day Blues Festival in Georgia in 2000 there was a tremendous variety of music under the umbrella of blues. Des and I and The Producers were doing the country blues but the other people – there were more than a hundred performers altogether – were playing a wide range of music.
One of the musicians: Beverly “Guitar” Watkins names Sister Rosetta Tharpe as an early influence and has had a long career as a blues musician. She describes her musical affinity: “I like that real Lightnin’ Hopkins lowdown blues…I would call that hard classic blues, you know…railroad smokin’ blues!” (25) She and Francine Reed both performed what I would call modern blues. They represented what the blues in Georgia has become: it has authenticity, is less twelve bar in essence and has more of a raw edge than Chicago blues.
Singers And Songs
Many Versions
Lil Son Jackson – a Texas country bluesman – became famous just after the war. His sound was acceptable to white audiences and he also updated and adapted country blues forms and themes to his own use. I came to identify with him because that’s what I did. “Lay Down My Old Guitar” – one of his earliest recordings – is the number in my repertoire. I was impressed by his finger picking which reminds me of John Hurt, though he’s usually compared with Lightnin’ Hopkins.
I’ve used pop songs such as Little Feat’s “Willin’” and turned them into country blues, or then again into rock or a jug band style for the Skunk Band to play. I’ve taken jazz classics such as “Stormy Weather” and given it a country blues slide effect. This happens in music all the time, of course: Lonnie Donegan took country blues music and turned it into pop – he recorded “Rock Island Line” in 1955. The Rooftop Singers’ cheerful pop song, “Walk Right In” (1962) was done originally by Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers. I have a 1963 Collectors’ Issue: a “Strictly Limited Edition” of the music of Gus Cannon recorded in 1926 which includes their version of “Walk Right In”. Incidentally, the folk trio’s Sixties hit boosted royalties for Gus Cannon who had recently pawned his banjo to pay bills!
Because the country blues music was collectively owned, there would be several versions of the songs from the earliest recordings in the twenties till the present day. Take Blind Willie Johnson’s music, for example. “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” was covered by Led Zeppelin; Eric Clapton did “Motherless Children”; Bob Dylan was influenced by “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” in his song, “In My Time Of Dying”. You only have to look at the web site Spotify to get some idea of the countless versions of blues songs in existence.
Listening to the early blues, noticing alterations and all the technical nuances has helped me develop my own versions. Absorbing the style of the musicians I admire means I can also play in the fashion of, say, Louis Armstrong or Blind Blake. This can be quite useful when you’re showing people techniques: you can demonstrate the differences to make a point. I can play a version of “St James Infirmary Blues” that shows its folk roots or I can evoke Louis Armstrong’s jazz-oriented interpretation in my blues style.
I’m fascinated by the biographies of songs and guitars.
Black Ace
“Black Ace Blues” was originally released in the late Thirties by Babe Karo Lemon Turner – impressive name – and it became so popular that he took the name Black Ace. He played a National steel guitar on his lap, using slide – one of very few bluesmen to use this technique. The others were Kokomo Arnold and Turner’s mentor Oscar “Buddy” Woods. Like many performers he lived in obscurity for a while until Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records sought him out and recorded him in 1960. Critics seem to agree that Turner has been underrated, partly because his output was lean and also because it was difficult to categorise his style, which Scott Cooper described as “Hawaii meets the Delta”. (26)
I came across “Black Ace Blues” on the album, Texas in the 30s, 1935-38. The Complete Recording of Carl Davis Dallas Jamboree Jug Band, Black Ace, Kitty Gray and her Wampus Cats. I liked the tune; I liked the story and I could see its dramatic potential. I don’t regard this song as Babe Karo Lemon Turner’s best number: his version is a bit thin and two-dimensional and lacking in resonance, even though he has two guitars on the disc. My treatment of the song is more full-bodied. His “You Gonna Need my Help Some Day” is a more traditional blues number and more successful in my view.
“Black Ace Blues” is a song about male confidence and potency: “I’m the boss card in your hand” and it’s one of the most popular numbers I do on twelve string with slide. You can’t do a successful version of a song about confidence unless you can make your voice as potent as your guitar. The guitar doesn’t compensate for vocal inadequacies: it shows them up.
John Lee Hooker
By working to my strengths, accepting that John Lee’s way was not my way and having confidence in my own interpretation, I also found I could do quite a lot with John Lee Hooker’s song “Groundhog”. His rendition is slow and sexy with a bluesy guitar and a slowly ticking rhythmic fuse. He does “Dimples” in the same way: slowly and taking a lot of effort with the timing which doesn’t suit my style at all. For me, “Groundhog” is a song you want to hit with, so I take the original influence and give it a white rock manner. John Lee’s slower version would be done with a little combo filling in all the gaps and Hooker playing simple guitar. The thing that works for him is a lazy slow feel – a pace that’s not natural for me. In my version I use slide for verve and texture. “Groundhog” is a song about territorial aggression so I want to give it a feral edge. My guitar rumbles away, at times like a growl, increasing in pace to emphasize the aggression whilst I vocalize scorn and menace. You have to use what you’ve got and my voice – between a tenor and a baritone – is double the volume of anybody I’ve played with. With long hard nails and strong fingers I can maximize guitar sound and fill all the spaces with threat. John Lee creates tension from slowness; I create tension by using slide and by upping the tempo.
Like BB King, whom I saw when he supported Fleetwood Mac at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1969, John Lee Hooker has amazing presence. He’s a scene-stealer: low brown half-spoken vocal style; slow effortless playing – his big hands doing sexual things up and down the neck of his guitar. I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert about twenty years ago in Manchester and John Lee Hooker appeared with him. “Boom Boom” was the number and John Lee did one verse. He’s sitting down and as soon as he sings, “Boom boom boom boom,” he demolishes everything Springsteen has done in the song. He’s coming from stillness; his power comes from stillness and Springsteen’s efforts in that song are wiped out.
Effortlessly
Effortlessly but not lazily. Yet Springsteen was pushing volume out, using energy and yes – it was powerful but not compared with John Lee. John Lee Hooker did it from his own natural draw. There’s such power in his vocal restraint; he’s the essence of cool and for him performance is an expression of his own sexuality.
Mississippi John Hurt
Unlik
e songs such as “Black Ace” and “Groundhog”, Mississippi John Hurt’s songs don’t lend themselves to any interference! You can’t do a Pete Johnson version of a John Hurt song because everything he does is complete. You either play it like that or leave it alone. He has a distinctive three finger technique like no other musician and a fluid and syncopated style. His guitar playing seems effortless but it’s actually complex and his gentle voice fits the intimate setting in which he would have played. I have immense respect for this musician, whom I never met though I do have a treasured record of his Newport Folk Festival (July 1963) performance which came from Bert Bellamy’s collection. I copied his style of finger picking and liked his songs, which have been described as “old time music” – coming from a folk source that produced both blues and country music. There is no ‘modern’ blues influence in his styles and it has been suggested that he is the musical link between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hurt’s music has been admired by white musicians as well as black musicians. There’s a story that a pupil played a John Hurt record for the classical guitarist Andres Segovia. Segovia wondered who the second guitarist was.
There was no second guitarist.
“I’m Satisfied” is a song about sexual joy originally recorded in the late Twenties. Then John Hurt disappeared until rediscovered in the Sixties. The lyrics in this song are interesting for their sexual innuendo. You can’t always hear them and because of the way they’re pronounced, the double entendre is not always apparent. Phrases such as “total load” and “total-on shaker from my navel down” certainly stimulate the imagination. The relaxed and tuneful style contrasts with the earthy sexual confidence.
Ain't Bad for a Pink Page 16