Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  The raspy voices of James Brown and Wilson Pickett, the seductive vocals of Marvin Gaye had added heat to the parties of our teenage years. We were slow-dancing, barely moving, paying close attention to the heavy breathing of Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” and Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me.” We squeezed each other, hugged even tighter, hearing the first notes of Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine.” In the sixties and seventies, the blues, rhythm & blues, and soul intoxicated us: “Shake, Shake, Shake,” “Chains, Chains, Chains.” We were stunned and ravished by African-American music. It gave our political revolts a depth, an existentialist inspiration. And all of a sudden, in the early eighties, a new wave took us by surprise: the music of the African diaspora—majestic music, both happy and melancholic, that set our Parisian rainy days on fire.

  We were moved, but also unable to make up our minds about which we liked better: Afro-American music or African music? The plaintive, falsetto voices of Youssou N’Dour, Ismael Lo, Salif Keita, or the smooth sounds of Stevie Wonder, the pounding heavy funk of the Gap Band, of Maze, or the luminous incantations from Ladysmith Black Mambazo of South Africa? But little by little, we could see some connections, some ties; we didn’t have to choose after all, we could gobble it all up.

  Black American music had in a way psychoanalyzed us. James Brown was screaming, “I’m black, I’m proud,” and in a self-imposed reversal of fortune, a kind of metaphysical self-hatred, we idealized the suffering and the struggle of the oppressed; feeling ill at ease, we wanted to be black. We discovered our fascination for exile and suffering present in the dramatic and simple “Dock of the Bay,” by Otis Redding, with the last notes drowning in the sad murmur of the waves.

  Flash back to Paris in the eighties: A funky, brass band of a magazine, Actuel, defines those ten years for us. Fast, cheeky, inquisitive, Actuel was like an oracle, with its intuitions that would make a mark on its time. Jean-Francois Bizot, who started Actuel, is a big gruff guy full of big gruff ideas, a walking encyclopedia, crazy about jazz and blues, someone who didn’t hesitate to champion African music that came out raw and against the grain.

  Just as happiness, or sorrows, never come alone, along with the African music wave came the pirate-radio movement. Bizot, never one to miss a beat, started his own, Radio Nova, a truly original station that brings together and fosters multiple worlds of sound. I worked there, in the elegant seven-story building of Actuel-Radio Nova. We would see lots of fascinating people passing by, who made it hard to concentrate. The magazine and the radio were for West Indian, Jamaican, and African musicians, a place of anchorage, of recognition—they were at home there. There was a DJ from Guadeloupe, Socrates, his record collection of blues and soul music particularly impressed us. He turned us on to the Staples Singers’ emblematic “I’ll Take You There” and also the music of Joe Tex, Bobby Womack, Ernie K-Doe, Eddie Floyd, and Arthur Conley. There was also DJ Bintou, from Burkina Faso, a beautiful, commanding presence who orchestrated numerous tumultuous gatherings, full of laughter and smoke in the corridors and the studios of Radio Nova. We thought history was happening right here, happening and spinning outward, worldwide, orbit-wide, a future that would last forever, and we were getting a kick out of being seated in the first row.

  In those days, we were always scheming to top off the days with jazzy nights. The best address for this, of course, was the most secret one: We would sneak out for a party at the Rex, on Boulevard Sebastopol, where African and West Indian artists would meet, where we could count on a rainbow swirl of sounds, dances, and encounters. There was Mamadou, the smooth talker who would organize hilarious contests among the best-dressed sapeurs, those Congolese dandies who liked to show off in patent-leather shoes and wear crisp designer clothes by Armani or Miyake. Oh yeah, can’t forget the energetic West Indian DJ named Sydney, who would hook up funk and African music on the Rex turntable.

  Actuel nicknamed us “les jeunes gens modernes.” It was truly a renaissance, a newly found humanism. We believed in multiculturalism, cultural cross-fertilization, bricolage, merging, citizens of the world, world music, a global village. It happened like that, like falling in love or love at first sight, and we could not live without it, without African music or Afro-American music; yet, the interplay between the two confused us. Africans in France had issues with Afro-American artists, whose huge popularity would irritate the Africans but also would challenge them. There were a lot of quarrels among schools and cliques, some real, some pure hype.

  Through the nineties, we witnessed great lessons of reversibility and hybridization: Papa Wemba and his moving, playful, Africanized version of Otis Redding’s “Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)”; Ali Farka Toure and his blues recorded in Memphis; Youssou N’Dour in a duet with Wyclef Jean.

  What is left today of our love stories, where are our mentors, the pioneers? What happened to Bonga, Bongo, or Zao? Zao, from the former Zaire, a prophet, serious and droll, who had written in 1985 the great antiwar song “The Veterans”: Did we really believe once that a song could change the world, that to love people’s songs was to love the people in their songs? Were we fools? Was it fake, the worshipping of difference in the suddenly reconciled differences? Did world music fail us?

  While waiting for the answers in France, like elsewhere, to get down, we replay the blues, even the globalized versions, a thousand times redone, electrified, Africanized, Arabized, distilled, cyberspaced, and worked through the grinder of disco, ragamuffin, techno, ambient, house, garage, acid, trip-hop. Blues Frenchified also by our nostalgic French singers, Bernard Lavilliers, Alain Souchon, or by Patricia Kaas, who sings the blues a la Edith Piaf, or Francis Cabrel, who in a dignified way talks about slavery and the blues: “Son House and Charley Patton, Blind Blake and Willie Dixon, Ma Rainey and Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf and Blind Lemon” in his tune “100 More Years.”

  As for the children of the African and West Indian diaspora, Princesses Nubiennes, Zap Mama, Princesse Erika, Oxymo Puccino, MC Solaar, and many others in France, caught in between all these trends and fashions, from hip-hop to Afro-European pop, it’s not always easy for them to know where they stand.

  “When I get the blues, awake at night, I find myself,” sing the Nubiennes. Perhaps, that’s one thing the blues means, going back to the roots, listening to the sonic ocean, while “sitting on the dock of the bay.” [Translated by Brigitte Engler]

  * Over the years, Lead Belly’s name often has been spelled “Leadbelly”; his family prefers the spelling of his name to be two words, so that is the spelling used throughout this book.

  WARMING BY THE DEVIL’S FIRE

  Directed by Charles Burnett

  Historically, there’s a complex, even antagonistic, relationship between the blues—the devil’s music, Satan’s music—and the church in the black community. A lot of blues players, many of them women, left the church to pursue a career in the blues, and ended up going back at the end of their days. In Warming by the-Devil’s Fire, we mentioned how Son House, who was a preacher at one time, went to jail for murder in self defense, came out, tried to be a preacher again, then went back to playing the blues. “Georgia Tom” (whose real name was Thomas A. Dorsey) wrote sexually graphic songs for Bessie Smith and others, then he went and wrote some wonderful, lyrical religious compositions later on. Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Reverend Gary Davis did the same thing.

  This relationship between the sacred and the profane is the theme of Warming by the Devil’s Fire. It tells the story of a young kid going back to Mississippi before he’s twelve to get baptized. To get saved. But then he’s kidnapped by his uncle Buddy—a blues person—who takes him around to experience what he’s gonna be saved from. At the end, his other uncle, a preacher named Flem, finds him and puts him on the road to the mourner’s bench. And years later, Uncle Buddy also ends up becoming a preacher.

  When we started this project, I screened a lot of footage on the blues; if I hadn’t, I probably would have made a relatively conventional
documentary. But after seeing so many others, I began to think what could I add? How is this going to be different? I also had to consider how to frame the film—because there’s so much to the blues, what do you include, who do you exclude? It took quite a while for me to sort these questions out, which must have frustrated Marty Scorsese.

  The story I chose for Warming by the Devil’s Fire isn’t strictly autobiographical, but everything in the film happened to a certain extent, and I used these experiences as guideposts to come up with a story that everyone could identify with. I had an uncle who was very much like Buddy. Like the trickster figure in folklore, Buddy awakens things in his nephew and gives him experiences that will help him become a complete person. At the same time, I wanted to tell a story about the blues that echoed the form. There’s play within the material; it tries to be loose. And the character played by Tommy Hicks—Uncle Buddy—personifies the feeling of the blues and embodies all of its contradictions.

  The story’s told from the perspective of the narrator, the young kid who returns to Mississippi and becomes aware of the blues as an art form. It’s through his eyes that we, the audience, meet the blues. It’s through his ears that we listen to the blues and come to appreciate them. The film includes a wide range of music, from raw gutbucket blues to the more sophisticated R&B, and is representative of both male and female singers.

  I wanted to put the music in context, too. The blues came out of the South, and the South has its history of struggles, and it seemed to me you can’t really separate the blues from their historical context: how people lived, the hardships they experienced, the texture of their daily lives—it was all related. I was looking for things that spoke to that period, that conveyed the harshness, the humor, and the contradictions. For example, we use a lot of footage of the horrible flood that devastated that part of Mississippi. Lives were lost. The whole economy was damaged. We showed the levee camps that sprang up as a result—another tragic period in the history of black labor. We used chain-gang images. For a black person in the South at the time, it didn’t take very much to go to jail. You didn’t have to do a serious crime—just look the wrong way. Out of those experiences came the elements for the blues.

  The blues encompasses every emotion; people listen to the blues because the blues allows one to come to terms with basic instincts. And they speak to the circumstances for blacks of an earlier time. When you look at the atmosphere surrounding the blues—racism, hard work and little to show for it; exploitation, humiliation, and the explosive life at the juke joint, where shootings and knife fights were not uncommon—you get a picture of survival and the will to live and self-destruct at the same time.

  I also wanted to include images that were in themselves moving, visual, cinematic. I really admire a work by James Agee called Now let Us Praise Famous Men. He and Walker Evans went across the South and documented workers—black and white—during the Depression. What made that book remarkable was that it provided this sense of history told from a certain perspective. Yet Agee was also concerned about exploiting the subject; he wanted to be as objective as possible. The result was a document that gives a feeling of the period that would have been lost otherwise. That’s one of the things I was trying to achieve—to go beyond information and convey a feeling for how these people lived and how they felt.

  I grew up playing the trumpet, so W.C. Handy’s music was the beginning; his were the first blues I learned how to play. Handy wasn’t your typical vagabond blues player, like Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, traveling with a guitar on his back to find work on the street corners. Handy came from a middle-class family, which was unusual. His father wanted him to go to college and didn’t think music was any way to make a living. But Handy had a lot of things going for him—he was one of the first African-Americans to write and publish his own material. He followed his own dreams, went against his parents’ wishes, and ended up being successful.

  A young W.C. Handy, circa 1898

  Handy went blind, then his sight came back, and finally he went permanently blind. I’ve always been interested in people who have to overcome a handicap like blindness, like Blind Lemon Jefferson, who managed to survive, hopping trains and singing in levee camps, the worst and most dangerous places to work, where there wasn’t any law. That he was able to be imaginative and creative and have a sense of poetry under those circumstances is remarkable. His music and lyrics are incredibly moving, but the things he sings about are things you only want to experience vicariously.

  In his film, Burnett portrays the rough living of the blues. Here, the narrator, as a child, shares a bed with his uncle Buddy.

  During one scene, Buddy plays a record by Lucille Bogan, a singer whose lyrics were very graphic sexually. Her records should be double X-rated. [In fact her first release was too raw to be released.] When she sings about “nipples on my titties as big as the end of your thumb” and on and on, you get a clear sense of why the church was so opposed to the blues. On the other hand, Lucille Bogan can be seen as an important figure in that she was unabashed about her sexual desire at a time long before the so-called “sexual revolution.” Bogan, Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith—these were women at the top of their game creatively who dealt openly with women’s themes and issues.

  Choosing the music was the hardest part—because there was so much great material to choose from. Every time I came back to the film, I’d wind up choosing another piece of music. To really get a sense of the blues, you’d need to do the impossible, by putting everything in. I chose a Sonny Boy Williamson song, for example, because he’s a great singer/harmonica player, of course—but also because he was a character himself, someone with a great screen presence. When you do a film, you always have to consider casting. There were some wonderful musicians we could have used who, unfortunately, weren’t as cinematically engaging. A lot of people who were essential to this era probably should have been included for historical reasons, but for dramatic reasons I wound up leaving them out. Movies don’t allow for any lulls. So you go for the personality, what works well on the screen.

  Burnett’s narrator remembers going to Mississippi to get baptized, or “saved.” Uncle Buddy shows him what he’s getting saved from.

  I wanted to have more of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday in the film, in fact more of everyone.

  Especially the women, who came from vaudeville, which meant they had more professional training, as opposed to someone like Robert Johnson, who migrated and picked up things as he went. The early women singers had a big impact on the blues, particularly because of their record sales. They had huge audiences and helped spread the blues. The women had a unique role.

  —Charles Burnett

  BESSIE SMITH: WHO KILLED THE EMPRESS? BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

  The only thing clear about that September night was the night itself. It was nearly 2 a.m, ten miles north of Clarksdale, Mississippi. There was no rain, just the open air, the stars, and the shadowy ribbon of Highway 61 stretching into the Delta distance.

  Bessie Smith was on that road, traveling in an old Packard with a wooden frame. The date was September 26, 1937- Bessie—known as the Empress of the Blues—was a bit down on her luck around that time. She wasn’t flat broke, but she was no longer music royalty. She was, in a way, living the life she had sung about in her song “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” Time was, she would blow into town, traveling in her own private train car, heralded by adoring articles in black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, her many minions passing out flyers announcing that the Empress had arrived. Now she was playing smaller joints, some half filled, and she was lucky to get the work. Her driver was a man named Richard Morgan, and by most accounts he was also her lover. Bessie had a gig set for later that day in Darling, Mississippi; to get a head start, she and Morgan had left Memphis early. They had traveled around seventy-five miles and figured they’d spend the night in Clarksdale before heading on.

&
nbsp; Bessie never made it to her gig. But the story about how she died has kept traveling on, like a car on a dark highway, picking up truths and half-truths, exaggerations, and outright fabrications along its journey. A Down Beat magazine article published two months after her death asked, “Did Bessie Smith Bleed to Death While Waiting for Medical Aid?” Another Down Beat article printed just a month later retracted the claims made in the first and announced, “Southern Whites Did Not Turn Dying Bessie Away,” but the earlier charges had already entered popular lore. The story that Smith had been turned away from a hospital by racist whites got more mileage from the 1959 play The Death of Bessie Smith, by Edward Albee. Then in 1972, Chris Albertson published the biography Bessie that was widely interpreted as debunking the story that Smith’s death resulted from segregation and prejudice. Still, there may be some substance to the claims that bigotry, and not just bad luck, played a part in ending the reign of the Empress of the Blues.

  Bessie Smith’s life began with loss. She was born on April 15, 1894 (or possibly 1895) in the Blue Goose Hollow section of Chattanooga, Tennessee; her father, a part-time Baptist preacher named William, died when she was still a small child, and her mother, Laura, passed away before Bessie was ten. Bessie’s brother Clarence, the oldest surviving man in the family, joined a traveling minstrel show in 1904, working as a comedian and dancer. When Clarence passed through town in 1912—with the Moses Stokes troupe—Bessie grabbed her chance, auditioned, and left with them, initially as a dancer.

  The troupe’s premier singer at the time was none other than Ma Rainey, one of the earliest, and most influential, blues singers. Rainey was as colorful a character as there’s ever been in American music—which is saying a lot—and was given to wearing wild costumes, getting her way, and living an openly bisexual life. Some music writers discount Rainey’s impact on the young Bessie, but black newspapers from the period testify to her influence. The April 10, 1926, edition of the Baltimore Afro-American, noted “… it was [Ma Rainey] who first started on their way to fame and fortune [vaudeville stars] Butterbeans and Susie … and Bessie Smith.” Maud Smith Faggins, Bessie Smith’s sister-in-law, said that even after Bessie left Rainey’s troupe, the two singers remained friends. Said Faggins: “Ma Rainey used to come on our show car, and she used to talk about how she used to spank Bessie and how she used to make Bessie sing. Ma Rainey and Pa Rainey is the one [sic] that really put Bessie on the road.”