Ain't Bad for a Pink (20 page)

…Oh chocolate drop, that’s me
‘Cause my hair is curly
Just because my teeth are pearly
Just because I always wear a smile
‘Like to dress up in the latest style
‘Cause I’m glad I’m livin’
Takes troubles all with a smile
Just because my color shade
Is different maybe
That’s why they call me “Shine”.

The reaction was generous. It was generous I think because I managed to convey that irrepressible pride.

The pinning down of places, events and famous people gives a certain atmosphere to a song. Knowing that “Parchman Farm” is a penitentiary and that “St. James Infirmary Blues” is about a morgue sets the scene and sets the tone. “On the corner of Peach Tree and Vine”: a legendary busking spot in Atlanta where Blind Willie McTell allegedly played, occurs in a few songs. I’ve actually played at Fat Matt’s which is situated there; it felt momentous. To widen his appeal, Leadbelly sang songs about contemporary events such as the Titanic and the Hindenburg disaster, about political leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hitler, and about celebrities such as Jean Harlow and Howard Hughes. “Sweet Home Chicago”
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marks the economic migration of black people – “Ain’t gonna dig no more potatoes/Pull no more corn”
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– from the rural South to the industrial North.

For a non-American blues musician certain place names are exotic-sounding and poetic or just significant. I always enjoy singing the alliterative line, “I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari Tehachapi to Tonapah” in Little Feat’s “Willin’” but it’s very disappointing to find that the Chattanooga Choo Choo no longer runs and that there is otherwise nothing memorable about Chattanooga except the famous big band song popularized by Glenn Miller.

The question of the ownership of these early songs is obscure. Originality was claimed but usually not substantiated. Robert Johnson, for instance, has been credited with songs that predated his career: stuff that had been recorded ten years previously, with only one line being different! Blind Willie McTell reworked songs by Sippie Wallace, Bessie Smith and Ivy Smith to produce “Statesboro Blues”.
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W.C. Handy, an important popularizer of the blues, claimed hundreds but in reality most of these songs and tunes were handed around. As folk songs they belong to everyone.

As well as identifying emotionally and politically with the early black musicians I’ve also admired their mastery of musical techniques that look so simple to the uninitiated. The country blues is surprisingly varied in mood and complexity and there’s such a wide range of feeling too, from the profound spiritual primitivism in Blind Willie Johnson to Blind Blake’s music full of laughter and Skip James on the edge of a weird place. They could make a guitar sound like a piano; they could make a guitar sound like two guitars; they could make a harmonica sound like a train. They didn’t need drums: they could stamp the earth and pound the side of their guitar. They didn’t need other voices – they could answer themselves, converse with the audience or with their guitar. They could create a stage full of characters and set them off into action. Some blues music like Robert Petway’s “Catfish Blues” takes you into rhythm; some, like “Down ‘n’ Out Blues”, into melody with all possible variations in between.

Without realizing it at the time I was exposed early on to all the main strands in country blues music. It was as if the spirit of the blues had created a comprehensive compilation for me: the reverberating spectacle of slide in the convulsive blues of Son House, the melodic complexity of finger-picking in Mississippi John Hurt, gospel influences through Sister Rosetta Tharpe, showy, party-time professionalism from boogie-woogie pianist Roosevelt Sykes and the expression of raw suffering in John Estes. Then the bridge-makers: Jimmy Witherspoon shouting his blues/big band cross-over numbers, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee entering mainstream popular culture and John Lee Hooker providing the cross-over between blues and rhythm and blues. The music ranged from the earthy and domestic to the religious and existential with many a laugh in between.

See I have got up out of bed an’ played the thing. Played the blues? When I got satisfied, I put it down, wen’ on and went to bed an’ went to sleep. You see, it was off my mind.

Mississippi Fred McDowell.
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After my mother died. I found it an uplifting thing to sing the blues. At a certain level it’s just a relaxation; at another it’s meditation or even medication. I still lose myself for hours in a normal working day just doing fun things on a guitar. It only takes a spark to light the fire: I can be holding a conversation and be playing and not know I’m doing it. Once the memory bank hits on something it’s another hundred songs.

Georges Adins, who went to meet John Estes in 1962, wrote:

His voice cries and moans – his singing has the ring of actual reality and deep truth…filled with intense anguish, a fierce sorrow...He is unhappy and unfortunate and has nothing else but his voice and his guitar to tell us about the desolation and loneliness which a blind man feels.
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This is the experiential view of the blues: a feeling expressed as a musical soliloquy rather than a specific form of music. Blues is described in other ways too. People talk about its origins in ragtime, early jazz, religious songs, minstrel, popular, folk and so on and its characteristics and functions: pentatonic melody, typical chord progression, call and response. Call and response songs were an important influence in the development of the blues. These old work songs in which someone would sing and all the other workers would sing a response, gave a rhythm to the work as well as bonding the workers. “Old Alabama” – a prison song recorded at Parchman in 1947 –
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gives a very powerful impression of call and response punctuated with what sounds like the fall of the whip. The percussion is actually listed as “axe strokes”.

You hear echoes of this dialogue in the songs of Blind Willie Johnson. His wife Angeline sang a rather feeble answer-back on his 1930 recording of “John The Revelator”. In “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” the plaintive melodic guitar answers the harsh voice and in “Dark Was The Night” Johnson sings and responds as if comforting himself. Charley Patton’s dramatic, rhythmic rendition of “Down The Dirty Road” (1929) has the singing voice answered by spoken words.

It’s all very well to know about these songs but when you realize the implications of their origin in the toil of a whole people, it adds emotional impact.

You know a musical
genre
is relevant when it spreads prolifically. The country blues spread throughout the South and also to cities in the South and in the North. There are blues known as Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, Texas, Piedmont, Louisiana, Western, East Coast, Swamp, New Orleans, Delta, Kansas City, Atlanta and St Louis. Each region developed its own flavour. By the Twenties, with mechanisation on farms, there would be unemployment and social upheaval as rural workers moved to the faster pace of life in the North – its urban tensions exacerbated by this influx.

When the country blues moved from the cotton states where the majority of black people lived to the mass manufacturing cities such as Chicago and Detroit, it changed and a lot of the features of the early blues music were forgotten. Both the country blues and the urban blues are based on the twelve bar structure but the former is more characterized by melodic structures, whereas the latter is more closely associated with twelve bar blues, as is most of slide music. People regard the twelve bar blues “I woke up this morning” strand as being the definitive blues and this is what led to rhythm and blues in the Fifties.

I would put the urban blues as starting in the Thirties. If you change the climate, the pace, the technology and the economy this is reflected in the music. Once things move on the music evolves. There was a social and economic demand for more and bigger venues to accommodate large audiences; in response to this the resonator guitar – which had a short reign between the wars – was developed to give greater volume in large spaces. For the same reason blues shouters such as Jimmy Witherspoon came into being. The intimacy of acoustic guitar playing was coming to an end. If you’re working in a band, it doesn’t take long to know what the audience likes; you respond with the beat they favour. You might modify the emphasis in quite subtle ways but it’s cumulative.

It’s no longer the country blues. How can it be? This is Chicago. This is New York. This is Detroit.

This is how music changes – in response to the audience – which in turn reflects the society from which it comes and this is how the original forms can be lost. Some people feel regret for this and yearn for a lost golden age which may or may not have existed. When all’s said and done, although we should take the music seriously, we shouldn’t be too solemn about it. Like all popular music the country blues was of the moment. Perhaps what we should really mourn are those musicians who didn’t get the chance to record or whose recording perished. Who knows what has been lost? The precariousness of musical treasure is well illustrated in the story of Blind Willie McTell’s last session tape. Ed Rhodes, a white guy who ran record stores in Atlanta in the Fifties, persuaded McTell, then in his sixties and busking in parking lots, to do some recording. This amateur recording was the only tape not to perish when Rhodes discarded his tapes and sold his recording equipment. Strangely enough, the photo of the young McTell we all know survived obscurity in a bin outside the premises of an avant-garde magazine. These precious things survived by the skin of someone’s instinct.
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In 1936 Charlie Christian used a jazz guitar with an electric pick-up. The resonator’s days were numbered but wouldn’t come to an end till the electric guitar came into widespread use. Meanwhile, progress in guitar technology was halted by World War Two which focused all engineering efforts onto the war effort
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This happened with Rickenbacker, Gibson and National. Although the solid body electric guitar was developed in the early Forties by Les Paul and popularized in the late Thirties and early Forties by T-Bone Walker, it wasn’t until after the war that manufacture of the electric guitar began to supersede all other types in the world of pop and blues. By the late Fifties every teenager wanted one.

Me? I wanted a resonator.

I do mourn the golden age of country blues. In a world where it is an anachronism, the hardest thing is to educate other musicians that it has a distinctive quality and is not just a pedantic or a pedestrian beat; that it has range and subtlety and makes large demands on the performer to exploit as fully as possible the use of voice and acoustic guitar. Unfortunately this is largely unknown or forgotten. Twelve bar ‘dumpty-dumpty’ music as associated with the urban blues is probably the worst thing that ever happened to the blues: so much of it is banal crap. That goes for all popular music after the Fifties while I’m on the subject. The original blues has been so watered down that it’s lost its potency. It’s been corrupted by commercialization and severed from its roots. I’m not just talking about black performers. Jim Reeves singing at the Carnegie Hall had balls. His other music was saccharine country pop.

But it sold records.

Yet the early blues singers had so much more to offer. Take a fairly random example: Scrapper Blackwell. People tend to talk more about his musical partner Leroy Carr yet what he could do acoustically was subtle and sophisticated. His guitar playing was influenced by the more varied inversions and chord progressions demonstrated by Leroy Carr’s piano-playing. Using both acoustic and jazz conventions, you get nice little jazzy inversions then the next moment he’s playing what a rock star would play – decades before it happened! One of the albums I inherited from Bert Bellamy:
Mr. Scrapper’s Blues,
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the cover showing him playing an economy Kay guitar, has a couple of instrumentals which display his virtuosity and attitude. He keeps them abstract by calling them by the key in which they are played, and explores the possibilities from bass runs to lyrical passages high on the treble strings, or he will use a staccato strum for dramatic effect so that a musical doodle becomes a classic little jewel. “‘A’ Blues” has an interesting jazz inversion in D9 in it. I am totally impressed by this musician.

In the Sixties the country blues had a rebirth in Britain and Europe but as in America the interest came largely from white, educated people. Possibly because black people associated the blues with their oppressed past, their musical interest gravitated towards the glamorous pop music and role models produced by Tamla Motown. But you could still hear that train a-comin’ in the music of Jimi Hendrix, especially in his acoustic tracks and it whistles relentlessly through “Voodoo Child”. And the rhythm that survived slavery finds its most potent expression in rap.

If you’re into modern blues it is much better done in the United States than anywhere else. The Chicago blues is fast, rhythmically strong, emphasizing beat rather than melody and focusing on group performance. Today’s white blues performers play a more complex style than the black country blues players did, the exceptions being Blind Blake, Kokomo Arnold and Lonnie Johnson. When I performed at The Annual Labor Day Blues Festival in Georgia in 2000 there was a tremendous variety of music under the umbrella of blues. Des and I and The Producers were doing the country blues but the other people – there were more than a hundred performers altogether – were playing a wide range of music.

One of the musicians: Beverly “Guitar” Watkins names Sister Rosetta Tharpe as an early influence and has had a long career as a blues musician. She describes her musical affinity: “I like that real Lightnin’ Hopkins lowdown blues…I would call that hard classic blues, you know…railroad smokin’ blues!”
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She and Francine Reed both performed what I would call modern blues. They represented what the blues in Georgia has become: it has authenticity, is less twelve bar in essence and has more of a raw edge than Chicago blues.