Ain't Bad for a Pink

by Sandra Gibson

  John Hurt’s short song “Pay Day” has a restrained, minor feel with complicated rhythms and is again from an earlier tradition. It’s about stealing in order to survive and about the transience of relationships. It’s hard to understand the lack of economic power experienced by people still, in effect, owned by the plantations. The subject doesn’t have a dog to help him catch rabbits so he steals food and now he in turn is hunted by hounds. The lyrics speak of survival at a level unfamiliar in Western society:

  Pay Day

  Well, I did all I can do and I can’t get along with you

  I’m goin’ to take you to your Mama, Pay Day

  Pay Day, Pay Day

  I’m goin’ to take you to your Mama, Pay Day.

  Well, a rabbit come along and I ain’t go no rabbit dog

  And I hate to see that rabbit get away

  Get away, get away

  Oh, I hate to see that rabbit get away.

  Well, just about a week ago, I stole a ham of meat

  I’m gon’ keep my skillet greasy if I can

  If I can, if I can

  I’m gon’ keep my skillet greasy if I can.

  Well, the hounds are on my track, a knapsack on my back

  I’m gon’ make it to my shanty, ‘fore day

  ‘fore day, ‘fore day

  Oh, I’m gon’ make it to my shanty, ‘fore day.

  “Louis Collins” (1928) is a lament about the violent death of a pimp and as with all Hurt’s songs there’s only one way to do this understated song: his way. The trademark finger picking makes it sound as if there are two guitars. Again, the bleak subject matter and mournful tune shock. The finality of “laid him six foot under the clay” isn’t alleviated by the reference to angels. It’s compassionate but not sentimental – a song which upholds the individual’s right to be mourned, whatever the background.

  Son House

  When the man hit the downbeat on his National steel-bodied guitar and you saw his eyes disappear into the back of his head, you knew you were going to hear some blues.

  Cub Koda.

  John Hurt sings about life’s harshness in a melodic, contained way. All the energy is in his skilful hands. You can’t say this of Son House – he engages his whole body. “The blues possessed him like a lowdown shaking chill” – to quote Bob Groom. (27) Some of his performances were allegedly terrifying in intensity. At the height of his powers he was billed as the “Father Of Folk Blues” and legend has it that he wouldn’t give Robert Johnson lessons because he didn’t think him a worthy pupil! He also said Johnson was “no good until something happened” – a reference to the pact with the devil he allegedly made. People have referred to this with regard to Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong as well. So why is this myth so widespread amongst creative people? I think it must mean that a good musician goes into a sort of wilderness and gets in touch with another musical dimension through the power of technical practice, and through the power of mind and spirit so that there is no distinction between the music and the musician performing it. Technical expertise does matter, but only if it’s so ingrained that you don’t have to think about it and only if it’s contained by passion. Or it contains the passion.

  Son House’s performances were certainly passionate. His most famous number is a song of traditional provenance, “Death Letter”. Lyrically bleak and feverish with intensity, it has a sense of clamouring urgency and I have tried to capture this energy in my own version of the song, using slide. Son House performed it on a metal-bodied National resonator guitar using a copper slide. He often altered the tempo and lyrics for different performances, sometimes playing it twice in one set and some versions could last fifteen minutes.

  The fact that Son House let me play his guitar and that the song meant a lot to me because of my mother’s death, made it an important choice for my repertoire. The emotion and power are his; the emotion and power are mine as well. In my version some of the vocal phrasing and some of the words are changed. I wanted to create my own interpretation. Or it might have been that I wasn’t good enough to do it like the original. But I certainly wanted to play it just as Robert Johnson, who reworked it as “Walking Blues” and many others did. When I listen to Son House on a 1960s recording again, I hear things – new things – that I might add on to my version or to another song altogether.

  Francis “Scrapper” Blackwell

  I feel close to some musicians because of a sense of technical compatibility. Scrapper Blackwell, a performer from the inter-war years who played piano as well as guitar, is an undervalued but consummate blues player in my view. Wikipedia describes him as “an exceptional acoustic single-note picker in the Piedmont and Chicago blues style” and as veering towards jazz. I respond to him partly because he plays from a pianist’s point of view as well as a guitarist’s point of view, and I found this accessible because I had been taught piano. There’s this element in Leadbelly too: the walking bass lines, heavy strings and low tunings give a sound resembling a piano.

  There’s another reason for my interest in Scrapper Blackwell. He had an extremely colourful and precarious background: he came from a very large and musical family and was involved in bootlegging in the Twenties. A combination of Cherokee and Negro, he was never going to have an easy time and I was impressed by his determination to be a musician and by him being an instinctive blues player: “when I did went to playin’ the real blues, I was gone too, just gone…the minute I saw the string, I hit it. And when I hit it, it was the right string. But I couldn’t tell you today how I ever started playing.” (28) He made his first guitar from cigar boxes, wood and wire, taught himself to play, became an itinerant musician and eventually teamed up with pianist Leroy Carr in the late Twenties. Their 1928 Vocalion hit “How Long How Long Blues” was the biggest blues hit of the year but it’s his version of “Down And Out Blues”: a song written by Jim Cox in the 1920s and popularized by Bessie Smith that most appealed to me. In spite of the depression in the lyrics there is a nice jaunty, jazzy Chaplinesque quality that I have absorbed for my version of this song. You can’t keep a good man down! Scrapper Blackwell does what a conventional acoustic player doesn’t usually do: he repeats the chord structure on barre chords.

  Blackwell’s is the finest version of this song I’ve ever heard. This premonition of the Great Depression in an era of frantic hedonism is one of those songs: once you’ve mastered it, you can play anything. It has minors, diminished chords, melody and feeling with some cross-over jazz and blues. There are thousands of songs using the same four chords but this song uses much more. There are lots of chords. It’s like the musical equivalent of that exercise they used to do in typing schools: “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” – which uses every letter in the English language. Count the chords: C, E, A, D minor, A, D 7th, C sharp 7th, D 7th, F, F diminished, C, A, D7th, G. I make that nine; there are only eight notes in a scale. There’s also a jazz turnaround in it and you can get an embellishment on that.

  The jazzy and clear vocals in Scrapper’s version of “Down And Out Blues”, the depth and resonance of the voice, together with the skilled guitar playing do indeed produce “a little orchestra”, such is his virtuosity. Yet it’s just him and a guitar or piano. That’s all.

  When I play this I use all my fingers and my thumb. Scrapper Blackwell uses mainly the thumb and one finger – with stunning results. Grossman will tell you to use two fingers and a thumb. At the time I was learning the songs I presumed that all fingers would be used to produce those sounds; I was ignorant of how they were produced. Only contemporaries such as Keb Mo, whose blues style combines modern elements with influences from Son House and Robert Johnson, use this way of playing.

  I’ve stuck to Blackwell’s melody and guitar playing but have never been able to produce the intensity in his voice, despite the fact that I have a ‘black’ voice. Next to Scrapper Blackwell I sound like a pop singer. He lives his story; he is that man. He has the ultimate weary blues voice in this so
ng. Being black was a bastard.

  “Down And Out Blues” became the theme song of an era. Used to having the back seat of the car piled high with money in the partying times with Leroy Carr, Blackwell went into obscurity when Carr died. He was rediscovered in the late Fifties and recorded for the Prestige/Bluesville label in 1962 but was unfortunately shot and killed during a mugging in an Indianapolis alley – another violent end and a crime that has never been solved.

  Blind Blake

  “Here’s somethin’ gonna make you feel good!”

  My other heroes of technique are Blind Blake and Kokomo Arnold. If I was on a desert island I would try to master Blind Blake’s “Rope Stretching Blues”. Like Scrapper Blackwell, his piano-playing influences his guitar-playing: he plays from notation, not from chord boxes using the guitar neck as keyboard, but handling it conventionally. “Rope Stretching Blues” has all the innuendos that he can make: musical jokes, out of context links and he laughs and talks over the top – totally relaxed. His linear style repeats a little but changes, moves on – just skips along, extending the phrases. In places the guitar work in this song is reminiscent of the piano accompaniment to the dramas of the silent screen. You can’t get a more dramatic situation than a man waiting to hang!

  My version of “Early This Morning” is influenced by Blind Blake. I had to change it quite a lot because nobody can play like him! You listen but you can’t work out the chords. He’s one of the most skilful artists I’ve ever heard and Steve James described his instrumentals as “hypermetabolic”. (29)

  Blake was one of the pioneering musicians in Chicago. I have an album: Blind Blake’s Blues in Chicago in the Classic Jazz Masters series, which I had to search the length and breadth of the country to find in the Sixties. Many such albums were limited editions. There is plenty to impress. Leola B. Wilson sings on some of the tracks, as does Bertha Henderson; Blind Blake on vocals, guitar and piano constantly surprises by emphatic rhythmic change. The use of rattle bones adds a new dimension of texture, rhythm and jollity: like tap-dancing faster and faster. How incongruous the xylophone sounds, giving an air of surprise and mystery. Surely it’s deliberately out of tune? But I don’t think it is; things were just so relaxed.

  Andy Boote had the tablature to “Blind Blake’s Rag”. I asked him to work it out and show me what was actually being played so I could make corrections to my rendition. He came back to me: “Don’t bother. You sound a lot closer to it than the tablature. Stick to doing it by ear.”

  I also love Fats Domino for this quality of conviviality – the way he can play while he’s laughing. “Feet’s Too Big” is impressive for its techniques too and hearing this makes me flip through the entire catalogue. I do a version of “Ain’t Misbehavin” for my own private pleasure in which I use different chords. Fats, like Blind Blake, has a bounce of fun I want to get. So I use the piano chords.

  It’s worth remembering that the blues had this aspect of life-celebrating humour. “Let’s Have A Party” by Kitty Grey and the Wampus Cats is another favourite of mine. She’s a great piano player and daft storyteller in clever lyrics. Her “I Can’t Dance I Got Ants In My Pants” has an infectious humour and liveliness in the piano and voice. It’s resourceful partying music which shows the cross-over points between blues and pop as the Leadbelly Woolworth’s album did. Similarly jazz and blues meet in Louis Armstrong’s “Don’t Get Around Much Any More” – a number he did with Duke Ellington on Together Again. A lot of jazz enthusiasts would find this too ‘popular’ but it’s good quality music.

  If I sit and chill I can imagine each song and each musician. I can’t play all the instruments but I can understand what each one is doing musically, especially harmony; Louis’ harmonies are stunning. Melody is simple: it’s the harmonies that make the whole thing. You can either hear the swing or you can’t; you can only explain it by conducting but there’s no guarantee. I suggested to a very accomplished guitarist that I should conduct him in order to demonstrate the swing: he was offended. But he didn’t feel it in his heart, you see. With my guitar I can live Louis. The trumpet harmonies in his version of “St. James’ Infirmary Blues” are incredibly haunting. In a minor key. In some versions it’s a simple folk tune but the way I play it is the Louis Armstrong way: with a jazz feel. I take it from a three chord song to six chords and I put some harmonies on top of the tune like jazz musicians and classical composers do. The basic tune is extended by harmonies and when I play my version I can hear his trumpet. This is artistic freedom.

  Even songs that are about having the blues, like “Down And Out Blues” can have an underlying melodic optimism. In “Know Just How I Feel” I like the cacophony of verses: there are about twelve verses from which I pick and mix. I change them every time I play the song: individual words or whole verses like the old bluesmen did. This song has a minor feel to it with a descending cadence in: “I feel like an engine/ Ain’t got no drivin’ wheel”. There is optimism for the future in the guitar picking although a blue feeling in the melody for the present circumstances.

  Blind Blake was gone by the end of his thirties. His dates are vague (circa 1893 – circa 1933); there’s only one photograph and the cause of death is not established, though Reverend Gary Davis said he had heard Blind Blake was killed by a streetcar. In the black argot of the times, “a blake is a man of tough, unrelenting character” (30) and rumour has it he was a blind wrestler. Like many of these deaths – Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Scrapper Blackwell – the matter remains unresolved and therefore open to lurid speculation. The death of a black man was not treated in the same way as the death of a white man, sad to say. Would Leadbelly have escaped the gallows if the man he killed had been white? But I celebrate Blind Blake’s joyful expertise and paid homage by cutting my Georgia CD in four hours.

  Recording engineer: Can you do a dozen in an hour?

  Blind Blake: I can do as many as you want, boss!

  All in one take. (31)

  Kokomo Arnold

  Kokomo Arnold, also named Gitfiddle Jim, is the only other musician who comes near Blind Blake. A left-handed player: he played his guitar flat. No-one has surpassed Kokomo on National slide. It’s as if you’ve got guitarist, bass player and rhythm section all at once and don’t forget – on top of that these guys sing and laugh! “Busy Bootin”, an earlier version of the Sixties hit, “Keep A-Knockin’ But You Can’t Come In” is one of the Kokomo Arnold songs I do. Lots of people have done versions of this and I also play it rock ‘n’ roll style.

  What I can’t understand is how Kokomo can play jazz chords on an open-tuned guitar. He plays slide but the chord structures are the same as an ordinary guitarist would play. Yet getting 7ths and minors is quite difficult on slide unless you’re tuned to these but then you can’t do majors. I’ve long puzzled over Kokomo’s supreme guitar skill and found it impossible to do what he did. Because of my desire to preserve my precious records I deprived myself of an important piece of information! In order that I wouldn’t damage them by playing them too much or by being clumsy with the stylus, I used to record them onto tape or cassettes. To learn the songs I would play these instead of the records over and over and over. But in doing this I often neglected to read record covers and sleeve notes. So – it’s only recently that I’ve discovered that what I thought Kokomo was achieving with one guitar was actually being achieved by two guitars. This doesn’t make him less amazing, though! He accompanied himself on most of his recordings nevertheless.

  But to think that for many years I had been trying to get this effect with only one guitar!

  This story illustrates the difficulty a musician has when he tries to study long-dead musicians from the pre-video age. They were often not filmed or archives were carelessly lost. Seeing them play would clarify some things because there has been no-one to ask about their techniques. There was very little country blues influence in folk circles; none of the folk greats I met knew and it took the Stones and Eric Clapton to raise its pro
file.

  Ry Cooder made the same point with regard to Blind Willie Johnson whose “incomparable sense of timing and tone” he admired. He puzzled about him like I did about Blind Blake and Kokomo Arnold and concluded that Johnson doesn’t play chords – he didn’t put in extra chords. The listener perceives chords nevertheless. Often with music it’s what you leave out that makes it special. You can put on a monophonic harmony with slide – that’s what Blind Willie Johnson does, maintaining his rhythm with open chord. With him you get a haunting vocal and guitar line that in places don’t quite fit but the whole thing is a statement in music of his spiritual certainty. I agree with Ry Cooder that his guitar playing is unique – you can’t copy it – though I think his description of him as “an interplanetary world musician” is a bit over the top. Cooder described “Dark Was The Night” as the “most transcendent piece in all American music”. (32) It inspired his soundtrack for Paris Texas. Eric Clapton thought Johnson’s slide playing was supreme. I would say he was a black guy singing songs and accompanying himself in a fairly basic way: the only way he knew how. Hence the simplicity of the structure.

  But many musicians and commentators have been in awe of this musician and he is a one-off. Johnson’s “Dark Was The Night” was on an album sent off into space in Voyager I in 1977.

  So he was interplanetary after all.

  “The Twelves” is one of Kokomo’s songs that I would try to learn on my fictitious desert island. It’s virtually the same song as “The Dirty Dozens” recorded by boogie-woogie pianist Speckled Red. I don’t know what it’s about: it dances along at a relentless pace and it’s so fast it’s difficult to make any sense of it. It’s incredible. I’ve heard many jazz bands do the same chords but I don’t understand how he does it. Even if I saw it I might not understand.