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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
My Love Affair With the Blues
My Love Affair With the Blues
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wolfkristiansen
54 posts
Oct 15, 2010
2:32 AM
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Hello, Modern Blues Harmonica members. Indulge me, and read this essay I wrote about the blues a few years ago. There's harmonica in there, somewhere:
"Blues, at its best, is a vital, moving music. The very sound of it touches people everywhere, not just English speakers, and not just those in Western cultures. I’ve loved it since I was a child, counting my age on my fingers alone. I didn't know it was blues, only that it struck a chord in me like nothing else. Back then it was Elvis singing "My Baby Left Me", "Jailhouse Rock"; stuff like that, played on the radio in the fifties and sixties.
My parents were classically trained musicians who immigrated to Canada from Europe when I was two. I grew up hearing my father sing opera and my mother play classical piano. My sisters took piano lessons, heavy on the Mozart and Bach. In our household, this was the only real music.
When I was 12 I heard a program on the CBC about Bessie Smith. I listened raptly to her husky, evocative voice. The host said this was "blues" music, made by black people. I went to my parents, the classical music purists, and made them listen to the last part of the program. I told them, "I don't know what's wrong with me, but I like this Negro music better". Politically incorrect, even for that time, but what did I know? My parents didn't seem to care one way or the other about my announcement, or even, for that matter, about blues. My father said, "You'll outgrow it". I didn't.
I bought my first vinyl album in college. It was "The Real Folk Blues" by a singer named "Howling Wolf". I'd never heard him. I had read about him in Charles Keil's "Urban Blues"-- my bible at the time. I thought I’d check him out. I put the album on a little Seabreeze turntable/amplifier/speaker combo borrowed from my upstairs landlord. Out through the four inch speakers came the hugest, roughest, bluesiest voice I'd ever heard, accompanied by this wild, throbbing, pulsating harmonica. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I had to have more of that stuff!
Then, the usual route for my generation-- I got turned on to Muddy Waters and the other Chess Records artists, then other artists, labels and eras. I discovered Robert Johnson-- the epitome of the blues. If you don't like Robert Johnson, you don't like blues. From him I learned that blues poetry can be as deep and moving as blues music. I started going to blues shows. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howling Wolf, James Cotton, John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins, B.B. King and more. My blues experience and taste expanded exponentially.
I love all kinds of blues now, but regularly come back to 1950s Chicago blues and the Holy Trinity of Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf and Little Walter for my deep blues fix. Howling Wolf is still the man. I still have that album. My CDs get more play now, but I fire up my turntable and tube amplifier sometimes for that unmatchable analog blues experience. Blues and analog sound are made for each other. I missed the whole tape cassette era. By the time I got around to admitting it was time to get a cassette deck, my wife pointed out everyone around me had CD players. I got one.
Somewhere along the way, I learned to play blues harmonica. The first song I learned was "Poor Boy", from that first Howling Wolf album. The melody lays out in third position, not second. So I first learned to play in that position, not the usual second position.
Blues is a black man's music. They were and are the originators; we (whites) were and are the imitators. I'm one of those imitators. Any innovation coming from whites almost always takes the music away from blues and into blues rock. I know no statement like this can be absolute. I'm voicing it because I believe it, by and large. My intention is not to re-ignite the debate, but to set out what side I’m on.
Muddy Waters said this, and I agree: White man can play the blues but he can’t sing it. He said it more eloquently than that. I can’t find the quote right now.
At some point in my younger years, I became such a black blues purist (my friends say snob) that I gave away all my white blues albums. Paul Butterfield, John Mayall, Canned Heat, early Ten Years After, Savoy Brown—off they went to the used record store. I’m not such a purist now, and actually like some white blues artists. Years later, I ended up re-buying some of the albums I gave away.
Black music, acoustic or electric, is still the good stuff. Blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, jazzy blues, bluesy jazz, funk, soul, black gospel, I love it all. I saw James Brown in 1966 and 1996 and can’t decide which was the better concert. Blues is the wellspring I always return to, though.
My favorite kind of blues has it all— sincerity, good singing, interesting or even profound lyrics, good rhythm, interesting melody in or outside of the I-IV-V form. My favorite blues centers around the heart and gut and not the head.
The worst blues coming out now, in my opinion, is by the white guitar slingers who put in perfunctory vocal introductions and endings (usually sung sharp) to showcase what they’re really interested in: the 15 minute guitar solo in the middle. I know many people like that kind of blues. If they love it as much as I love black blues, more power to them. (Before anyone jumps on me, I know there are black blues performers who likewise stick long guitar solos in their songs— I don’t like them either.)
My kind of blues has given me so much joy; if other blues, or even other music, does the same for others, I’m glad for them. Presumably we’re in this group because we love blues. The ones I pity are those for whom music, any kind of music, does nothing.
In another life (no kids, no mortgage) I played harp in a blues band for five years. I backed up John Lee Hooker and Albert Collins during that time. I’m still playing, currently in an unlikely trio of harp, drums and piano. We play music festivals and the occasional (no longer smoky) bar here on the west coast of British Columbia. Our piano player is the bluesiest piano player I’ve heard in our small town. She sings like a bird, which is good, because I’m one of those bad white blues singers I was dissing earlier. I quit singing years ago when I saw people literally grimacing in the audience when I hit a clinker. I do all my singing through my harp now. I get to do all the fills in our current band because there’s no guitarist.
I’ll quit now, so I’ve got more to say another time."
Cheers,
wolf kristiansen
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jbone
418 posts
Oct 15, 2010
4:21 AM
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Well said, sir! we are kindred spirits in a lot of what you speak.
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Joe_L
710 posts
Oct 15, 2010
11:29 AM
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Wolf - If you haven't read this essay by Paul Garon, check it out. I think you may find it interesting.
White Blues
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The Blues Photo Gallery
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wolfkristiansen
55 posts
Oct 16, 2010
1:50 AM
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Joe L-- thanks for the link to the essay,"White Blues", by Paul Garon. I read it, and agree with it.
I've got his book "Blues and the Poetic Spirit". It's heavy reading, but worth the effort. Here's an excerpt, from the beginning:
"The principal thesis of Blues and the Poetic Spirit is that the blues is a music that signifies the rebellion of the spirit, a body of song that achieves poetry by its insistent revolt and demand for liberation."
This is the Dirty-South Blues Harp Forum. The most important word in the title is blues. Blues is bigger than harp.
Cheers,
LeVitraRolex
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kudzurunner
1937 posts
Oct 16, 2010
5:47 AM
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I know Paul Garon moderately well. I've assembled two panels at academic conferences on which I've asked him to serve, and I've invited him to two Living Blues symposia. He's an interesting, learned guy. But I strongly disagree with the claims that he makes in that "White Blues" essay. I did my best to refute some of them in an essay entitled "Whose Blues?", which was initially published in THIRSTY EAR, a magazine out of Santa Fe, and later republished in my book JOURNEYMAN'S ROAD.
Here's a link to my essay:
http://www.thirstyearfestival.com/features/blues.html
One point that rarely surfaces in this discussion is that the issue of "white blues," except for a brief period in the late 1960s, is the invention of white blues purists like Wolf (in his former incarnation, as described above) and Paul Garon. Yes, there are a couple of choice quotes--invariably invoked by white blues purists--in which Muddy Waters says that whites can play good guitar but can't "get the black man's vocal," but overwhelmingly, black blues musicians are color-blind pragmatists. If you can play, they're OK with you. If you can sing (and many whites can't sing convincing blues, but a few can) they're OK with you. Black blues listeners, in my experience, are the same way. If you sing and play the music they want to hear, focusing on concerns that they actually share, they're happy to have you around.
It's white blues aficionados, on the other hand, who want to draw lines--as Wolf describes himself doing in one phase of his life--and say, "Only the REAL black stuff for me." This isn't to say that there wasn't a difference between "black blues culture" and "white blues culture" for many decades, and that there wasn't an element of pretense, and sometimes minstrelsy, in the way white performers tried to put the music across. I don't blame white folk who love blues for saying, "I prefer Albert Collins to Alvin Lee." But in my experience, the white blues purist fetish for black blues goes beyond this, into an active disdain for any and every sort of blues performance by people who happen to have white faces. When Ron Wellburn and other Black Aesthetic intellectuals did this in the late 1960s, it was an understandable response to a specific situation in which, for example, Janis Jopline was being celebrated as "The Queen of the Blues" by the mass media while Koko Taylor was being ignored by that same media. Living Blues, which was founded by Paul Garon among others, was founded in that same moment of reactive Black Power politics. But as I say: the irony is that black audiences and actual working black blues musicians are nowhere near that hard-line when it comes to judging blues performers in racial terms. Or at least that's my experience. If you can play, if you can sing, in a way that they like, or that intrigues them, they'll show you some gratitude. It goes without saying that many older black blues artists would have failed to make a living over the past four decades if it hadn't been for the white guys who played drums, guitar, bass, piano, and harp for them, and who drove their cars. Those white guys did all that, and really learned how to sing and play blues. (Gals, too.) Blues is now a world music. The conversation is no longer about black and white. In Oklahoma, New Mexico, and parts of Canada, it's about Indian boys playing the blues. It's about Brazilian boys playing the blues. It's about French-African boys playing the blues, and singing the blues with a French accent. It's about Lightnin Malcolm and Cedric Burnside transcending white and black--teaching people to listen to the connection below skin-level.
Last Edited by on Oct 16, 2010 5:48 AM
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kudzurunner
1938 posts
Oct 16, 2010
6:02 AM
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PS: I salute Wolf, needless to say, for having allowed his thinking to evolve back in the direction of ecumenical blues loving. Blues is a complex music. It's almost always trying to enact complex syntheses in which two or three things that SHOULDN'T be able to go together somehow go together. "I hate you but I love you," etc. So it stands to reason that somebody who says "Blues is music by black people, period, and whites simply can't sing or play the stuff in a believable way" is being unwisely undialectical. They're judging the book by looking at the cover. Bo Diddley inveighed against fools who did this. The blues love paradox. The blues always find a way of embarrassing those who draw overly rigid lines. That's because the blues emerged in a time of Jim Crow segregation, when separation between "white" and "black" were codified in the South and enforced with brutal violence. That legal situation led to all sorts of absurdities--such as somebody with one black great-grandparent and 15 white great-grandparents being called "black," and denied the right to vote and denied all sorts of other things--and the music was one of the chief ways in which southern black folk responded to the absurdity. Blues has always been particularly attentive to absurdity, to contradiction, to paradox, for this reason. It's a survival mechanism. "If I don't go crazy," Muddy sang, "I will surely lose my mind."
One paradox is that the white boy sometimes CAN play the blues. He will walk into your juke joint with a harp in his hand and whup any black harp-playing pretender you can toss at him, even old Willie who THINKS he's hot s--t. Black audiences, in my experience, delight in this sort of absurdity. The world is never quite what it seems, and it certainly isn't what white folks say it is--or black ministers, or the old folk. It's more alive and varied and exciting than that, and those white boys will surprise you when you least expect it.
Last Edited by on Oct 16, 2010 6:04 AM
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groyster1
535 posts
Oct 16, 2010
6:10 AM
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@wolf
surprised you gave away your white boy playing blues color has nothing to do with it peter greens early work with original fleetwood mac showed his natural ability in great vocals,great guitar,even occasional harp fleetwood mac went to chicago in 1969 and recorded and very much impressed the veteran greats rice miller played with the yardbirds and other english groups and came away very impressed with caucasian blues playing
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wolfkristiansen
56 posts
Oct 16, 2010
5:38 PM
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Groyster-- Peter Green is my favorite white blues guitarist. I'm with you on that.
About your other point, "Rice miller played with the yardbirds and other english groups and came away very impressed with caucasian blues playing"-- I don't know about that. I vaguely remembered reading differently about 20 years ago, but couldn't find the quote. I emailed 'fessor Mojo AKA Bill Donoghue who steered me on to the quote. Here it is:
"Williamson reputedly told Robbie Robertson of the Band; 'Those Englishmen want to play the blues so bad - and they play it so bad'"
(From "Eric Clapton: Lost in the Blues", by Harry Shapiro, 1999)
"These days, it's customary to downplay the recordings he made with British beat groups, in some cases rightly; but often, one feels, commentators want to show their awareness of his remark to Levon Helm that 'they want to play the blues so bad, and they play it so bad.' It may be relevant to note that Sonny Boy had lived most of his life in an environment where it was advisable to guess what the nearest white folks wanted to hear; on the other side of the argument, Paul Oliver has described putting him in a cab in the small hours to go and hear 'a group of enthusiastic youngsters [who] had invited him to come and hear them play,' and 'his sincere desire not to disappoint them.' I don't claim to be an objective commentator on 'Sonny Boy Williamson & The Yardbirds' - we are most blind to the faults of our earliest loves - but it seems inarguable that the band's accompaniment is respectful, respectable, and sometimes, especially by drummer Jim McCarty, rather well considered."
(From "Don't Start Me Talkin'", 1999, by Chris Smith in the English blues magazine, Juke Blues.)
Who knows if Sonny Boy actually said this? I note the quote is attributed to Levon Helm in one instance, and Robbie Robertson in the other. But it does at least raise the question as to what Sonny Boy really thought about his British musical compatriots.
Adam-- I read your essay, "Whose Blues?" a few years ago, on the internet, and read it again when you referred us to it. I urge everyone to read it, those who haven't. Well reasoned and persuasive. It didn't change my mind, but, like I said, I didn't want to re-ignite any debate, I just wanted to set out the side I'm on. In the end, we are destined to have different views.
I'm fully aware of the irony of a white man (me) playing and loving music I say belongs to blacks.
To change the subject a bit, here's a quote from your essay that caught my interest:
"Restive young African-American men, so-called "New Negroes," have always unnerved whitefolks: Witness the reflexive dismissal of rap by your average white blues fan."
I like black music across the spectrum, including rap. Rap, to me, is black poetry delivered rhythmically. Rap, like so much black music, has influenced musicians around the world of all races and all cultures. Here's a mind-blowing example of this-- a Mongolian rap band. The rap starts about 30 seconds into the song, have a listen:
Cheers,
LeVitraRolex
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groyster1
536 posts
Oct 17, 2010
6:43 AM
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@wolf
rice miller was known to be "in his cups" so maybe he was not consistent with his comments-adam was playing sonny boy with the yardbirds and mentioned once that sonny boy was on the 5 chord while the ybs with clapton was on the 4 chord-mick fleetwood mentioned in fleetwood macs recordings that the veterans would change keys during a song and he had trouble following them but early fleetwood were very strong and its a tragedy what happened to peter green and danny kirwan with their drug experiments
Last Edited by on Oct 17, 2010 6:44 AM
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Blind Melon
38 posts
Oct 25, 2010
7:09 AM
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Wolf,
Very nice essay. I enjoyed reading it.
One thing that I would like to comment on is this quote...
"Blues is a black man's music. They were and are the originators; we (whites) were and are the imitators."
I will not argue that blacks invented blues. I will not argue that the best (and my favorite blues) is from black musicians.
The majority of the music that I own and listen to is of black artists.
But I disagree with any comments (said or implied) that blacks "own" the blues.
That would be like saying since Dr. James Naismith, a white Canadian, invented basketball in 1891, that whites own basketball.
I am not trying to start a riot. I give all the dues and respect to the "musicians of color", but please do not lock this music in one race.
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