Escaping the Delta (35 page)

Overall, the shift away from vocals marked blues's evolution toward a more clinical and less subtle or conversational approach. Especially in the post-Clapton electric scene, blues stars have tended to be described in much the same terms as heavy-metal guitarists: as technical wizards who can play blindingly fast and have mastered a dazzling range of styles. Their audience has also come to resemble the metal crowd, overwhelmingly white and male, and prone to play air guitar along with the extended high-volume solos.

The dominant blues attitude is a grungy, hard-bitten machismo. Blues artists, male or female, are expected to be hard-drinking, hard-loving tough guys. This flowed naturally from the white fascination with black singers as primitive, primal figures. The black blues audience looked to singers to tell truthful, day-to-day stories—essentially the same standard applied by white country fans—and appreciated
cool words of wisdom or sly comic observations more than shouts of rage or despair. The white audience did not come to blues in search of understated intelligence. It came for emotional release, for a raw, direct passion that it found lacking in white styles. It came in search of Leadbelly fresh off the chain gang, John Lee Hooker's “Boom boom, I'll shoot you right down,” Janis Joplin's uninhibited wail, Stevie Ray's Texas outlaw stance.

On the acoustic scene, this could be a bit more subtle, but the rule still holds. Dave Van Ronk, a thoughtful, scholarly man, was well aware that his success as a blues singer was built at least as much on his huge, bearish appearance, ferocious vocal power, and reputation for being able to drink untold quantities of whiskey as it was on his subtle guitar arrangements and intricate, jazz-flavored phrasing. It troubled him that a superbly talented musician like Paul Geremia would be forever handicapped by not being loud or scary enough.

Blues has always been marketed with a strong dollop of
nostalgie de la boue
. Even back in Bessie Smith's day, records were advertised with pictures of broken-down wooden shacks and ragged characters, accompanied by descriptions written in dialect and reeking of poverty, drunkenness, and violence. (Though the music was being marketed almost exclusively to an African-American audience, it is not clear that black people were consulted about the composition of these ads.) Plenty of blues lovers were irritated by such stereotypes, and in 1941 Richard Wright was already protesting that “The blues, contrary to popular conception, are not always concerned with love, razors, dice, and death.”
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Sixty years later, it is still common to find white blues fans equating poverty and grunge with true blues feeling. Writer after writer has made the trek to Mississippi or Chicago, looking for a juke joint or bar where the customers are poor, drunk, and rowdy, and where there is the stimulating fear that at any moment someone might pull a knife. I have done it myself, and for an urban white kid such trips have the thrill of a journey to Afghanistan or Tierra del Fuego. The band may be mediocre or worse, but for a moment one can feel transported back to the glory days of Muddy Waters, or Robert Johnson himself.

Exciting as it is, this is pure outsider romanticism. The most
popular and influential blues players were rarely stuck playing the lousiest joints. Waters and Johnson were known for their clean, sharp suits, and they played for the hippest crowds their neighborhoods provided. And they were among the poorer, more down-home performers. Dinah Washington and T-Bone Walker did not play any dark holes-in-the-wall if they could help it, and their audience was as swanky as it could manage. Even today, go to a Bobby Blue Bland show in a solidly black neighborhood, and it will be full of people wearing nice clothes. In fact, one of the reasons there are so few black people at most blues shows is that the average blues club is grungy and uncomfortable, with sweaty fans packed together as if they were at a rock concert. Put the same acts onstage at an upscale jazz club, and the proportion of African-American listeners instantly skyrockets. In part, this is because the remaining black blues audience is older, made up of people who grew up on Bland and the Kings, but it is also because black fans have never been charmed by poverty, or needed a sordid atmosphere in order to feel that they were having a real blues experience. While white fans drink straight whiskey to get in a blues mood, Muddy Waters drank only champagne, and insisted that it be the real French stuff.

Once again, I am not trying to damn anyone's tastes. I have spent great nights in grungy bars, dancing and sweating and soaking up the funky atmosphere. One of my favorite gigs of all time was playing guitar in the third-string zydeco band on a Saturday night in Mamou, Louisiana, where I was the only white guy in the place. It was like a trip to another world, and I was fascinated, and drunk, and proud that folks complimented my playing—even though I was just with the relief band, and we were no great shakes. In later years, I seized every opportunity to get out to backcountry juke joints, even if the band was a bunch of unknown locals, and I expect to be in a lot more such rooms before I die. But, while those experiences are engraved in my mind as exotic adventures, I tend to remember few details about the music. Ask me about the most memorable blues shows I have seen, the ones where I remember specific songs and exactly how the performers looked, moved, and sounded, and I recall Jimmy Witherspoon with a first-rate pickup band of jazz players, Etta James or Eddie Kirk
land at Boston's nicest blues club, or B. B. King blowing all the down-home cats offstage at the Providence Civic Center. The settings may or may not have been ideal in terms of atmosphere, but they were the ones that could pay for the best singers, and the ones where those singers preferred to work. Anyone who would rather hear a mediocre band in a juke joint than a great one in a clean, comfortable nightclub is looking for something other than music—which, once again, is a perfectly reasonable choice, but will have an effect on what gets played.

Incidentally, that Providence Civic Center show was a revelation for me. It featured, in order of appearance, Roomful of Blues, Koko Taylor, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy, Willie Dixon, Freddie King, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters, who ended his set jamming with Dixon, Wells, and Guy. Even now, as I write those names, that finale sounds like a dream. I had gone there to see Waters, Dixon, and Wells and Guy, all of whom I considered legends. In comparison, I thought of B. B. as too slick and smooth—that horn section in nice uniforms and all—and in those days I had not yet heard of Freddie. I was a pure, down-home, folk-blues fan. But Freddie knocked me out, sweating and shouting and playing slide with the microphone stand. And then B. B. came on, and taught me that everything I knew about blues was wrong. Because he just stood there calmly and played the most amazing music I had ever heard. He was awesome, in the literal sense that he seemed immense, majestic, and it was impossible to look away from him. And it was all so relaxed and natural, as if he were talking directly to each person in that huge stadium. It was everything I had always loved about blues and more, the perfect blend of deep emotion and flawless musicianship. The Muddy Waters jam session was great too, and I still feel very lucky to have seen Waters in that company, but it did not have that kind of magic.
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Maybe it was a matter of the room and the audience; maybe Waters needed a more intimate setting. Or maybe he was just having a slightly off night, while B. B. was on fire. In any case, it was one of the greatest blues performances I have seen, despite the fact that the Providence Civic Center was as unconducive to blues “feeling” as any structure on earth. Unlike what I have heard in a hundred bars and
jukes, where I was drinking and feeling good, the band was rocking, and the smoke and stale beer and sweat blended into a perfect honky-tonk bouquet, this was music that could transcend its setting and deserved to be ranked as one of the world's greatest styles. And that is no small distinction, because I do believe that blues, at its best, can rank up there with the finest work of the Ellington band, with Pablo Casals playing Bach, with Billie Holiday and Ali Akbar Khan and the early Ornette Coleman Quartet—make your own list, and whoever is on it, I swear that there have been blues artists of that stature. But they came up in another world.

Again, it is all about the audience. Because all of those artists—like almost any artists, anywhere, anytime—did their greatest work when they were performing regularly for audiences that understood them and demanded their greatest work. An audience that yells its approval whenever the guitar hits a screaming, sustained high note, but misses the subtleties of a vocal phrase and does not chuckle at the inside jokes, will get what it cheers for. Most players will drop the subtleties—which involve far more work and care—and just give the people what they want, collect the check, and go home. The performers who insist on keeping their artistic standards high may hold out and resist the temptation to provide cheap thrills, but they will not think much of the audience, and the more years they spend playing for it, the less enthusiastic they will be. And it hardly matters how brilliant or talented any of these musicians are. If the audience is happy with mediocrity, great musicians will produce mediocrity. Or quit, or drink themselves to death.

If I had to name the greatest blues recordings of all time, virtually all of them would be from before 1970, and there are few serious blues fans who would not say the same. There has been plenty of good work done since then, but awesome, transcendent classics on the order of Skip James singing “Devil Got My Woman” or Leroy Carr's “Midnight Hour Blues,” or Bessie Smith's and Lemon Jefferson's finest records, or the first hits Muddy Waters had on Chess? No way, no how. And this is not because of any decline in musical expertise. The current blues stars can play faster, cleaner, and with more versatility than ever—if music were the Olympics, we would be seeing records broken
every couple of years. But the world where an artist like Jimmy Rogers (the Muddy Waters band guitarist, not the white yodeler) could record a masterpiece like “That's All Right” is gone. And I pick that record because Rogers was not an exceptionally great blues singer. He was a fine second-tier artist, a marvelous sideman, but in 1950 he was able to make superb, astonishing music because he was pushed to the absolute top of his potential and beyond, by a scene that knew blues backward and forward, loved it, and could tell the difference between a musician giving his all and a showman with a fine line of shuck and jive. (And I am not saying that the audience did not like showmanship and jive, just that it knew the difference.)

Perhaps more importantly—since I seem to be lapsing into my own strain of romanticism—it was a scene on which blues was hot, young, and attracted the best and brightest musicians in America. To revisit the old iceberg metaphor, all the blues artists we have ever heard represent only a tiny fraction of all the people who were playing in local bars, at parties, at dances, and on street corners. There was a pool of thousands of performers, maybe tens of thousands, and the ones we are aware of represent only the top fraction, the ones who were distinctive enough or had enough hustle to be recorded. An idea of the unrecorded talent pool can be gleaned from the fact that Leadbelly, Mance Lipscomb, Robert Pete Williams, Johnny Shines, Honeyboy Edwards, and dozens of other musicians who recorded later but were already active in the 1920s or 1930s were missed by the commercial companies. As Muddy Waters remembered it, “Several boys around there could use the slide and I'd say they were just as good as Robert Johnson, the only thing about it is they never had a chance to get a record out.”
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When we listen to Johnson, we are hearing the cream of a large crop, and that particular crop was not playing that way even a decade after his death. By the 1940s, those young men were joining jump combos, as Robert Lockwood did. By the 1950s, they might have been singing doo-wop. Today, they would be rapping and mixing.

It takes a special sort of person to want to play unpopular, archaic music. Thank God there are a few out there, since a lot of old, unhip styles remain brilliant, complex, and moving, and all the records on earth cannot substitute for hearing them played live. In a world where
creativity and innovation are constantly cited as the prime artistic virtues, it is important that some people still take on the tough task of mastering classic forms, of becoming traditional craftsmen. It can also be an inspiring artistic journey. I once met a sculptor who, after years of doing modern, nonrepresentational work, needed some money and accepted a commission to copy a Michelangelo. “It was the strangest thing,” he told me. “There I was, cutting into the stone, and a Michelangelo was coming out. The feeling was like nothing I had ever experienced, completely different from making my own pieces. But none of my friends understand, they think I am just prostituting myself.” It can be an equally amazing feeling for a young guitarist to move her fingers on the fretboard and hear the sound of Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, or Albert King emerge from her hands. I imagine Johnson must have experienced a similar feeling when he mastered a new Lonnie Johnson lick, or heard his falsetto whoop coming back off a record as cool and strong as Peetie Wheatstraw's original.

Except that Johnson and his peers were learning the latest, bestselling styles of their day, the ones that promised money and sex, bright lights and big cities. They were, like Michelangelo, leading an artistic revolution, not revisiting some favorite old sounds. Some of the early blues masters may have been antisocial loners, but the music that made them famous was not antisocial loner's music. It was mainstream, big-selling pop, with all the pleasures and compromises that entails. And the urge to be a pop star is worlds away from the urge to play cult music, fine as that cult music may be.

To say that there is a museum-like or classical quality to the greatest blues as we hear it today is to put it in a category with Rembrandt, with Egyptian sculpture, with van Gogh and Beethoven and Duke Ellington. It is not an insult, but it is a description, and a reminder that things have changed since the days when it was a new sound, taking off and racing toward a wide-open future. It is the museum-goers who have made Robert Johnson a legend, who consider him the emblematic figure of the classic blues era. He fits the bill perfectly, and not only because he recorded superb music. He tried out all the different blues approaches of his day, wrote his own variations on them, and got
them on record, providing a better survey of 1930s trends than we can hear in the work of any other single player. He came from the Mississippi Delta, which has become hallowed in blues lore for its combination of racist underdevelopment, astonishing musical talents, and unique status in the development of the later Chicago/Detroit sound that, in turn, inspired the hard core of rock 'n' roll. He exemplifies the lifestyle that white listeners have always associated with the music: a homeless wanderer, alone in the world, haunted by demons, destroyed by violence. His early death and his introspective lyrics cast him as the early blues world's Keats or Mozart, James Dean, Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix.