Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Presley had everything in place to make history. For starters, he stumbled into Sun Records, where Phillips was looking for someone white who could sing convincingly in a black style. Going anywhere else to make a record, like, say, Nashville, a few hours east of Memphis, where white singers made the city the capital of country music, would have probably meant Elvis would have never been discovered. Second, not only had Elvis absorbed the sounds of black gospel and blues growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, before relocating to Memphis, but he genuinely loved black music, which gave his music honesty and sincerity. And finally, Presley was young (not yet twenty years old when he first recorded for Phillips), remarkably handsome, sexy but in a safe, innocent way, and white. Also, being musically astute, he had a firm grasp of country music, white gospel, and the pop music of the day as exemplified by crooner Dean Martin.

  Elvis Presley blended the best elements of white and black music and culture and, with Phillips’ guidance, turned the mix into rock & roll and a musical explosion, the power of which had never been felt before, not even in the 1920s, when blues and jazz captured the imagination of young America. The blues was also impacted by the sudden birth of rock & roll in the early 1950s. Black artists began looking more to rock & roll and less to the blues for musical success, especially those who had been singing a very blues-based, black rock & roll prototype—Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ike Turner, Big Joe Turner. So did rhythm & blues singers like Wynonie Harris and Roy Brown, both of whom had big-selling records in 1948 with a song called “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” The young white audience that embraced rock & roll was larger and richer than the black blues and rhythm & blues communities.

  A young black man from the St. Louis area with looks as striking as Presley’s and an equal understanding of the formula that mixed black blues with white country, guitarist Chuck Berry wrote his own songs and was just brash enough to think his sound could appeal to both black and white audiences. Berry went to Chicago in 1955 to see about recording his music for Chess. Later that year Chess issued Berry’s “Maybellene,” a song with even more musical significance than Presley’s “That’s All Right,” since it was an original composition (though inspired by a country standard, “Ida Red”), not a cover of an already existing song. And it was performed by a black man.

  Music historians may argue that Berry’s history-making record was predated by Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston nearly four years earlier in Memphis at the Sun studio, when they recorded a song called “Rocket 88,” which was released by Chess in 1951. Depending on one’s definition of rock & roll and interpretation of who gave birth to it and where, a good case can be made for Turner and Brenston as being the first rock & roll artists, black or white. But all historians and critics would agree that neither Turner nor Brenston had the social and cultural components in place in 1951 to cause the stir that Presley and Berry did a few years later. With Berry, Chess broadened its catalogue to include black rock & roll artists, making an impact on American music that rivaled Sun’s.

  Little Walter played harmonica with Muddy Waters’ band and became a solo blues star with the hit “My Babe.”

  In addition to Berry, Chess scored commercially with Bo Diddley, a black artist whose signature guitar sound featured a rhythm that bounced and boogied and whose songs often contained a beat—the “Bo Diddley” beat—built on a previous black beat described as “shave ‘n’ a haircut, two bits.” Born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Mississippi, in 1928, Bo Diddley was adopted as a child, and his name became Ellas Bates McDaniels when his family moved to Chicago in 1934. After playing around the Windy City in blues bands in the early 1950s, Diddley signed a recording contract with Chess in 1955. His debut record—the self-titled “Bo Diddley,” backed by the bluesy “I’m a Man”—made him nearly as big a star as Chuck Berry. But Berry was able to follow up the success of “Maybellene” with nearly two dozen other Chess hits.

  Chess Records released its share of rock & roll records in the 1950s, but it ruled the blues during the music’s golden decade. No other label produced as many seminal artists or recordings or did as much to bring the blues into the modern era. Muddy Waters was the label’s first—and biggest—blues artist. But he was surrounded by a group of other artists, some of whom played in his bands (Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, Junior Wells, James Cotton, Otis Spann) and later became stars in their own right, some of whom were recording rivals (Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson), and some of whom were critical behind-the-scene players, vital to Waters’ success (Willie Dixon).

  That Chess was a Chicago-based recording company cannot be underestimated. During the black migration north in the 1940s, which continued unabated in the fifties, hundreds of blues artists settled in the Windy City, as did hundreds of thousands of transplanted black blues record buyers, in effect creating a fertile field of blues talent and a large enthusiastic audience for the records Chess issued. Detroit also had a thriving blues scene in the postwar years. New York had become the home not only of Lead Belly but also of Reverend Gary Davis, Josh White, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and other bluesmen relocated from the Carolinas and the Piedmont region along the Eastern Seaboard as early as the thirties and forties. The Memphis blues scenes continued to thrive in the 1950s, as did the scene in St. Louis and East St. Louis, the nearly all-black community across the Mississippi River in Illinois. Out on the West Coast, Los Angeles and Oakland contributed a blues sound that often was smoother and softer than the sounds back east, courtesy of artists such as singer/pianist Charles Brown. But none of these cities could match Chicago’s blues power. In the 1950s, Chicago became “home of the blues,” and Chess was the kitchen where the music was made.

  The chef was Willie Dixon. In the studio he produced records, played bass on them, wrote and arranged songs, oversaw session musicians, befriended artists and offered advice, and acted as talent scout. He also made his own records, although, as a recording artist, he never could match the success of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, the two Chess bluesmen who benefited most from Dixon’s many talents. Both Waters and Wolf relied on Dixon for songs, in particular. Two of Waters’ best records—”Hoochie Coochie Man” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You”—were written by Dixon, while Wolf scored with such Dixon numbers as “Spoonful,” “Little Red Rooster,” “I Ain’t Superstitious,” and “Back Door Man.” Dixon also gave Little Walter “My Babe,” which was a big hit for the singer/harmonica player; and to Sonny Boy Williamson went “Bring It On Home.”

  Dixon had arrived in Chicago from Vicksburg, Mississippi, as early as 1936, not to play the blues but to pursue a career as a prizefighter. He won the Illinois State Golden Gloves heavyweight championship and turned pro, but after only a few fights he hung up his gloves and picked up the bass. After serving prison time as a conscientious objector for refusing to serve in the armed forces, Dixon played bass in a number of groups, most notably the Big Three Trio, which recorded blues and pop from 1947 to 1952. During this time Dixon met Phil and Leonard Chess at a popular blues club they owned, the Macomba Lounge, and began working for their label in 1948. Hiring Dixon would be one of the Chess brothers’ smartest moves. By 1954, Dixon’s input was critical to the success of the Chess sound.

  In addition to Chess, there were many other independent record companies that were part of the postwar blues story—Atlantic and Fire in New York; the aforementioned Sun in Memphis; Modern, RPM, Aladdin, and Specialty in Los Angeles; Peacock and Duke out of Houston; Trumpet from Jackson, Mississippi; Nashville’s Excello and Bullet; Newark’s Savoy; King from Cincinnati; and Vee Jay and Cobra from Chicago. Together, these and other labels made more blues available to the record-buying public than ever before.

  And it wasn’t just Chess artists who made the most exciting blues statements on record. In addition to B.B. King, there were dozens more major blues artists who played a part in the golden age of electric blues. John Lee Hooker moved to Detroit from Mississippi in 1943, finding opportunity on Hastings Street, Detroit’
s version of Memphis’ Beale Street. Hooker’s brand of boogie-blues and his dark, low-slung, sexually provocative vocals made him one of the most popular of the non-Chess recording artists. Hooker’s landmark record “Boogie Chillen” captured the music’s primal energy and simplicity; the one-chord boogie drone was hypnotic. In the song Hooker tells how he heard “Papa tell Mama, let that boy boogie-woogie,” which is exactly what Hooker did, becoming the dark prince of boogie blues.

  By most accounts, Jimmy Reed could drink just as effectively as he could sing and play the blues. Recording mostly for Vee Jay, Reed created a slow-drag, easygoing blues sound that was downright irresistible. Eighteen of Reed’s records made it onto the Billboard R&B charts from 1955 to 1961, including such blues chestnuts as “Honest I Do,” “Big Boss Man,” and “Bright Lights, Big City.” Working with boyhood friend Eddie Taylor, who taught Reed how to play guitar, and his wife, Mary Lee “Mama” Reed, who helped Reed compose his songs and get him through recording sessions despite his penchant for drink, Reed was one of the blues’ most popular artists in the 1950s. As compared to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who confronted their listeners with gritty, urgent blues, Reed stroked his audience with laid-back blues grooves that hit a responsive chord almost immediately. With his nonthreatening vocals, soft harmonica riffs, and walking bass lines, Reed and his blues were impossible not to like.

  Slide guitar stylist Elmore James

  Elmore James brought new excitement to the slide guitar style that had been a staple of the blues since the 1920s. Using Robert Johnson as his main inspiration, James created a riveting slide technique first heard in “Dust My Broom,” his epic 1952 reinvention of the Robert Johnson classic “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” for the label Trumpet that featured slurred, hell-raising notes that whooped with emotion. The main slide riff in the James version was used time and again by the guitarist in future recordings and became so identifiable that any blues slide guitar player worth his salt had to master it and include it in his or her guitar vocabulary.

  Like so many other bluesmen, James was born in Mississippi. After learning the rudiments of the guitar, playing with Sonny Boy Williamson, and serving in the navy during World War II, James returned to Mississippi, where he played in a series of makeshift bands before getting the chance to record for Trumpet in 1952. Riding the success of his Trumpet recordings, James moved to Chicago, formed a group, the Broomdusters, and recorded for the Meteor label. By the late fifties he had struck a deal with Bobby Robinson’s New York-based Fire Records, which released some of his best post-Trumpet recordings, including “The Sky Is Crying” and “Done Somebody Wrong.” Unfortunately, James died of a heart attack in 1963, never having quite reached the level of acclaim enjoyed by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and other Chess artists.

  Ever since Blind Lemon Jefferson became one of the most important country-blues artists of the 1920s, Texas had been a state with a remarkably rich blues tradition. Texas Alexander, Sippie Wallace, and T-Bone Walker all hailed from the Lone Star State, as did Sam “Lightnin’ “ Hopkins, one of the most prolific and consistently popular blues musicians of the twentieth century. Hopkins was a cousin of Texas Alexander, one of the best pre-war blues singers to come out of Texas, and his earliest blues connection was with Blind Lemon Jefferson, who influenced Hopkins’ emerging blues guitar style. Just after World War II, Hopkins began his recording career, which, when it finally ended in the late seventies (Hopkins died in 1982), amounted to hundreds of recordings with nearly two dozen labels.

  Hopkins recorded as a solo artist, as part of a duet, and with a band. He was a master improviser, making up songs on the spot, reshaping melodies and lyrics to fit a particular moment or audience, and cutting one song into another. “Depending on how he felt or what day it was or whether the moon was full, Lightnin’ was just totally unpredictable,” recalled Chris Strachwitz, who recorded Hopkins for his Arhoolie label in the sixties. Many of Hopkins’ songs were autobiographical; humor was an element that could often be found in his music. In the end, Lightnin’ Hopkins was a blues machine, producing one good blues record after another.

  In the 1950s the blues went international. From its inception, jazz was viewed by Europeans, particularly the British and French, as something exotically American and therefore, alluring. Beginning as early as the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the Fisk Jubilee Singers toured England and parts of Europe, African-American music began to be embraced by European and British art crowds. In the early twentieth century, bandleaders such as James Reese Europe and, later, singer Josephine Baker, made their marks overseas. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz artists toured there in the 1930s. After World War II, the appetite for American recordings broadened. Merchant seamen would trade or sell records in ports such as Liverpool and London before distribution agreements with American record companies were in place. Collectors and American music fans there treasured rare copies of Chess recordings and knew well the excitement created by the blues, even if it was experienced only on vinyl.

  The first country-blues singer to perform overseas was Lead Belly, in France in 1949, shortly before his death, and then Josh White and Lonnie Johnson the following year. In 1951, and then again a year later, Big Bill Broonzy played Great Britain and France. Knowledge of Broonzy and other African-American folk-blues artists came from musicologist Alan Lomax and his frequent music shows on BBC radio and television. Adventures in Folk Song and Patterns in American Song were two of Lomax’s most popular radio shows that aired on the BBC. They cultivated a small but growing audience for American folk and blues music in England. Thanks to the encouragement of Lomax and Hugues Panassie, a French jazz fanatic and the editor of the publication Jazz Hot, Broonzy played a series of dates that introduced live American folk blues from the concert stage to French and British audiences.

  Broonzy had had trouble maintaining his popularity with African-American blues fans in the years just after World War II. Smartly, Broonzy had seen how young white intellectuals, especially in New York City, had embraced the blues as a treasured folk music from a disenfranchised people. Lead Belly, Josh White, and others had done well with whites by playing folk blues. Broonzy decided he would do the same. He began playing college coffeehouses and small folk-music clubs in the States; his success there gave him the courage to try Europe with its equally white audiences. The trip paid off, as Broonzy in the 1950s became one of the best-known American blues artists outside America.

  Other artists followed in Broonzy’s path, most notably Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, followed by Muddy Waters in 1958, Champion Jack Dupree in 1959, and Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, James Cotton, Little Brother Montgomery, Willie Dixon, and Jesse Fuller in 1960. The arrival of the new decade saw interest in electric Chicago blues recede in the American black community. Record sales stopped growing. Waters’ near-decade run of hits had slowed down; there was little in the way of new ideas or energy coming from Waters and Wolf, though they continued to make exemplary recordings. The sound was somewhat stale, if the songs weren’t.

  But there was something else happening in the black community in the mid-1950s: a new determination to gain self-respect and equality in white-dominated America. A young preacher from Atlanta, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., pushed for reform through nonviolence. On December 1, 1955, a tired housewoman, Rosa Parks, refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, prompting a boycott of the city’s transit system by blacks. Suddenly, it seemed as if African-Americans all over had gained the courage to speak out, step out, cry out in frustration—and do something about it. For a growing number of young black activists, the blues was music from another era.

  The African-American civil rights movement caused monumental change, not just in black culture but in all America. The blues stood by while African-Americans, mostly young, took to the streets and demanded justice. A new music form suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere. It was called soul music.

  Soul counte
d blues and rhythm & blues among its roots, but it also drew heavily from gospel and pop. There was more melodic freedom in soul; the traditional A-A-B blues form was only acknowledged, not followed as if it were the main musical source. Improvised vocalizing, the kind that made gospel so dynamic, was an important soul ingredient, as was the call-and-response delivery, a standard strategy in most forms of gospel. And where in blues the guitar was a primary means of expression, in soul the human voice knew no competition.

  Ray Charles is often considered to be the author of the first big-selling soul song. In 1959 his “What’d I Say” topped the Billboard rhythm & blues charts. Though the song had as many R&B roots as it did prototype soul sounds, it did mark a change in black music. By the time a young, ambitious assembly line worker from the automotive factories of Detroit started a record company called Motown, soul was on its way to redefining black music, much the way Muddy Waters and Chess Records did a generation earlier. To young black ears, soul sounded in sync with the times. People were moving forward in their thinking and actions, dreams suddenly seemed possible, the world could be changed, things could happen. For many young African-Americans, soul music reflected all of these feelings.