I wanted to post comments made by Sugar Blue recently in the Chicago Tribune regarding white influence and involvement in blues music. I have not seen him or communicated to talk to him about these statements since they were made, but I took offense to some of them. Here are excerpts, followed by the citation to the article:
"And it seemed to me that it's very, very important to make a statement about that … because this (music) is of the black experience and always will be. And the fact that it has become universal is a wonderful thing, because it says how important and influential and powerful this music is.
"But it must be remembered that though you are welcome to the house, do not try and take the home. Come on in, visit, enjoy, do your thing. But remember whose house you're in."
That is a slap in the face to white performers, musicians, and even fans, in that white people are not trying to TAKE anything, and the suggestion of theft is offensive. I'm trying to understand what he said in its entirety, but the only conclusion I can come up with is offensive and borderline racist. Am I misinterpreting his words? White musicians and fans are helping keep this music ALIVE.
I love Sugar Blue, as a musician and a human being. He is my friend. But I am trying to deal with these remarks.
Comments please?
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-23/entertainment/ct-ent-1024-jazz-sugar-blue-20121024_1_sugar-blue-delta-blues-legend-david-honeyboy-edwards
Last Edited by on Dec 04, 2012 8:51 AM
It seems to me he was just saying you gotta respect the form and where it came from. I know people who think blues is just what Eric Clapton, SRV, and John Bonomassa play. That is taking the house.
That said it is a small quote in a news article and there may be a whole bunch of context that is missing or the quote could simply be wrong, so it would be a mistake to read too much into it.
I think that his comment is crystal clear. The question is not if he did in fact say it, but what does he mean? And he is talking to white people, not blacks. So if black people move away from traditional blues themes it is OK, but whites are prohibited? Sugar Blue is not a traditional blues man either.
Last Edited by on Dec 04, 2012 9:32 AM
Considering the context of the article and why he was asked to speak there, etc. it isn't as harsh as it sounds in the OP.
When read in context, I agree with walterharp. He was stating the importance of understanding the blues and not just playing it.
He makes some great points. The blues lifestyle has been glamorized and a lot of people are missing the boat. If an alien came to earth and their only experience with the blues was the current scene, I bet the connection to its actual origins would be hard to get.
Race is always a touchy subject in any context, but I don't think Sugar Blue was trying to offend anyone. He is right to say that America and the rest of the world need to remember that Blues and Jazz are African American art forms. The music is about the only positive thing to arise from the evil , corrupt and morally bankrupt institution of slavery; the collective experience that accompanies the history of the music is pain, suffering, poverty, violence directed against Black Americans specifically. It's important to keep this knowledge foremost in our minds as non-black blues musicians create their own unique voices and continue the tradition. As Sugar said, do your own thing, but remember who's house your in. The shame of it all is that the history of popular music is largely about the routine theft by white musicians of the innovations by black musicians, usually without credit or compensation. We do know that things have improved quite a bit since the less savory times, but it remains a large stain on our collective memory. I take no offense at Sugar's remarks and just give him a silent nod of agreement. His point is simple, his point is true. ---------- Ted Burke http://youtube.com/watch?v=-VPUDjK-ibQ&feature=relmfu
Like most questions in which people make unilateral pronouncements about the blues, the answer is Of course! and Not quite! Neither the hard-core position (blues is and has always been BLACK music) and the universalist position (no black, no white, just the blues!) captures the whole story.
There are only a couple of big things that you can say about the blues with absolute certainty. Here are five:
1) If you create a list--which I once did--of all the important blues musicians who were born in Mississippi, you get 90% of the great African American male performers (although almost none of the important black blueswomen) whose names would be familiar to any serious white American blues fan. These include Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and scores of others. There are only two white guys on the list, and they're minor figures: Harmonica Frank Floyd and Mose Allison. [Edited to read: ...and Charlie Musselwhite! Duh]
2) In the period between 1920 and 1960, blues was one of the primary, perhaps THE primary, black popular music. It was also hugely popular with whites, on Broadway and elsewhere, during the 1920s, but minimally popular with whites during the 1930s and 1940s. In the early 1950s, black R&B--blues updated--became popular with white youth, and in the late 1950s, after rock and roll began to decimate the black Chicago blues scene, country blues began to become popular with whites.
3) During the decade of the 1960s, thanks largely to the British blues invasion, the blues--including black artists such as B. B. King, Albert King, and Muddy Waters--became hugely popular among white audiences, and some of the greatest accolades were reserved for white blues artists such as Paul Butterfield, Janis Joplin, and Cream. Blues also became hugely popular in Russia after B.B.'s 1968 trip there. Black artists were strongly ambivalent about the white audience. B. B. loved 'em, once they started to love him, but he couldn't stand the white critics who called his electric blues "degraded" relative to the more "pure" country blues.; Muddy had no f-ing idea (his word and tone) of what to make of 'em. White audiences were both marvelously supportive and extraordinarily, maddeningly fickle in their likes and dislikes, their strictures about what consituted "real" blues.
4) White have notably dominated the business of recording, selling, promoting, historicizing, and arbitrating the blues. They've made most of the money off the music through the years; the successful black blues businessman--and King is one--have been rare.
5) It's impossible accurately to describe the contemporary blues scene as a black-white thing. It's a multicultural thing. It's an international thing. It's about Japanese, Hispanics, Serbs, Guamians, Africans, playing the blues.
We're living, fifty years after the 1960s, in a period whose dynamics are still in many ways perceptibly shaped by the history of the past hundred years and especially by the aftermath of that signal decade.
When I think about the blues as a cultural studies scholar, I'm increasingly less interested in judging what should or shouldn't happen and more interested in exploring what actually is happening. So, for example, I'd put Sugar Blue's comments in a fifty year span of African American cultural criticism about the blues, extending back to Larry Neal and James Cone and extending forward past a poem by photographer Roland L. Freeman called "Don't Forget the Blues," which begins:
Do you see ‘em, here they come.
Last Edited by on Dec 04, 2012 12:05 PM
Easing into our communities In their big fancy cars, Looking like alien carpetbaggers Straight from Mars. They slide in from the East, North, South and West, And when they leave, You can bet they’ve taken the best….
I know they’ve been doing anything they choose, I just want’em to keep their darn hands off’a my blues.
The blues are many things these days. In many and various ways, they are an African American cultural inheritance. They draw on black vernacular language and figurations (crawling kingsnakes, mojo hands, etc.); they draw on a repertoire of performance techniques (slurred and bent notes, melismatic vocal lines, syncopated rhythms) that clearly trace back to Africa. It's possible to argue that they trace back to slavery (John Lee Hooker did) and that they DON'T trace back to slavery; Angela Y. Davis and Kalamu ya Salaam argue the latter position, and both of them are proud and brilliant African American spokespeople for the music. The blues are also American music at this point; they've been used in advertisements for countless products. They're the foundation of a profitable new branch of the tourism industry (blues cruises.)
Blues are white music. They're the way that folks like us--95% of whom, I would guess, are white guys--undertand our (blackened) subcultural selves.
Blues are a world music. Many of us come from America, but many of us don't. The visitors to Modern Blues Harmonica come from something like 136 countries around the world.
Blues are a paradox. They aren't only one thing--although some folks, as Sugar Blue does in his statement, will try to insist that they are fundamentally one thing. What's remarkable about the blues is that, as an idiom and a way of life, they stubbornly resist being reduced to just one thing. (They're sort of like black people in that respect. Racism consists of responding to "black people" as if they're all essentially the same narrowly-understood thing, rather than, say, human. Human beings are complex. White boys, too, BTW.) By the same token, when you actually HAVE the blues, they overwhelmingly dominate your interior life at certain moments. In that moment, they just ARE. They're complex, but they're also one big, bad, nasty thing.
That the sort of moment Sugar Blue was having when he uttered the statement above. At other moments, he's happy he married his Italian bride and that he can count on her for some kick-ass blues bass, right next to him on stage.
It's probably also important to think about exactly who Sugar Blue's audience is. Who buys his records? Who attends his live shows? I've said before, but it's worth saying again: if every non-African-American member of his audience simply turned tail and abandoned him, his audience, with the exception of a small, localized Chicago community audience made up of the 40-and-up set, would disappear.
What, then, is he complaining about? Does he believe that white artists are garnering accolades--from white-dominated organizations, it should be noted--that he should by rights be receiving? Does he wish that white promoters like me, for example, would stop calling him, since when we hire him, we're inevitably making some money off of him?
Or, the reverse, does he wish that he, rather than Mike Morgan and the Crawl (for example), were getting the big juicy Blues Cruise gigs?
Or is his objection NOT that so many whites and non-African Americans are listening to the music and playing the music, but that in the process of listening to the music and playing the music, they are a) neglecting to pay sufficient daily homage to the fact that the greats of the past and near-past were primarily African American and/or b) by their very presence subtly shifting the meaning of the blues to that it has become the soundtrack to beery good times and extended Caribbean cruises?
Last Edited by on Dec 04, 2012 11:52 AM
There is nothing new that you've quoted. If any, time has mellowed him. There was an article written in the 80's with Blue and Junior Wells. It was down right controversial at the time. He's never been shy about expressing his opinion and he is consistent. I applaud him for that. He's also right on many things.
If he is your friend, maybe you should seek out his clarification.
If you look at the lineups of many so-called blues festivals, it is hard to deny that black artists are being brushed aside.
I've said everything I have to say more than a few times! The subject has lost a lot of its melodrama for me. I'll leave the field to others.
Joe, that phrase "are being brushed aside" does more work than it should. European blues festivals, for example, are known to strongly prefer black blues bands from the US--to the point where they have sometimes specifically asked bandleaders the race of the musicians they intend to bring. I still remember when Ilan, the longtime owner of Terra Blues, asked me to suggest some top harmonica players that he might bring into his club. I had just seen William Clarke and I said "William Clarke!" He said, "Is he white or black?" I said "White." He shook his head, lowered his eyes, and said "No no no." Ilan was from Israel.
I've certainly noticed that blues festivals in part of California sometimes have very few black faces. That used to bother me. Now, as a promoter, I know that it has something to do with passive ignorance (rather than active brushing aside) on the part of the promoter combined, in some cases, with budgets that won't allow African American talent to be brought from long distances. That's not always the case, of course.
My own feeling is that one should make an extra effort to bring in African American masters like--yes!--Sugar Blue. And Billy Branch and Charlie Sayles and Dr. Feelgood Potts. Call me crazy.
I couldn't care less what Sugar Blue would have me do, however. I'm going to remain true to my creed, I'm going to play the best and most original harmonica stuff I can, I'm going to kick asses when I can and submit when I must, and I'm going to keep championing modernist masters like Blue and Jason Ricci. We all make of the blues, ultimately, what it must be for us.
Sugar Blue, too, does this in his statement. He makes it into a specific kind of cry of pain, and that's fine with me.
Last Edited by on Dec 04, 2012 12:03 PM
"Come on in, visit, enjoy, do your thing. But remember whose house you're in."
I think that he's qualifying the larger quote here. I don't think he's implying that white guys can't do the blues, just that you have to treat it with respect when they do, and be aware of the issues involved and the history of it all, which is a fair position to take.
It's not the only position, but it's a fair place to start a debate. You have traditionalists, and you have people who like to bounce tradition on it's head. You have that in every art form, and there is always, at least, friendly tension between the camps.
Some traditionalists are traditionalists because they are trying to preserve something. Others just because that's how they learned it. Non-traditionalists may be deliberately deconstructing the form, or they may not be familiar with the form at any deep level.
Blues isn't what it used to be. To some people it's part of identity, and to others it's just a set of musical patterns. There is always pushing back and forth between who owns the right to the tradition. Old school heavy metal fans hated glam rock, even although glam rock had the same screaming riffs, the fan base was different, even although to people outside the hard rock scene the fans seemed the same.
Posers. He seems to be against posers. Don't sing about poverty as a personal experience if you haven't been poor. Don't sing like you were a drug addict if you never where a drug addict. That's different than singing about the problems of poverty. You can see schools failing, and neighborhoods falling apart even as you drive through a neighborhood, and be moved to write about it, but don't write about it in the first person if you are going home to a McMansion.
The other side of that argument is part of what some people do when they write is to challenge themselves to put themselves in other people's position. I took a lot of creative writing in college. One of the big things in writing prose was learning voice, and how to write dialogue that sounded realistic. If you are writing dialogue for someone who has a different accent or dialect, in prose, you are supposed to try to write it honestly, but always carefully. You don't want caricatures. Maybe it's because songs are so short that the dialogue is examined more carefully, or there isn't a larger context like there would be in a book, or maybe because music styles are already loaded with cultural meaning that they actually have more context and subtext that you have to be aware of, whatever the reason, it's very easy to make a political statement completely by accident with music.
I think that's what he is trying to get at. In college I majored in English Lit, which is why I'm unemployed in Greenland (well, okay, Upstate New York, but same difference!) This sort of debate theory guys get involved in and love. I think it's important to step back though and realize that it's not how a lot of people come at it. If you look at everything through a political lens, everything looks political to you. It's important to step back sometimes and realize that that may not be how other people are looking at it.
It's ironic, in a way, that a quote that seems to be particularly concerned with social context may be missing some social context, but there it is. Remember though, that we have a pretty ugly history with regards to appropriating black culture. The most obvious example is minstrel shows in black-face. If you were raised in that context, and then you see a bunch of white guys dressed and sounding like old black blues players? You can make the blues 'yours' in the sense that you can make a song your own, but we've got to make sure we don't veer off and take make like we understand everything about the tradition.
Blues is also heavily associated with the South. Sugar Blue is from New York so other than skin color what is his connection to Blues music. Can a black man from New York really claim the Blues is his music?
I can just hear some of the black folks I grew up saying… who does he think he is? He’s one of those uppity city blacks, he don’t know nuthin about no blues…
And all of this is being discussed on an internet forum started by a white boy from New York…
…and don’t even get me started on County Music or NASCAR…
Great, thoughtful discussion of a topic that will come up forever. I've shared my thoughts before, so won't this go-round, except to quote a funny song by the Bonzo Dog Band from the '60s:
"Can blue men sing the whites, or are they hypocrites?"
To rephrase and old joke: I’ve been green with envy, red with anger, scared white as a ghost, yellow in the face of danger, and had my share of the blues…what right do I have to call anyone colored :)
Good for sugar,he calls em the way he sees them.Sugar's about half rocker,and plays to mostly white audiences.When I saw him in vegas,he closed out the show solo,playing sbw big harp which was fantastic.
I listen to mostly old black masters,and alot of the newer white guys with their own licks.When I tell people I play harp,man they think of bob dylan,or those old black guy blues,and most probably think ho-hum,till they hear it live.
I love and live blues,country,and some rock,no other sounds or lyrics tell the stories I have lived.Emotionly we all share our human existence the same.
I even heard that Sugar, just like that white Popper guy, play solid state amps. Oh the shame!! May the mojo be taken away forever. Seriously, the "Blues" is more a history lesson, do some research, study it. Learn about the tragic lives and deaths, of these musical pioneers. White musicians played fifths, blues artists, drank fifths. There's a ton of history, and some very tragic tales. I find it fascinating, and a true history lesson.
I was wrong about how many different countries are represented in the Modern Blues Harmonica guest list.
In calendar year 2012, this website has had visitors from 190 countries around the world.
I'm probably suicidally honest to give away the analytics that I'm about to give away--my competitors will salivate to know all this--but here are the analytics for calendar year 2012, to date. Rank, country, absolute # of visitors, % of total visitors.
My point is simple: the blues--and blues harmonica music, specifically--is a world music.
I'll post the first batch of analytics here and the remainder in a second post, since they're too big to fit in this post:
There's a serious philosophical issue here, and it's one that hasn't received much attention.
When I uploaded my very first harmonica video to YouTube, back in February of 2007, I threw down the gauntlet. "I'm going to give it all away," I said. In the long context of blues education, that was an innovation. That's simply not how it worked prior to that. Musicians, blues performers, simply didn't give their stuff away for free. Only an idiot would do that. After all, the standard protocol was for black blues performers to be ruthlessly (or benignly) exploited by white recording execs. They'd pay the performers $25 and give them a bottle of booze, in exchange for which they'd sign away their publishing and basically, knowingly, give up on the idea of receiving royalties.
That was the world in which my longtime partner Sterling Magee had come up. You got cash at the recording session, because it was the only payment you were likely to see.
Only a fool, in such a context, would "give it all away," when the world was trying to TAKE it all away.
I did what I did, staked out that position, because a) I wasn't actively performing and wasn't worried about anybody stealing my gig; and b) I had a day job.
So I could afford to give it all away. Also, I never had liked the coterie atmosphere, the mystification, that I sensed at work in the "organized" blues harmonica world.
So I gave it all away. Folks responded. With absolutely no foresight, I suddenly realized that I had been blessed with a business opportunity. I'm a blues guy; I improvised. I created a fly-by-night website, called it Modern Blues Harmonica, and worked my ass off creating video lessons, updating and creating tab sheets, doing what entrepreneurs do. I had absolutely no training in that line of work--SEO, WTF??--but I'm no fool.
Sugar Blue's pronouncement comes at the world from a diametrically opposed position. He's trying to hold onto something, a cultural inheritance, that he feels is being somehow taken away from him and his. The whole metaphor of the house: don't forget whose house you're in. Hell, that's the language that my mentor, Nat Riddles, used. But he did so in a way that included white harp players like Kim Wilson.
That's the difference between Sugar Blue and Nat Riddles. Nat was explicitly ecumenical. He'd been taught by Bob Shatkin, Lenny Rabinovitz. Jewish guys. He was open about all that stuff. This didn't mean he was "less black" than Sugar Blue. He was just less invested in insisting that the blues was black music that was being (mis-)appropriated by the wider (and grasping, insatiable) white world.
My other mentor, Sterling Magee, had a surprisingly similar ecumenical outlook. I still remember the delight with which he told me about the white guy in Germany who had traded him a guitar so that he, Sterling, could play like that Elvis Presley guy from Mississippi who was making waves in the mid 1950s when Sterling was over in Germany.
In other words, I was lucky enough to have been mentored in the blues by two very different--indeed, singular--African America blues musicians who had very different ideas about how the blues fit into the world than the ideas expressed by Sugar Blue in that particular interview.
I hear and appreciate what Sugar is saying. I think he and we would benefit if he actually spelled out the people or dynamics that he considers his antagonists, rather than signifying on them with house-metaphors, but indirection is his right, and that right is culturally based. We all need to make a living, and blow off steam.
If I were a Scottish bagpiper, and black folk kept coming over the hill, bagpipes in hand, thrusting tape recorders in my face, insisting that my "wild" bagpipe melodies told the story of my people's pain, then--after several decades--creating websites called "Modern Downhome Bagpipe" and debating whether Alisdair McLaren, Stuart Liddell, Roddy MacDonald, or DeQuan Jefferson were Top-10 All Time Bagpipers, I'd probably freak out too.
Last Edited by on Dec 04, 2012 8:35 PM
@robbert: If you're congratulating me on the number of visits this place receives annually, thanks. You're right: MBH definitely ain't a backwater. I'm proud of the fact that if you google "blues harmonica," this website currently comes up #1 on p. 1. MBH has had that ranking for quite a while now, but David Barrett's bluesharmonica.com edged me out for a few months. Then I did some more SEO, using easily available free tools, and beat him back down into the third or fourth position.
Roughly 60-65% of the traffic on this website is traffic to the forum homepage. It's you crazy people who have helped make this website #1. But of course Google organic rankings are based on a whole bunch of things, including the number of reputable sites that link to your site, SEO stuff (i.e., do your HTML title tags and search terms have a discernable relation with the words that actually show up with some frequency on your webpages?), and other things. It helps to have the words "blues harmonica" in the URL, obviously. But so-called "user-generated content" is one index that Google pays attention to, and this forum, for all its zaniness, has definitely kept the website smoking' hot in Googlebot's eyes.
Point is, this rickety ol' website is doing OK.
Last Edited by on Dec 05, 2012 12:32 PM
Sugar musta just seen the Viagra ad with the white middle-aged peckerwood dude who wanted a wood pecker, which is set to Wolf's classic track. Here's a guy who's smart enough to know to put water in your radiator when your ride is overheating but so damn stupid he uses bottled water out of a vending machine rather than from a fucking hose. I'm 65 and Caucasian as they come and it enrages me every time I see it. I feel like pulling an Elvis and blasting the tube with my 357. No way this guy gets in the house! Not even the yard! Hell Chester B was as virile a human being as ever lived, probably died with a hard-on. Rave on Sugar, I hear what you're sayin'! Oh, by the way there was a black bagpiper , played jazz on the damn thing, never claimed to invent it . Sure Blues is public domain but use some sensitivity when we wander around.
We've already told them they can't own " Bill Monroe's blue grass house", the "Appalachian house" and the "Scottish bagpipe house" so, yeah classical is out for them too.
Edit: Oh and I think we banned them from the Klezmer house as well. Come to think of it, I think someone warned them to stay out of the Metal house too. ---------- Sun, sun, sun Burn, burn, burn Soon, soon, soon Moon, moon, moon
Last Edited by on Jan 15, 2013 4:50 PM
I think it's a mixed up interpretation of: Exodus 20:5 – “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”
CWinter & JD Hoskins: I don't know if either of you has taken the time to watch my Blues Talk series, but the pair of you is exemplifying to a T the polarization that I talk about in the first couple of talks, and that I work hard to take the conversation beyond. There is indeed a whole world of facts and ideas beyond the positions you're seeking to hold down. I urge you to check out my videos.
http://www.modernbluesharmonica.com/blues-talk.html
Last Edited by on Jan 15, 2013 4:56 PM
Ultimately, who really cares about what sugar blue said. Whether he meant it as insult or not, it doesn't really ultimately matter. . The sun still rises in the morning and sets down at night. There are MUCH more important topics happening on a day-to-day basis, and much poignant topics to ponder. Sugar blue is a man known to an extremely small portion of the population, don't sweat the small stuff!
I got an email this morning from Blues Revue pushing their new "Blues Poets" series of t-shirts. Four fine white musicians, talented up-and-comers who write catchy lyrics: Damon Fowler, J.P. Soars, Victor Wainwright, and Dough Deming. On the one hand: hey, what's not to like? Talented songwriters should be recognized. On the other hand: where do I start? All men, all white: that's hardly the "full spectrum of the blues" that BR's own creed stipulates they are "dedicated" to. And if one actually knows anything at all about blues poetry per se--Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Sherley Anne Williams, Sterling Plumpp, John Sinclair, Jayne Cortez, Kevin Young, Jessica Care Moore, etc.--one can't help but feel, yes, the racial insult.
I'm all in favor of dedicating t-shirts to the work of Blues Poets. But get real. It isn't hard to find real and contemporary blues poetry--or simply great and memorable blues lyrics written by black songwriters. Heck, Sterling Plumpp has written some memorable lyrics for contemporary Chicago players. There's Willie Dixon, Larry Garner. Keb' Mo's "Perpetual Blues Machine."
So let's acknowledge Blues Revue's gesture for what it is: not just a way of making money for the magazine and extending the brand of the four emergent artists in question (both of which I don't begrudge them), but a de facto active incitement to the consolidation of the phrase "blues poets" as a white thing and the forgetting of the great tradition of...well, blues poetry.
It all depends who you are, what you know, and how you look at things. I'm disinclined to get racial where the blues are concerned, frankly, because to do so might tend to undercut my own standpoint. But I happen to know a lot about blues poetry. In fact, my next Blues Talk, released tomorrow, is about blues poetry--Hughes in particular. So I see the big fat problem with what Blues Revue is doing. I"m quite sure that they don't have a clue.
Last Edited by on Jan 16, 2013 4:20 AM
Our race issues in Australia are quite different, but one thing that has become apparent is that in order for reconciliation to take place, a real and honest understanding of our past has to see the light of day, and we (the majority) have to acknowledge how our privilege is at least partly built on the displacement and disadvantage of others.
Its not about 'sins of the father' etc, its about respecting and understanding the past. Maybe the blues is everybody's house now, but its important not lose sight of who built it and the conditions that helped create it.
I find Blues the most meaningful of all music genres, and understanding its origins and social context can only help deepen its meaning and appreciation . ---------- Lucky Lester
Race issues in Australia: disgRACE issues. words are cheap; there's no quick fix I can think of, and the only fix I can think of at all is goodwill ----------
Last Edited by on Jan 16, 2013 5:39 AM
I know for myself,blues is part of my life since i was 13 yrs. old, i`m 64 now...I`ve always respected blues as ,out of black culture and it`s a language that learning the dialects is as important as the words.as my black friend always said,"you see any bad folks hanging around,you call the law" it might be the only way sugar blue has to get even with the white vs. black ,it`s mine and you can`t play story.
Last Edited by on Jan 16, 2013 2:04 PM
" Honkin On Bobo 1100 posts Jan 16, 2013 6:52 AM In a video on the other thread, Sugar said his blues were not of or for white people."
Does Sugar Blue personally know the African American blues singer who holds the copyright/patent for blues music????
As far as I am concerned, music is a means of expression belonging soley to NO particular group/race/creed. Whether its classical, metal, grunge, blues, etc.
Last Edited by on Jan 16, 2013 8:37 AM
I was in a Denny's last night eating with my wife and Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You" came up on the speakers in the dining room.
I had one of those cathartic moments where I was struck with the simple beauty and heart of the song and the artist who wrote it.
I told Amy that Stevie Wonder is definitely one of the "angels" of music, and how that kind of simple message of love and hope is so powerful.
I thought of other musical angels in my universe: Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Louis Armstrong, what do they have in common?
It really had me look at where I indulge in supporting the message of cynicism, resignation and negativity in my music and in my conversation.
We all have a choice in what we have to say and it all deserves to be said, but what I think is most inspiring and lasting ultimately, is the work that truly comes from the naked heart, the raw human experience and redemption.
No one can disrespect that, and no one can take it away. ---------- Shane,
The Popper video above is pretty hilarious. Popper describing what the blues is is the equivalent of Vanilla Ice discussing the true meaning of hip hop.
Sugar Blue's comments don't surprise me. I've heard similar comments from other blacks who take offense to Elvis and other white artists who ripped off Mississippi delta blues players.
As a black man, I believe the blues is for all to enjoy. Nobody owns the blues.
I would much rather hear Billy Branch's view on the topic than Sugar Blue. Branch is an ambassador to the blues.
@ kudzurunner - I think that your reaction may be a tad politically correct. I for one certainly do not believe that every media outlet's presentation (in every instance) of a group of musicians in a given genre have to be a politically correct rainbow of ethnicity. I am reminded of the recent outcry regarding a White House photo consisting of all white men, when in fact the photo was NOT truly representative of Obama's White House administration whose personnel is approximately 41% female. But a lot of people went away with the wrong idea that women were being ignored for positions, which is not the case.
On the other hand, the publisher of Blues Revue was on the October 2012 Blues cruise, and I was a lone captive audience in one of the elevators one morning when he pitched his magazine to me, with a free one year subscription no less (being given to all Cruisers). I thought he was somehow connected to Living Blues Magazine in some way (who were also on the boat) when he corrected me by stating that his magazine was "the good one." I went away from that chance encounter with the conclusion that he was a pompous ass, and ignored the subscription offer. So when considering the source, you may be on to something. :)
Last Edited by on Jan 16, 2013 3:15 PM
Adam Gussow is a native New Yorker who fell in love with southern rock as a teenager and then emulated the example of countless others by following its trail back to gut-bucket country blues. After gaining proficiency as a harmonica player, Gussow teamed with Sterling Magee for many years as the duo Satan and Adam. Now a transplanted Mississippian, Gussow has released his second solo album, a sequel and expansion of his 2010 release, Kick and Stomp.
On Southbound, Gussow not only demonstrates his chops but also his versatility. Kick and Stomp featured his stylings on percussion, as well as harmonica; Southbound allows him to stretch out on guitar also. The addition of other musicians, not only on guitar but also on bass and keyboards, leads to a fuller sound. Not to be confined to the country-blues sub-genre, Gussow delves into Chicago blues and displays a respect and affinity for jazz.
The result is an eclectic set of eleven cuts which begins with the title song, attributed to ex-Allman Brothers guitarist Dicky Betts. This full-tilt rocker features Gussow on harmonica, percussion, rhythm and lead guitars, and vocal, and is abetted by the fine piano contribution of Bill Perry, Jr. and the propulsive bass of Jerry Jemmott. A segue into full blues mode is represented by the Jimmy Reed classic “You Don’t Have to Go,” again played at a rapid clip that highlights Gussow’s impressive Mississippi saxophone chops while abandoning Reed’s seductively languid tempo and harp style. Gussow’s vocal, though, falls short of Reed’s lascivious drawl and slur as Gussow strains for the high notes.
The Quincy Jones theme from the TV show Sanford and Son is played at a similar frenetic clip. The pace slows down a little for the jazzy “Grazing in the Grass,” with Jemmott’s funky bass foundation front and center. “Old McDonald in Mississippi,” one of two of Gussow’s own compositions on the disc, is a rather limp (pun intended) attempt at euphemistic barnyard sexual humor and suffers from a weak vocal.
Shifting back into the Chicago blues groove, Gussow tackles the standard “I’m Tore Down,” this time accompanied by the adept Dave Woolworth on bass. The instrumentation is fine, but the song suffers from the lack of a powerful, compelling vocal. Next up are two instrumentals: “Why Not,” with maracas and a weaving harmonica line that reminded me of Charlie Musselwhite’s “Christo Redentor,” and “Green Tomatoes,” which is repetitious and undistinguished.
Gussow’s second self-penned composition, “Home to Mississippi,” is the longest cut of the album and wears out its welcome after a couple of choruses. Another blues chesnut, “C.C. Rider,” is given an upbeat treatment; liner notes give a nod to “a brilliantly supportive guitar part” by Bryan Ward, but the guitar is barely audible, as is true throughout the CD. The album concludes with “Alley Cat,” a brief but sprightly jazz turn that allows Gussow to explore the full range of his harmonica.
Although Gussow is justified in highlighting his formidable harmonica skill, his attempt to be front and center on every song diminishes the contributions of his accompanists and even his own guitar overdubs, and the six songs on which he sings expose his lack of vocal power and range.
Features which deserve praise include the informative and unpretentious liner notes, and the inclusion of harmonica key used on each song.
Steve Daniels is a contributing writer at BluesWax. . Filed Under: BluesWax Weekly • This Week's BluesWax • Weekly CD Reviews .
No, my comment about Blues Revue has nothing to do with bitterness--just as my earlier criticism of Sugar Blue has nothing to do with bitterness. Hah! I loved that review of my album. It was fair payback for the stuff I wrote about them in the introduction to Journeyman's Road.
I do my best to call 'em as I see 'em. In this case, as anybody who reads what I wrote can see, I'm speaking as somebody who knows what blues poetry actually is and knows that BR, among other things, is encouraging us to forget its long and illustrious tradition, not to mention contemporary incarnations that don't happen to be blond. Read what I wrote. My comment is fair and balanced. It does come down, however, on the side of the Blues Revue folks, in this case, being idiots and hypocrites. Please tell them I said that.
To be blunt, I didn't buy most of what Sugar Blue said until I got that email from BR this morning. That was the moment when I said, "Jeez, maybe he really does have a point." I simply didn't want to believe that things had gotten that bad.
The sixth installment of Blues Talk, "Langston Hughes and early blues poetry," debuts at midnight tonight, CST.
Last Edited by on Jan 16, 2013 6:45 PM
I agree 100%. Funniest part is the lick he plays that little walter would play haha lol. I would love to see him sit in with Bharaths band or junior watson he would probably trip and fall. It be real interesting to see him "try" and play blues. But hey he is "damn" good haha.
Elvis became popular back in the 50's because he was a white man who could sound Black,.also what did he turn into Rock an Roll ,.The songs that the black man sung (Blues songs). As kudzurunner said " During the decade of the 1960s, thanks largely to the British blues invasion," That is when most white teens heard of the Blues,. I don't remember anyone in high school back in the Early/Mid 60's talking about B. B. King, Albert King, Muddy Waters, Lil walter ,Elmore James , but they did talk about the British bands an the new sound. ------------click Link Below -----------
There are a lot of things about Elvis that most folks don't know. He had a lot of songs on the R&B charts in the mid-1950s--which is to say, a lot of black folks bought his records, all over the country but especially in Memphis, where he was mobbed by black female fans at the WDIA show in December 1956. Here's the Wikipedia page for R&B #1 hits. Elvis broke in late in 1956.
Elvis never said, "The only thing negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes." Scholar Michael Bertrand, author of RACE, ROCK, AND ELVIS, has gone to the bottom of that urban myth and conclusively proved that it's a fabrication.
Little Richard said many things, but one thing he said was "Thanks God for Elvis Presley. Thank GOD for Elvis Presley." Because he opened the doors for black rockers to connect with white audiences.
Elvis was particularly good to his black female background singers, the Sweet Inspirations. Here's one of them, Myrna Smith, talking about that:
The Sweet Inspirations are currently touring a production that includes a number of Elvis songs. Yes, that's right: black musicians are making money off the songs made popular by a dead white guy. Funny how that works.
http://www.sweetinspirations.org/index_files/page0005.html
Last Edited by on Jan 17, 2013 5:24 AM
elvis was very close to his mother who raised him very well....he seems to have loved blues music and was heavily influenced by it....and biker nailed it when he said"nobody owns the blues"....it is for all to enjoy
@Kudzurunner "To be blunt, I didn't buy most of what Sugar Blue said until I got that email from BR this morning. That was the moment when I said, "Jeez, maybe he really does have a point." I simply didn't want to believe that things had gotten that bad."
BR as a media source does have some license and measure on what blues was, is, isn't, and could be, BUT only a little. Same goes for Sugar Blue. My point is that nobody is king, we all get to decide and assertions that offer so much credence to any individual or organization misses the practical reality. Here's two examples, from reality: If I play blues around the elementary kids they think I'm an escaped guy from jail. When I worked in a restaurant I would try to play during cigarette breaks (near the dumpsters, I've never smoked) and we'd all get busted by the boss for not working.
Last Edited by on Jan 17, 2013 6:58 AM
Living Blues? Does anyone know what their official, or unofficial, position is/was on covering black vs. white performers? I don't know where I heard that LB had a policy on prioritizing black players but the fact that they didn't cover many of the people I wanted to follow didn't help their sales, in my case. (though I will add that I didn't usually care much for Margolin's editorial take in BR)
Last Edited by on Jan 17, 2013 8:08 AM
I can speak about Living Blues because I know all the guys over there and the publication office is about a mile from where I'm sitting.
Living Blues on its masthead calls itself "the journal of the African-American blues tradition." Their editorial position has evolved over the years. They still don't put famous white blues performers (Musselwhite, Raitt, Wilson, Clapton, to name four obvious examples) on the cover, but on rare occasions they have allowed white faces to show up there in supporting roles. I was one example, but there have been three or four other white faces on the cover over the years--including, most recently, an older player who was part of a special issue on Natchez blues.
Over the past decade, the all-important CD reviews section in the back--it's basically the latter 30-40% of the magazine--has slowly opened up, racially speaking, to the point where I suspect that 30-40% of the reviews are about releases by white artists and/or mixed bands. The lead reviews, the first three or four, pretty much always feature African American artists, but after that it's a pretty mixed bag. And there's no detectable bias against white blues artists. LB is unusual in being just as likely in their reviews to criticize black blues artists as white artists.
They accept advertising from pretty much everybody who wants to run ads, so Delta Groove, with a large stable of artists that includes, for example, an eight-harp-guy show featuring all white players, runs big ads. In the last few pages, white blues artists such as Michael "Hawkeye" Herman and others, often run small ads.
One of my grad students recently completed a Southern Studies M.A. thesis on Living Blues in which, in one chapter, she compared the editorial policies of Blues Revue and Living Blues. There's one kind of column that shows up quite a lot in BR but never shows up in LB. Can you guess? It's columns that teach you how to play--columns for guitarists and harmonica players that tab stuff out. LB, the "journal of the African American blues tradition," just doesn't want to teach its (largely white) readership how to play the blues. Interestingly, they had such how-to columns very early in the magazine's history, then dropped them.
Last Edited by on Jan 17, 2013 8:16 AM
Last Edited by on Jan 16, 2013 5:39 AM