Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  JD: Otha Turner is a master. I believe he’s the most complete human being I’ve ever met because his art and his life and his family and his existence as a farmer—it’s all one thing.

  LD: We were young children growing up when a lot of the great blues guys were still around. I do remember going to the Memphis Blues Festivals and seeing Mud Boy and the Neutrons, which was you and Lee Baker, a great guitar player and protege of Furry Lewis; Sid Selvidge, a great singer; and Jimmy Crosthwait, washboard player extraordinaire.

  JD: We were the white boys from the Memphis Country Blues Festivals. We were exposed to these great men. I used to play with Sleepy John all the time, and Furry got to where he couldn’t play without Lee. There was definitely a real special symbiotic relationship between the Memphis bohemian underground and these old men. I used to play for Bukka White a lot. We used to open for each other … if it was the two of us, he’d play piano and make me play guitar because he thought that was funny. Toward the end, there was a honky-tonk biker bar where Mud Boy first started playing—a place called Hot Mama’s. I used to play there with Bukka pretty regularly. We were teaching him to play “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Born to Be Wild.”

  LD: These four young guys—Mud Boy and the Neutrons—were having the same kind of relationship that I ended up having with R.L. Burnside and Otha Turner.

  JD: Twenty years earlier … But back to Mister Rogers’. On the show with Otha was Jessie Mae Hemphill, the “She-Wolf” playing the bass drum—legends of the blues. And Fred Rogers, gentleman and genius that he is, interviewing. Called Otha Mr. Turner. If there was to be an introduction to the way I feel about the blues for me to show my son—it was perfect. A gift from Mister Rogers. From his neighborhood to our neighborhood.

  WHY I WEAR MY MOJO HAND By Robert Palmer [From the Oxford American music issue, 1997]

  Blues and trouble, that’s the cliche. The reality is: blues and chaos. Blues is supposed to be—what?—nurtured by trouble? So is most art that reaches deep inside and demands unflinching honesty. Is blues about trouble? No more than it is about good-time Saturday nights and murder most foul, sharecroppers’ servitude, and sweet home Chicago. Is blues a cause of trouble? Not directly. But what sort of thing almost inevitably causes trouble in our oppressively regimented world? You guessed it: chaos.

  The blues-and-chaos equation first presented itself to me in the mid-sixties, when a bunch of us—musicians, artists, and a smattering of smugglers and dealers—organized and presented the first Memphis Blues Festival in the Overton Park Shell. For years I believed the remarkable levels of chaos in everything remotely connected with those festivals resulted from a bunch of hippies trying to turn elderly blues singers into anarchist father-figures.

  Now I’m not so sure. In any case, that was before I met R.L. Burnside.

  R.L. was an outstanding disciple of one the greatest of all bluesmen, Mississippi Fred McDowell, who had been a Memphis Blues Festival regular. By the early 1970s, R.L. had really come into his own. The juke joints he ran in the north Mississippi hill country were as famous for their level of violence as for R.L.’s outstanding music, which rolled out of his jacked-up guitar amp in dark, turbulent waves—sometimes punctuated by gunshots, especially on Saturday nights. In fact, R.L. has been reported waving a (presumably loaded) pistol in at least one crowded joint. If that strikes you as akin to yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, well, that’s R.L. The man is a connoisseur of chaos; he attracts it, admires it, and then absorbs it, like a black hole sucking reality itself into the chaos of Nothing.

  Back in 1993, when I found myself producing a Burnside session for the album Too Bad Jim, a succession of chaotic eruptions seemed to threaten the entire project. A string bass fell to pieces in the studio. Then the drum kit collapsed into kindling after being given a single light tap. A glass door fell out of its mounting and gave me a skull-rattling knock upside the head. Out of the corner of my eye I glanced over at R.L.—he was enjoying himself like a kid at a Disney movie. The performances he recorded that day were highlights of the album.

  I decided, out of near-desperation, to fight fire with fire. Using objects and materials you can find in any good botanica, and dedicating them with a simple, made-up ritual I thought appropriate, I made myself a chaos-buster, a post-Heisenberg-Uncertainty-Principle Mojo Hand. The next time I went in the studio with R.L., the mojo was secreted on my person. The session went well. Toward the end we were taking a break when it happened again: A tall screen began to tip over, as usual for no apparent reason. It fell and hit engineer Robbie Norris on his head. This time, I was all smiles. “It works!” I crowed, giving my mojo charm a surreptitious rub. Robbie was gingerly rubbing the top of his head. “Yeah,” he said, “it works for you.”

  But of course, that’s just what you expect from magic: If it affects the practitioner’s reality, and in the way desired, it works. Chaos theory is one way of explaining the mechanics involved. Another, more poetic, and perhaps wiser way of explaining it is called “the blues.” Rarely have chaos and uncertainty been so listenable; and I’ll almost certainly be listening for the rest of my life. If I choose to pack my mojo, well, once again the blues says it best: “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.”

  ALl FARKA TOURE: SOUND TRAVELS BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

  Griots, in West Africa, are history set to music. They embody every story ever told, or worth knowing, anyway; they are every legend and every fable; they are schooled in the lore of kings and in the chronicles of wars. And, of course, there is a story told about how the line of storytellers was born. Griots sing of a time during the life of the prophet Mohammed when a man named Sourakata heard Mohammed’s message and mocked him. But each time Sourakata’s wicked words left his mouth, he found himself frozen in his tracks. Three times he mocked the Prophet, and three times he was held in place. Sourakata then recognized the power of Mohammed and the grace of his message, and his taunting words became songs of praise. Afterward, whenever Mohammed would visit a new place, Sourakata would go with him and implore, “Come out! Come out! People of the village, the Prophet of God has come!”

  Time passed, Mohammed’s message spread, and the Prophet and his followers continued their travels. Sourakata became so beloved by the Prophet, the story goes, that Mohammed’s other followers became jealous. They began to wonder why, when the pair came to villages and received offerings, that Sourakata was always granted by the Prophet the largest share when the bounty was divided.

  “Why do you favor Sourakata?” the jealous followers asked Mohammed.

  “It’s because of Sourakata that we receive anything,” the Prophet answered. “If you want nothing else, I will tell him to be quiet.”

  And so, when they entered the next village, Sourakata was silenced. He did not sing the praises of the Prophet, he did not announce his coming to the town, and he did not call the people to come out. And because he said nothing and sang nothing, no one came to hear the Prophet speak and no gifts were given. Immediately, Mohammed’s followers recognized their error, and Sourakata was asked to call to the people again.

  “People of the village, the Prophet of God has come!” And thus was the line of griots started.

  Ali Farka Toure, who is known by many as the “Bluesman of Africa,” was born in 1939 but not with that name and not into that profession. His birthplace was the village of Kanau, which is on the banks of the river Niger in Mali, just north of Niafunké, the town he would move to when he was four years old and where he now makes his home. He was his mother’s tenth son, and every male son she had given birth to before him had died in infancy. But he had lived, and it was an occasion worth marking. The name he was given was Ali Ibrahim, but it was a local custom to give a child an unusual nickname if the child’s parents have had other children who have died. The moniker that was selected for Ali was Farka, which means donkey—an animal known for its strength and stubbornness, traits he had displayed by clinging to life. “But let me make one thing clear,
” Toure would tell an interviewer later. “I’m the donkey that nobody climbs on!”

  From an early age, Toure was summoned by music. He came from a noble family, and the members of his clan were farmers—patiently working the land, praying for favorable weather and good harvests. But something called to him beyond the fields. He would hear local musicians playing in the spirit ceremonies on the banks of the Niger and he would watch, fascinated. The musicians would sing and play a variety of instruments: the njurkle (a single-string guitar), the ngoni (a four-string lute), and the njarka (a single-string violin). Something in Toure longed to join them, but members of his family did not consider music a suitable profession.

  Music in Mali can be a closed profession. Some are born to it, others are not. The griots of the region—also known as jelis—are a kind of spiritual trade union: Only those who are members are trained and encouraged to practice the craft. The griot tradition is a long one, spanning from the thirteenth century all the way to the twenty-first. A griot is like a library with an instrument, the kora, telling the tales of their people and setting them to music. Griots—like the American blues musicians who would come after them—are often on the move, from one place to the next, from one village to another. Their songs are not written down but passed from one generation to the next. Some of the songs are simple; others are complex, taking two days or more to perform. Becoming a griot without being born into a griot family is like becoming a lawyer without attending law school. One might have the talent for it, but there is a history to be learned before the tradition can be mastered, there are contacts that must be made before one can earn a living, and there are credentials one must possess before being taken seriously. And the boy who was named after a donkey was on the outside of it all. Still, when he was twelve years old, Toure fashioned his first instrument, a njurkle guitar, and taught himself how to play. Says Toure, “My family weren’t griots, so I never got any training. This is a gift I have; God doesn’t give everybody the ability to play an instrument. Music is a spiritual thing—the force of sound comes from the spirit.”

  Toure, like 90 percent of his countrymen, is a devout Muslim. But there are other traditions in Mali, and there are other powers that are said to hold sway over the people in the region. The river Niger is one of them, and some believe that between its banks, beneath the surface of the water, exists a world of spirits, supernatural beings with the power to influence events—from illnesses and diseases, to earthquakes and floods. The djinns are summoned through spirit ceremonies, and the world of men can communicate with their world by means of music and dance.

  When Toure was thirteen years old, he had a spiritual encounter in Niafunké. He was walking along playing songs on his njurkle guitar. It was about 2 a.m. Suddenly, before him he saw three little girls, each one taller than the last. They were lined up next to one another, like the steps of a staircase. He found himself frozen in place, unable to move any further. He stood there, unmoving, until 4 a.m.

  The next day Toure was again walking, this time along the edge of the fields, without his instrument. There before him he saw a black-and-white snake with a strange mark on its head. The snake wrapped itself around Toure’s head. He extricated himself, and the snake fell into a pit. Toure ran away, but the incident wasn’t over. Shortly after that he began to have “attacks,” he later reported, saying that he felt as if he entered a new world. He was no longer the person he once was. He felt he could resist pain, he had a new conviction that he could even withstand fire. He was beyond the physical world. He was sent to the village of Hombori to be cured, and he stayed there for a year. He eventually came back to Niafunké, but as a musician. He may not have been born into it, but now he was born again. He began to play his instrument with new passion and focus and began his career as a musician. He could feel the spirits welcoming him. Says Toure, “I have all the spirits. I work the spirits, and I work with the spirits. I was born among them and grew up among them.” He was not born a griot, but like a griot, he began to travel around Africa.

  Ali Farka Toure, 2000

  In 1968 he heard a recording of John Lee Hooker and was entranced. Initially, he thought Hooker was playing music derived from Mali. Several Malian song forms—including the musical traditions of the Bambara, Songhai, and Fulani ethnic groups—rely on minor pentatonic (five-note) scales, which are similar to the blues scale. Toure would later come to understand in greater depth the connection between African music and American blues. Also in 1968 Toure bought a six-string electric guitar. Armed with that instrument, Toure has since journeyed around the planet: to America, England, France, Japan, and many other nations. He has collaborated with American blues performers such as Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, the British-Indian musician Nitin Sawhney, and won a Grammy. Now he is at home in the town he grew up in and feels little reason to leave it again. In 2001, he announced that he was retiring from touring.

  These days, Toure stays close to home. Niafunké is a small village where fishermen cast nets into the Niger, cattle roam the countryside, and where some of the buildings are constructed of mud brick. “I know everywhere in the world,” Toure says. “I prefer it here.” Toure’s home has no telephone, and he likes it that way. “There’s nothing here—that’s why I’m here,” he says. “If there were a phone, you have to listen to people talk: ‘Yah, yah, yah, yah, yah.’“

  Toure confirmed his commitment to his native region by naming his 1999 album Niafunké and recording it at home. He didn’t want to make music that was purely a commercial venture—he wanted whatever he did to draw on his environment and reflect his social and spiritual values. “Music in Africa is not just a simple pleasure,” Toure says. “It’s a culture. It’s the culture in which we are born. We’ve grown up in it, we’ve lived it, and it’s what we know. For me, music is not something that comes from the university or the conservatory. What God gives you is worth more than what man gives you.” A recording facility was set up in an abandoned building in Niafunké; Toure worked the fields of his large rice farm during the day, and at night he settled in with his friends and band mates to record. Says Toure, “The albums I recorded before were recorded in rooms with enormous amounts of machinery. This album was not. I recorded it in my own village. It’s more authentic, like honey. I’ve tasted both sugar and honey, and I prefer honey. Now I’m allowing you to taste the honey.”

  Toure has been dubbed the Bluesman of Africa by the western press, but he doesn’t feel that he plays the blues. He says American blues performers play African music. The blues, he says, was a false name given by Americans to traditional African music that was brought to North America by slaves. Toure feels that Americans are lost, cut off from the source of their culture and language, and that they don’t know the correct names for the things that they left behind and half-remembered in their new land. Because Toure is African, because he is still in touch with the source of black culture, he feels he, and his fellow African musicians, know the right names for things. When he hears the blues, he hears the burbling of the Niger; he hears the spirit ceremonies on the riverbank; he hears the buyers and sellers calling out at the marketplace and the muezzin calling the people to prayer at the mosque. When he hears the blues, he hears Africa.

  American blacks did take much of their musical culture from Africa. A French text dating back to 1810 documents the music that Africans brought to the West. It reads, “As to guitars, which the Negroes call banza, see what they consist of: They cut lengthwise through the middle of a calabash… This fruit is sometimes eight inches or more in diameter. They stretch upon it the skin of a goat, which they adjust around the edges with little nails; they make two holes in its surface; then a piece of lath or flat wood makes the handle of the guitar; they then stretch three cords of pitre … and the instrument is finished. They play on this instrument tunes composed of three or four notes, which they repeat endlessly; this is what Bishop Grégoire calls sentimental and melancholy music, and which we call the music of savages.”<
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  Nearly two hundred years later, Africans hear American music and hear themselves, and Americans hear Africa and hear the blues. Call and response. It is one of the oldest elements of black music. A river-spirit calls out to a young boy on the banks. In the belly of a slave ship, the imprisoned cry out to one another through the long middle passage. In a cotton field, workers call out to each other through a long sweltering workday. A guitarist sings and her guitar answers back with a twang. A preacher exhorts his flock and they answer in sweet celebration. Africa calls out to North America, and the latter calls back to the former in the form of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson and Son House and Bessie Smith. The whole world hears and responds as Manu Dibango hears Miles Davis, and Salif Keita listens to Cuba’s Orquesta Aragón, and Miriam Makeba hears Harry Belafonte, and the Roots hear Fela Anikulapo Kuti, and all the music mixes and matches, and just who is the caller and who is the responder is somehow lost in a tangle of blue sound.

  Africa gave America some of what is now called the blues, but America gave Africa and the world back something else: a music that was something more than it once was. America gave back a sound tempered by hundreds of years of incarceration, a music energized by electric strings, a culture baptized by blood and by sweat and by the mud of the Mississippi. Africans may hear it and call it their own, but it isn’t. The blues is something that Africans and Americans now share. Toure certainly understands that the flow of music—its sharing and its spread—are important. Says Toure, “Honey is not sweet when tasted by one lone mouth. In my life I have only one ambition… Everything I do, everything I have, must be shared with others.”

  FRENCH TALKING BLUES BY CATHERINE NEDONCHELLE

  How did the love of African-American music in France turn into a passion for African music—from the blues to world music?