Boogie Man

  In the blues world, over on the African side of the African-American hyphen, the picture is far more complex. In Africa itself, songs, ballads and poems have traditionally served as vessels by which the community transmits its history and its values to its youth, but for those particular Africans who found themselves involuntarily transformed into Americans (of a sort), that history and those values had been forcibly stripped away. As a result, blues obeys a correspondingly different set of imperatives – one radically distinguishable from both its African and Anglo-Celtic ancestors – and simultaneously holds the following truths to be self-evident: yes, there is a strong and very clearly defined tradition, and yes, its practitioners are expected to improvise freely within it, recreating it anew to meet the immediate needs of both performer and audience. There are set themes, and there are specified functions: dance songs, work songs, celebrations, laments, love songs, hate songs and so forth. The tradition is unfixed; indeed, it demands to be freshly re-invented with each performance, recreated anew to reflect the changing needs and circumstances of its time and place. Blues artists both ancient and modern have worked from a ‘common stock’ of folk materials: instrumental motifs and vocal tics, melodies, lyrical tags, chord progressions and even complete songs are derived directly from the tradition, and some of them, as we have already seen, long predate the era of recording, let alone the conventional mechanics of publishing and copyright law. What counts above all in the blues is individuality: the development of a unique and unmistakable voice, the ability to place an ineradicable personal stamp on those ‘common stock’ materials freely available to all. While instrumental dexterity, vocal facility and stylistic versatility are heartily respected within the blues community, what distinguishes the truly great from the merely professional is the fully realized man (or woman)’s communicated essence of self; the ability to serve as a conduit for the full gamut of human emotion, to feel those emotions with sufficient depth and intensity to reach out and touch listeners in places that those listeners might not even have known that they had. Without exception, every blues singer who has managed to pull ahead of the pack or haul himself (or herself) from the hordes of hopefuls chasing the blues-lovers’ dollar has this quality. Any competent blues artist should have the ability to entertain – those who don’t should simply bacdafucup and find another line of work before they starve to death – but the measure of true mastery, from ’20s pioneers like Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton to contemporary brand leaders like Robert Cray or Ben Harper – is the scale on which performers are capable of being themselves in public. And, by extension, the depth and complexity of that self. To serve as a neutral transmitter simply don’t cut it here.

  Naturally, real life is never quite as cut-and-dried as the above might suggest. The boundaries between these two traditions are of necessity blurred – with considerable movement of repertoire and instrumentation – and examples of each approach can be found in each camp. Nevertheless, they share this belief, both in theory and in practice: that ‘folk’ music – like folk tales, folkways and folklore in general – is the collective property of a community. Everybody uses it, and nobody owns it: a musician can draw on the common stock and use the tools of that heritage to create and express, and those creations can then be added to the common stock, becoming freely available to a fresh generation. Songs and ideas travelled as and when people did; ‘oral transmission’ – an oddly medical term more appropriate these days to viruses than art, unless one considers that art is a virus – was the only way that a song or an idiom could boldly go where none of its siblings had gone before. And since music exists to be played rather than read, a written lyric or notated piece of music is to a song as a recipe is to a meal: a series of instructions as to how a thing is prepared, rather than the thing itself. No two chefs will prepare a dish in exactly the same way even if they’re working from the same recipe and using similar ingredients; and therefore no two performances of a written (or memorized) piece will be exactly the same. The definitive performances of the music of Mozart or Liszt would, in theory, have been those of Mozart or Liszt themselves, but since those gents were sufficiently inconsiderate to have lived, worked and died before the development of recording technology, we are denied their improvisations and must make do with their notes. This means that there are no definitive performances of Mozart or Liszt; only good ones and less good ones. It also means that you can’t eat a recipe. A skilled chef can read a recipe, form an instant impression of how the meal described would taste, and apply his or her accumulated knowledge and experience to the task of creating a customized personal variation, but this is of only theoretical interest to someone who happens to be hungry.

  Essentially, recording did to oral transmission what photography did to painting; in other words, relieved it of the burden of simple representation. It was no longer the painter’s primary responsibility to produce a permanent visual account of what people and things looked like, but rather to provide some insight into what things meant and, simply, to create objects and images which were beautiful or intriguing in their own right. Similarly, recording meant that songs and pieces of music did not need to be written down – or even memorized – in order to be preserved for posterity. A recorded performance is, literally, recorded: short of the destruction of the master tape and all known copies, it will survive, exactly as it was originally performed, long beyond the lifespan of the musician(s) who played it. Another artist, approaching those same materials afresh, has no need to reproduce what went before except insofar as (s)he wishes to demonstrate the contrast between the basic themes and the fresh elements with which they are replenished and renewed. Nowhere is this principle better illustrated than in be-bop, where a standard melody – the ‘head’ – is stated at the beginning of a piece as the springboard for the improvisations which follow. The standard melody and chord changes provide the bread, but the improvisation puts the meat into the sandwich: it’s what everybody has actually come to hear. And when those improvisations are flowing thick and fast, it would take a fiendishly accelerated hand and ear to transcribe them in sufficient detail for another musician to be able to come along the following morning to sight-read and play them precisely as they were improvised. In a sense, this is what makes improvisation so special: it occurs in the here-and-now, to be imagined, played and heard as part of a single process; and once played, it’s gone – unless, of course, someone recorded it.

  Recording was the first of a series of linked phenomena which forever altered the folk process. Via recording, songs and styles could travel wherever the physical object – i.e. the cylinder or disc – went, and radio removed even that limitation, permitting the music to transform itself into a phantom of the airwaves, solidified and realized by the presence of an appropriately tuned radio receiver. And, via copyright, what was once common intellectual property was effectively privatised. A classic example: during the early ’60s, the British folk singer/guitarist Martin Carthy made the acquaintance of several visiting Americans, two of whom happened to be named Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. During club sessions and late-night jams, Carthy introduced his new friends to his arrangements of a number of Anglo-Celtic traditional pieces. Dylan set a lyric of his own, later recorded as ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, to the melody and guitar arrangement of ‘Lord Franklin’, a technique literally as old as the folk process itself. Indeed, one of his most famous early songs, ‘With God On Our Side’, uses the same traditional Irish melody as Dominic Behan’s ‘The Patriot Game’; and, while the combination of that melody with Dylan’s lyric is copyrighted, the melody itself – one of several known as ‘The Fiddling Soldier’, or ‘The Soldier And The Lady’ – is still ‘out there’. Simon, on the other hand, was particularly intrigued by a tune called ‘Scarborough Fair’, which he and his partner Art Garfunkel subsequently recorded more or less intact. How ever, Simon and Garfunkel copyrighted the arrangement, which – after its use in Mike Nichols’ enormously popular 1968 movie The Graduate –
eventually went on to become a Muzak and AOR radio staple and to generate serious amounts of money. The issue of whether or not Simon’s action appropriated Martin Carthy’s creativity and violated his intellectual property is one best left to m’learned friends in the legal profession (or rather, to those who can afford to hire their services), but the end result was the removal of an ancient song from the public domain and its transformation into a copyrighted item for the use of which Simon and Garfunkel must receive payment. There was indeed a financial settlement – the details of which remain relevant only to the participants – but Carthy was more upset by this heisting of what he had considered to be a communally owned cultural asset than by any possible financial loss to himself.

  To reverse the argument, the copyrighting of a traditional blues piece has often proved to be the salvation of blues singers who have fallen victim to creative accounting, or – as was often the case with the storefront independent labels who pioneered blues recording – no accounting at all. Big Joe Williams almost certainly wasn’t the author of that beloved old chestnut ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ – a Delta staple memorably recorded by Muddy Waters as well as by John Lee Hooker – but the royalties generated by the Waters and Hooker versions (not to mention subsequent covers of the song by assorted blues-rock bands, most prominently the young Van Morrison’s Belfast rude-boy posse Them) provided Williams with some form of compensation for all the songs which he undoubtedly did write, but for which he was never paid. Skip James’ funeral expenses were met by the royalties generated by Cream’s cover of his ‘I’m So Glad’; a version which, incidentally, James despised. Still, it says something for Cream’s integrity that they credited him at all (especially considering that they had rearranged the song so drastically that they could probably have gotten away with claiming it as an entirely new composition), let alone made sure that the money reached him. In the blues world, the person who copyrighted a song might not necessarily be the person who wrote it, and – by the same token – the person in whose name a song was copyrighted wasn’t necessarily the one who collected the money. Case in point: Willie Dixon, who found that while the library of classic songs he composed for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other Chess stars was indeed copyrighted in his name, extracting the resulting moolah from Arc Music, Chess’ music-publishing subsidiary, was another matter entirely.

  The conventional notion of song copyright resides in a song’s lyrics, melody and chord changes: register those, and the piece is yours. If someone cops your song – in other words, borrows your melody or lyrics – you can, given sufficient funding to hire heavy-duty lawyers, take them to court and hose them down, big time. (Just ask George Harrison about the ‘My Sweet Lord’ court case, but be prepared to duck.) You can’t copyright a rhythm or a bass line, let alone a ‘groove’; if you could, Bo Diddley would be a seriously wealthy man and James Brown would be infinitely richer than he already is. You can, of course, copyright a recorded performance, and if someone samples a snatch of one of Mr Brown’s records and recycles it without authorization or payment, they’ll soon be hearing from legal eagles representing Mr Brown and/or Polydor Records. ‘I know they say that they’re only taking a little bit of the record,’ says Brown of the sampler-happy hip-hoppers who’ve squeezed so much juice from his inimitable grooves, ‘[but] how would you like it if I cut the buttons off your suit?’ But if somebody wants to assemble a bunch of musicians to play your beat themselves, they’ve got it; and if this wasn’t the case, then most of the history of the blues would consist of lawsuits rather than records. Imagine if someone had successfully copyrighted the twelve-bar blues structure, or the shuffle beat, or the ‘Dust My Broom’ slide-guitar motif (from Elmore James out of Robert Johnson, Son House, Charley Patton and beyond), or even the line ‘Woke up this mornin”. Then imagine how many bluesmen would have been able to function freely under the resulting restrictions.

  So let’s take stock. On the one hand we have a tradition based on a relatively free-flowing interaction of musical ideas and motifs; on the other a copyright system which tends to reward the cunning and well-connected as well as (in some case, read ‘rather than’) the creative and imaginative. In its own post hi-tech way, the sampling technology which drives rap and dance music would seem to be a way of reviving that free-flowing oral tradition (by ‘quoting’ existing works with all the digital fidelity of a 44,100-Mhz (slices-per-second) sampling rate), but said oral tradition developed in a time when there weren’t millions of dollars’ worth of royalties at stake. There are powerful arguments on both sides: on the ‘oral’ wing, we have the flow of ideas, the collective development of fresh variations of time-honoured traditions, the entire notion of folk and community culture. On the other side of the fence, we have the basic fiscal facts of the entertainment industry, the concept of inviolable intellectual property, and the impregnable right of the individual to receive and, wherever possible, enjoy the rewards of his or her creative labours. And in between, we have an artist like John Lee Hooker, whose work is uncompromisingly based in a deep and rich tradition and which draws freely on the resources of that tradition, but whose indisputable individuality rests on the uniqueness of his relationship with that tradition. The central issues that his oeuvre raises are these: how an artist can simultaneously be an utterly unique creative personage whose achievement, identity and agenda are totally and completely personal, while remaining inextricably linked, in the deepest roots of his creative being, to the cultural tradition of the community in which he was raised; and how that artist, born in 1917 and first recorded at the tail end of the 1940s, could achieve spectacular sales with music which seemed ‘older’ than the earliest country blues records, cut almost a quarter of a century before. The solution to such seeming paradoxes lies in the nature of the relationship between an individual and a tradition; and the innate flexibility of a tradition that not only permits, but specifically demands, that each individual who works within it should make it completely his or her own.

  When John Lee Hooker says that he was ‘born with the blues’, he speaks naught but the literal truth: for all practical purposes, he and his chosen art-form are exact contemporaries. Hooker is not actually as old as the blues – no living performer could be – but he is almost exactly the same age as recorded blues. It’s a shame that we have to abandon the 1920 birthdate, because it implies a lovely symmetry; it would have meant that he was born the year that the first blues record – ‘Crazy Love’, a vaguely bluesy urban ballad sung by the otherwise unremarkable Mamie Smith – was released; a mere three years before the first rural blues records were made (by the little-known Sylvester Weaver), and an even less significant five before the Texan street-singer Blind Lemon Jefferson became the music’s first superstar. Hooker’s childhood and early adolescence coincided with the first great boom in blues recording: in strict chronological terms, this places him squarely in the centre of the generation of musicians who dominated the first wave of postwar blues. Again, that 1920 birthdate would have made him five years younger than Muddy Waters or Willie Dixon and five years older than B.B. King; ten years younger than T-Bone Walker and Howlin’ Wolf and ten years older than Otis Spann and Bobby Bland; twenty or more years younger than Leadbelly or Blind Lemon Jefferson or Alex ‘Rice’ Miller, the man best known as the second Sonny Boy Williamson . . . but here the analogy begins to break down, because the generation of bluesmen born between the mid-’30s and the mid-’40s is the one which begins with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells and takes in the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. Let’s leave it with this: had he really been born in 1920, Hooker would have been thirty-five years younger than Leadbelly, and thirty-five years older than Stevie Ray Vaughan.

  As Hooker himself would put it, ‘At that time there wasn’t no songwriters, there wasn’t no publishers, nothin’. They just made songs up in the cotton fields and stuff like this.’ Needless to say, there wasn’t no recording studios, neither, so information about what the blues
sounded like before it was first recorded is, by definition, anecdotal. We know who first copyrighted the basic blues themes, but that doesn’t tell us an awful lot of about who might have originally created them. Staples like ‘Catfish Blues’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, ‘Walkin’ Blues’ or ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” certainly long predate their earliest recorded manifestations, and each exist in numerous variations, none of which could with any certainty be described as ‘earlier’ or ‘more authentic’ than the others. Virtually every Delta singer had his (only very rarely ‘her’) distinctive personal version of the standard fistful of guitar or piano riffs and lyrical motifs. Generally, blues tyros learned from an older singer in their neighbourhood, who may well have learned it either from one of the many itinerant bluesmen who would pass through the saloons, levee camps or plantations, or from a city-based performer taking a swing through the South with a tent show.