Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  There’s nothing that tells the truth like gutbucket blues. I mean, you got Jimmie Rodgers—you know I love Jimmie Rodgers—and Hank Williams, too, even if he didn’t get down all the way like the Howlin’ Wolf. But with the Wolf and some of those other great blues singers you have something that is so absolutely true, so close to the life that so many of our Southern people, black and white, have experienced, that how in the hell is the soul of man ever going to die when that is coming along to remind you of the most fundamental things-things that were so tough at the time, tough on the person that lived it, tough on the person that’s singing about it? These things you can’t buy in a book. You got to be there when it happens. And I guess I ought to know. It will always stay there. You won’t forget it. You won’t forget it.”—Sam Phillips

  WOLF LIVE IN ‘65

  By Robert Palmer

  [From Deep Blues, 1982]

  I’ll never forget a 1965 performance when Wolf played Memphis on a blues package show. This was several years before the blues revival made much headway among local whites, and there were only three or four of us, huddled right up front in the theater’s most expensive seats… The MC announced Wolf, and the curtains opened to reveal his band pumping out a decidedly downhome shuffle… Where was Wolf? Suddenly he sprang out onto the stage from the wings. He was a huge hulk of a man, but he advanced across the stage in sudden bursts of speed, his head pivoting from side to side, eyes huge and white, eyeballs rotating wildly. He seemed to be having an epileptic seizure, but no, he suddenly lunged for the microphone, blew a chorus of raw, heavily rhythmic harmonica, and began moaning. He had the hugest voice I have ever heard—it seemed to fill the hall and get right inside your ears, and when he hummed and moaned in falsetto, every hair on your neck crackled with electricity. The thirty-minute set went by like an express train, with Wolf switching from harp to guitar (which he played while rolling around on his back and, at one point, doing somersaults) and then leaping up to prowl the lip of the stage. He was the Mighty Wolf, no doubt about it. Finally, an impatient signal from the wings let him know that his portion of the show was over. Defiantly, Wolf counted off a bone-crushing rocker, began singing rhythmically, feigned an exit, and suddenly made a flying leap for the curtain at the side of the stage. Holding the microphone under his beefy right arm and singing into it all the while, he began climbing up the curtain, going higher and higher until he was perched far above the stage, the thick curtain threatening to rip, the audience screaming with delight. Then he loosened his grip and, in a single easy motion, slid right back down the curtain, hit the stage, cut off the tune, and stalked away, to the most ecstatic cheers of the evening. He was then fifty-five years old.

  Howlin’ Wolf, photographed two years after his memorable Memphis performance

  “I used to cover that Jimi Hendrix song ‘Angel’ … and I’d blend it all: Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, writers like Flannery O’Connor. You mix it up, pour it in a bowl, and see what comes out. And that’s me.”

  —Lucinda Williams

  THE SOUL OF A MAN

  Directed by Wim Wenders

  Martin Scorsese had an idea for a series of several films made about the blues. There has never been a project like this, where seven directors actually worked on one subject and produced seven feature-length films. Each film has a very distinct point of view. Each director selected his territory in the history of blues himself. There were no stylistic or content limits. I think Marty really had a splendid idea when he started this thing.

  I knew he was a blues fan, and he wasn’t sure if I was one as well, so we started to talk about our favorite bluesmen first. I thought it was intriguing to be able to finally dedicate some time to my blues heroes. After all, I didn’t know that much about them. Sure, I had every record I could ever find of Skip James, but I didn’t know much about his life. And although I knew J.B. Lenoir’s music for thirty years, I realized that if I had to tell anybody how he had lived, I wouldn’t know what to say. I knew the music and just loved it. So the film was a great opportunity to really dive into the stories of these people and find out more about them myself.

  I think my first memories of the blues are, rather, memories of spirituals. We didn’t even have a record player at home when I was young, and the radio only played German music and classical music, but in school I once heard a record of so-called Negro spirituals. That was a sound I had never heard before, and its emotional honesty truly took me by surprise. I listened to it over and over again and soon knew some of the songs by heart, although I didn’t speak English, so I didn’t know what it all meant. I was just guessing. That was my first contact.

  Later on, the first bluesman I actually knew by name was John Lee Hooker, and the first blues LPs I bought were John Lee Hooker’s, because he had impressed me so much on the first hearing. Blind Lemon Jefferson, too, B.B. King … I soon started to know more about this music, but I only developed a better knowledge of the blues when the English bands in the sixties started to cover all the old bluesmen and play them electrically. I was guided by Van Morrison, the Pretty Things, the Animals, and the Rolling Stones and discovered the original versions of the songs that had inspired them.

  The blues is utterly emotional music, with a very simple pattern inside which musicians can take enormous liberties. I liked that supposition of a structure that is simple, inside which a lot of freedom can play out. The blues really deals with all kinds of troubles, with all kinds of worries and sorrows, with hardship, so even a young white fellow like me could easily identify with its subject. It’s the best music to hear when you’re down and when you need comfort. It’s very strong rhythmically, really at the roots of both jazz and rock & roll. I was a jazz fan when I was sixteen, eighteen. I played tenor saxophone, heavily influenced by John Coltrane, and only later got into rock & roll and the blues.

  Music has played a paramount role in my enthusiasm for the craft of filmmaking. It all started when I made my very first short 16-mm silent film. I had no money to record any sound, so I had these silent images when I sat down for the first time in an editing room at film school to put these shots together. I had my tape recorder with me. I played some of my favorite tracks to these images of mine, and that was the greatest fun I’ve ever had. In terms of filmmaking, that was the greatest discovery for me: how to put images and music together! As soon as you start that, even if you think you know your images or that music, when you put them together, a third thing emerges that’s more than the sum of both. And that precious moment when you first see your imagery and hear the music together with it, that for me, ever since that short film, is why I like to make movies—in order to get to that moment of joy. At times I think that’s the whole reason I am in this moviemaking business to begin with. I just do not understand any director who’ll have that taken away from him.

  My musical taste is pretty wide: I love classical music, and I like Latin and African music. But when it comes down to it, my favorite music is really blues and rock & roll. That I’m so attached to American music, from early blues recordings of the late twenties up to the sixties, probably has a lot to do with the fact that I discovered this music for myself. It was something that belonged to me, a territory I found for myself that nobody had shown to me and that nobody had imposed on me. I had chosen it myself! Then these English kids came out of nowhere, when I was sixteen, seventeen years old. Bands like the Rolling Stones or the Beatles were quickly known, but the better ones, in my book, were the more unknown Them (with Van Morrison), or the Animals, the Pretty Things, or my all-time favorites, the Kinks. These kids, they were “my generation,” just like the Who were saying it. They were just as old as I was, a couple of them maybe a year or two older, and most of them were art students who had invented that music from scratch. I identified with them—that was my own generation, and the music they made was really my music.

  I once heard a song by Skip James on a compilation album sometime in the sixties, just one track, but it stood out.
It was more haunting than anything else around it, and I knew I had to find out more about this singer of whom I just knew this one song. It took me awhile until I tracked down another album. His other songs all had that same quality, different from anybody else’s voice. His guitar and piano playing, too, were very elaborate and didn’t sound like anything else I knew. So I think he was the first hero of mine. I felt here was the first guy who I picked myself, and I really got attached to him.

  And then I remember in 1967, a new record came out by John Mayall, the godfather of the English blues movement. I had all of his LPs. Mayall’s band was like a breeding ground of blues musicians in England. I loved this new album, Crusade, especially one song on it called “The Death of J.B. Lenoir.” When I first heard it, I just had the shivers. That song was so moving and so personal, and there was such a great sense of loss. He was mourning the death of a friend, and I had never heard of this man his was singing about: J.B. Lenoir. So again I tried to find out everything I could, and I dug out a record of his. It actually had come out in Germany. It was acoustic blues, songs about the American South. Very powerful songs, very contemporary, dealing with the Vietnam War, for instance, and that was the first time I heard anybody sing about that war. Other songs were dealing with the fights of the black people in America for equality. When I originally heard the first notes of that first album of the real J.B. Lenoir, I thought I had been mistaken. This must be a woman, I thought at first, but it became clear after a while that this was not a woman. It was a man singing with the most unique high-pitched voice, but not really falsetto. Very emotional on top of that. By then my English was better, and I understood more of the words already. I understood that there was somebody who was singing about things that nobody else was singing about. Over the years, I found out that he had made music in Chicago in the fifties with a big band, using electric guitar and a big-band sound. I collected five, six, or seven obscure albums by this J.B. Lenoir, and in my heart he became my favorite blues musician of them all. Every now and then I would meet somebody who knew him. I remember, for instance, years later I was driving with Sam Shepard in his pickup truck across America; we were writing Paris, Texas together at the time and Sam had a few cassettes, and at one point he put in a new tape and said, “I bet you don’t know this guy,” and it was J.B. Lenoir. So he was one of the connoisseurs. All these J.B. fans had something in common: They were convinced that this was one of the greatest singers ever, yet he had remained strangely obscure. I found out that the first records I had bought in Germany had never come out in America. And that these songs about the Vietnam War, his song addressed to President Eisenhower from the fifties, his songs about Mississippi and Alabama, Americans simply didn’t know them. No wonder he remained so obscure and unknown.

  Musicians, like Jimi Hendrix, knew him; J.B.’s most famous song, “Mama Talk to Your Daughter,” had been a moderate R&B hit. But nobody really knew so much about the maris life. So when Marty gave me the chance to select my territory in the story of the blues, I knew it had to be about J.B. Lenoir and Skip James. Later on, I figured it was a bit bizarre to just pick my two favorite musicians; I didn’t even know how to link them, so I realized I needed more of a “theme.” It hit me that the one topic in both of their lives was an overall issue in the blues anyway, which is that a lot of bluesmen are torn between the worldly side of their music and the spiritual side of it. It seemed like an important theme in the history of blues, this gap between the Sacred and the Profane. The tension between gospel and blues is a strange demarcation line that goes across the entire history of the blues. A lot of blues musicians travel between the two lives; others could only live inside one of them and then at one point in their lives would break with that life, like Skip James, who one day stepped out of the history of the blues and became a minister, never touching the blues again for thirty years. And that is not just him; a lot of blues musicians felt that they had to leave the devil’s music behind to play God’s music. So when it finally came time to write some sort of treatment for my film, I wrote that it was about the Sacred and the Profane. That might sound abstract, but it was really about two men.

  And while I was preparing the film, I realized they both had a forerunner, and that there was a third musician I should really include: Blind Willie Johnson. I knew even less about him than the other two. There is not a single photograph of the man, just one rather graphic portrait that was an ad for a recording of his in the late 1920s. You can’t really judge from that what he might have looked like. So Blind Willie was a total mystery, but he had written some great songs, one in particular, “Dark Was the Night,” that I had at one point selected and used as temp music for Paris, Texas when I first showed the film to Ry Cooder. I had indicated to Ry that a bottleneck guitar style was what I would love to hear on the film somehow. Ry was very taken by the idea. He knew that song really well; actually, he had recorded it once himself. The theme of “Dark Was the Night” eventually became the main musical theme of Paris, Texas. Blind Willie Johnson only sang sacred music, never touched a single secular song, although his techniques, especially his bottleneck style, are among the finest in blues history, to quote somebody as competent as Eric Clapton. And of course as far as guitar playing, rhythm, or singing is concerned, it’s the same music. Only later on, Blind Willie became the “narrator” of my film. That might sound weird, as he died in 1947. But Blind Willie really saved my film. I was at a loss as to which perspective I could tell our story from, until I remembered that Blind Willie’s song “Dark Was the Night” had been picked as one of the handful of songs that represented contemporary twentieth-century music on the record that went out with the space probe Voyager into outer space.

  The overall parameter of the entire series that Marty had discussed with the directors was to shoot these films digitally. We all more or less agreed that DV-Cam would be the ideal, very portable, very light equipment to shoot this. So I knew that most of the film (or at least anything that was contemporary) would be shot on DV-Cam, and I was fine with that. We had used similar equipment for some of Buena Vista Social Club, and I knew it was good enough to be blown up to film in the end. But my film’s time period started in the late twenties, and the most glorious moment in the life of Skip James was a legendary recording session that took place in 1931. Of course, there is no filmed record of this whatsoever, only a few scratchy 78s on shellac. There is not even a single image of Skip James from the time when he did that recording. So I decided to reenact some of the lives of my heroes in order to show them: Blind Willie Johnson in 1927 and Skip James in 1931. And I figured to go back to the twenties or early thirties and shoot on DV-Cam was not a good solution. To reenact some of the lives of Skip James and Blind Willie Johnson, I needed to find a different medium. I chose to do that on a hand-cranked camera from the early twenties, a Debrie Parvo. I had shot on that camera once before and knew it worked really well. I love the effect of the irregularity of the hand-cranked camera movement. It is a really beautiful and authentic effect and transports you right back in time—so successfully, in fact, that when we showed a first cut of the film, most of the people who saw it believed we had found all this original archived material and didn’t really understand that we had produced it ourselves. The hand-cranked camera enables you to make this time jump and single-handedly, so to speak, produces the feeling of the era. And it’s a lot of fun to work with such an old camera. It was also a challenge shooting with a hand-cranker: You’re completely out of sync, because already the hand movement is never regular, and we shot on sixteen frames on top of that. Most of the scenes we were shooting involved playback! I first thought that playing in sync with these old recordings from 1927 or 1931 was a ludicrous idea and probably totally impossible, but we did a test and it actually seemed possible to sync up our hand-cranked material to the music. But it was not easy. Every second frame of our film, shot at more or less sixteen frames per second, would have to be doubled up to get to around twenty-four frames, and th
en you still had to manipulate it tremendously to achieve any synchronicity. Basically, you had to find sync moments for every word, or every stroke of the guitar, so you could advance second by second and extract or add frames, which you can only do now with digital technology. So our idea worked with a mix of the oldest possible technique and top-notch digital technology, thus enabling us to produce scenes that look as if they were filmed at the time.

  The sole graphic of Blind Willie Johnson appears in this early Columbia ad.

  The second half of the film concentrates on the life of J.B. Lenoir, in the fifties and sixties, when I felt the hand-cranked camera would no longer be appropriate. To get into the spirit of that period I decided we should shoot in 16 mm so it would look really different. And then we found this incredible material that nobody had ever seen, these two films actually shot of J.B. Lenoir in the early sixties. These two 16-mm films were shot by a couple of art students, Steve Seaberg and his wife, Rönnog, in Chicago. They had never made a movie before and didn’t know much about filmmaking. But they had become friends with J.B. Lenoir, loved the music, and loved the man so much that they thought, We have to do something to get him known to other audiences. Rönnog was from Sweden, and Steve was American. And Rönnog had the fabulous idea that if they would shoot a little movie about J.B. and take it to Sweden with them, they could show it on Swedish television. So they went about it and made the first film, actually shooting in a photographer’s studio. They put J.B. in front of a backdrop, never moved the camera, and shot four songs in that one angle. Then they took these ten minutes or so to Swedish television. The Swedes looked at it and were horrified: It was uncut material that the Seabergs presented to them, and the sound was only on an optical track, which was not very good, so the Swedish television executives just flat-out said, “We can’t show this, and also you should know that we don’t have color here in Sweden, we only have black-and-white TV, so if you shoot something, it has to be black and white.” So Rönnog and Steve went back home to Chicago a little disappointed and put their ten-minute color 16-mm film on the shelf.