Ten Thoughts on the Blues

The blues has become more or less disreputable among music lovers, which is a shame. What happened was that after the 60s and 70s hard and classic rock boom crested, most of the people who continued to play and listen to the blues were white guys of "a certain age." Case in point, the ubiquitous Joe Bonamassa concerts during PBS fundraising. Its lack of hipness doesn't mean the blues are lame, but I do admit to putting blues on the back burner for quite awhile as a reactive measure. While there's a lot of quality in what we might call rocking white blues, there also can be a sameness to it that can bore a bit sometimes. Anyway, call it guilt by association, but I ended up not thinking about the blues much for many years. But that's my loss. In order to rectify the situation I've been turning back to the blues, which means going back and starting with the pre-rock years. Here are ten thoughts from my recent re-engagement.

1. One thing I find fascinating is that music like the Bobby Bland performance here was actually popular music in black communities back in the day. It wasn't niche music. All throughout the industrial north, in the 40s and 50s and into the 60s black neighborhoods all had corner bars and taverns that had juke boxes stocked with stuff like this. Bobby Bland presents an urbane take on the blues, a citified version of the blues that came up from the Mississippi Delta. They had a scene out west in LA, too, since there was also a lot of industry there. That's where the great T Bone Walker, influential guitarist and composer of "Stormy Monday," made his name. On Central Avenue.

2. White neighborhoods had their own taverns, with plenty of Hank Williams and Lefty Frizell and the like. Honky-tonk music. I don't know how much race mixing happened at clubs. Some, maybe even a fair amount, I think, among the various hipster tribes, you know, the people who called marijuana "gage." But mostly white people listened to black blues and R & B by buying what were then called "race records." Some major radio stations broadcast the sounds all across the land, reaching many white ears, usually between midnight and five.

3. Down south black and white musicians were definitely mixing it up right from the start of the 20th century. The roots of American music are more integrated than one would think — or rather, more integrated than we have been lead to believe. I know Louis Armstrong played on a Jimmie Rogers record in the 20s or 30s. Hank Williams' mentor in Montgomery, Alabama, was a black blues musician named Rufus "Tee Tot" Payne. The notion of quarantining black and white music is a lie.

4. Chicago is where the blues really flowered as a modern art form, the one that shaped rock music. Muddy Waters. Willie Dixon. Little Walter. James Cotton. Otis Spann. Buddy Guy. On and on. In Chicago, the blues never went out of fashion, and blues players are revered. It's sort of like how New Orleans is the only place in America today where a trumpet or trombone player can be considered cool and a major draw.

5. Or maybe that has changed, but I remember going to clubs in Chicago that featured blues bands and those joints were rockin', packed to the gills with people. One of the great experiences of my musical life was seeing Muddy Waters perform at a festival in Milwaukee around 1979. His band featured the brilliant Bob Margolin on guitar, a white musician who played with Muddy for years. You can see him on stage with Muddy in The Last Waltz. Muddy's music retained a fair amount of the country feel from the south, even though it was electrified. The key thing is that he played with authority. Specifically, since he keeps the song forms minimalist, each part, and especially the vocals, must be performed with pure conviction and soul force. The song they did in The Last Waltz, the single chord vamp Mannish Boy, exemplifies this. Check it out. When you keep it this simple there’s nowhere to hide.

6. Muddy famously said that white guitarists and harp players could play the blues as well as anyone — not just technically but with legit soul feeling — but he never heard a white guy sing the blues quite as convincingly as the pioneers of the form who came up the Mississippi River could. But he loved playing with white musicians. I was reading an old Downbeat interview with him and the white harmonica player Paul Butterfield and Muddy said the session they just did had the spirit and feel of the best sessions he ever played when they were establishing the blues scene in Chicago.

6. Many of the great blues players emerged into the wider culture because of the "folk revival" of the 50s and 60s. And many had popular late careers because of it. One of the best was Mississippi John Hurt, born in 1893. His elegant finger picking guitar style became hugely influential and his songs have been widely covered by musicians ranging from Jerry Garcia to Taj Mahal to Chris Smither, and so many more. The Rosetta Stone for the revival, or the source with the deepest and far reaching artistic resonance, was Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. This three record set showed aspiring musicians that the subject matter of music could go way past Tin Pan Alley, and that really there aren’t any rules in music. 

7. Simultaneously in England, the bohemian set was discovering the blues, too. Mick and Keith famously met on a bus when one of them spotted the other carrying some of the choicest blues albums available then in the UK. It's stunning to realize that, yes, there was a time when only the coolest art school types were hip to the blues! The Stones were a terrific cover band of black R&B and blues and rock and roll in their early years. They had verve and style and their own take on it. Paul McCartney took a humorous dig at them recently calling them a blues cover band, but he knows like we all do that the Stones went on to create some of the best music of the mid-to-late 20th century. 

8. Am I endorsing cultural appropriation? Yes. There's a difference between ripping off and incorporating aesthetic influences. Because of the blues rock boom, the originators gained bigger audiences than they might have. I'm not saying that this is perfect justice, but it's also true that there is no universe in which Muddy Waters' music could be as widely popular as that of the Stones. They had a pop element that was never there in Muddy's root-oriented sound. And I'm not using pop as a stand in for white. Black audiences of the time responded to people like Marvin Gaye on a much greater scale than they did for the blues guys. And so it is and has been from soul through funk and hip hop. B.B. King is the one guy who really did go huge, becoming a global star.

9. Speaking of B.B., there was a great Soundstage TV show with him and Bobby Bland that aired sometime in the late 70s. At one point they did an improvised medley where they tossed iconic blues verses back and forth. The form is so codified and the repertoire is so established that you can interpolate and re-purpose bits and pieces of classics in real time — like organic, pre-Internet hyperlinks — and all sorts of memories and implications arise. So when you sing that "it's a mean old world to live in all by yourself" it hits on the level of genetic memory sort of like "I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." 

10. I'll wrap up, and just make the point I made with this poem a while back. There is this notion that the blues is sad music, since we have the expression "feeling blue." But there are all sorts of blues since the key thing about the blues isn't sadness, but being a reflection of life as it actually is lived — and felt. In concert some of the saddest lines can take on a ritualistic aspect where the main feeling is one of having a laugh at how hard or strange life can be. Who was it that said "I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me"? Some Roman guy, I think. Let's see: Wikipedia tells me it was the playwright Terence, circa 2nd century BC. I think that's what the blues has been trying to tell us all along. And it's silly not to listen.