Couldn't agree more, Diggs. A friend had a handful of blues records when I was at a formative age, and John Hammond's were among them. I had only really been exposed to Sonny & Brownie but that had primed me to keep my ears open for blues. Hammond had a raw, gritty sound compared to S&B, plus I was awe-struck that one guy could make that much "sound" all alone. Then when I got my first chance to see him, I was spellbound. Stomping the stage floor to keep a heavy beat, searing guitar riffs filled with knife-sharp harp licks backed up this gritty, earthy singing style. And, his songs were all very cool. Old cars, street handguns, fast women, smoky bars. Thanks for reminding me, Diggs. Now I gotta go dig out my old vinyl... 8^) Michelle PS: Only later did I learn that his daddy was THE John Hammond of Colombia Records (through not "senior" - they have different middle names). How cool would it have been to have the original bluesmen teaching you their instruments? Otis Spann, piano, etc.?
We were lucky enough to play a festival with John Hammond and got to hang out back stage with him. He was very gracious with his time talking to anyone that approached him. Having seen him before I was already a fan, but after meeting him I became a bigger fan.....a very cool guy!!!
I played the documentary SEARCHING FOR ROBERT JOHNSON, which stars Hammond as narrator and principal performer, for the students in my southern studies grad class on Robert Johnson and the devil's music last spring, and I was surprised by how many of them criticized him for the way in which he hogged focus--or so they claimed--by reenacting the crossroads soul-sale moment and in other ways insisting that we take him as RJ's adequate substitute. I'm ambivalent about Hammond as a performer myself, but I thought he did a good, soulful job of telling the story. They weren't so kind. The students came from various majors and were both white and black. 90% of them disliked the role he played. Go figure.
Hammond is an interesting figure because for many decades he recorded albums but never wrote any of his own songs. Unlike RJ, Little Walter, T. Bone Walkter, Bessie Smith, and most of the blues artists we talk about here, he strictly covered other blues artists' songs. Then, at some point within the past ten years, he made an album, the title of which escapes me, in which he broke out and did some original stuff--with hip-hop mixed in, if I'm not wrong. A striking departure. I'd be grateful if somebody who knows his recordings could tell me which album that was.
He was interviewed by Scott Simon for NPR in 2007 and the header reads that after decades of playing the blues, "he has only recently begun writing his own songs."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7466075
Last Edited by on May 05, 2012 8:06 PM
Adam, both you and your students are entitled to your opinions but in my book John Hammond passes many of the bars you set for validity. The guy is a triple threat- great soulful voice that cracks into falsetto in all the right places and instantly recognisable guitar and harmonica styles , anyhow- big influence . Happy full moon everybody and peace and love to all on the forum, man.
some influence from his producer G Love/Garrett Dutton who's fairly well known for his blues/hip hop music
I also think that his partnership with Tom Waits has been part of his belated development as a songwriter, as most of his originals seem to have a Waits feel to them - obviously helps to have Stephen Hodges on drums too!
I have a wide selection of John's earliest CD's. It is easy to hear the progression of his talent from pedestrian to stellar in a few years. They are also a collection of the basics in regards to his song choices. To my ears, he doesn't sound like a white guy playing black music, but sounds very authentic. ---------- The Iceman
@DevonTom: When I say I'm ambivalent, I mean that I'm truly of two minds about the guy. I took 45 minutes last night and used iTunes previews to go through about 50 of Hammond's tracks from 8 or 9 of his albums, including the very first, COUNTRY BLUES, from 1965. I've seen him live a handful of times, starting back in the mid 1980s. I wasn't aware that he'd issued a total of 35 albums over the years, but that is a life's work indeed.
What's noticeable when you go back to 1965 is that he had incredible guitar prowess even then. He's got great technique, great rhythmic vitality inside the chord work. And he's got most of what became his characteristic vocal approach even then, although the Skip James falsetto element in a few songs surprised me.
When you roll forward to WICKED GRIN, an album that consists mostly of Tom Waits covers, you realize--or I realized--that his vocal approach is, in a strange way, as much a jazz/lounge approach as a blues approach. He is all about the vocal mask, the deliberate creation of a persona as a singer.
His singing voice and his speaking voice bear little relation to one another. He speaks like what he is: the blueblood scion of one of America's richest families, the Vanderbilts. In interview, he has the deepest, clearest, friendliest, most rational, most humane voice one is likely to hear in the blues world. He's a consummate gentleman. But when he sings, he contorts that same voice, slurs most of his words, chokes them, garbles and gargles them--and does so with great style, I might add. He and Tom Waits aren't just friends, but they're aesthetic counterparts, cousins even.
It's that disjunction between his speaking voice and his singing voice, which is very much present when you see him live, that contributes to my ambivalence about him as a performer. (Rod Piazza, by contrast, has no separation; he's either a full-time performance artist who refuses to drop the Mr. Jive mask in public even though he could, or he's actually become and is committed to the character he plays. Either way, as a harp player, he plays his ass off. THAT is not in question.) Hammond's guitar playing and harp playing are exemplary; he throws a great deal of emotion into both. I'm just more comfortable, as a listener, with performers like Honeyboy Edwards, Sugar Ray Norcia, Kim Wilson, Tab Benoit, Paul Butterfield, Eric Clapton, B. B. King--black, white, it doesn't matter--where the vocal masking element isn't so predominant, where there's an audible connection between speaker and singer. Watermelon Slim would be an example where there's no disjunction between singing and speaking voice; between man and performer. Deak Harp is another example. Put Hammond next to those two guys, onstage and off, and the point I'm trying to communicate should be apparent and indisputable. They are who they are. There's zero disconnect. With Hammond? Something very different is going on.
That's just me: a question of personal taste. As I listened to the songs themselves, though, in my long fast survey last night, I was impressed nonetheless by the huge corpus that Hammond has accumulated; by how good he was so young (early 20s on that first record); and by how sure and consistent he has been all along about the vocal effect he's trying for. He is an artist of the first order: I will agree with you on that.
The fact that he strictly did covers of other people's material for most of his career was a fact that, when crossed with the vocal masking, the highly stylized element, made me wonder what exactly his blues were about. He struck me, in a sense, as a performance artist more than a performer: somebody who asserted his claim to the material through a deliberate element of artifice rather than, as with some harp copyists, an intense focus on replication.
So yeah: I'm ambivalent. That means I honestly can't decide what I think. Part of me thinks he's sensational. Part of me just doesn't enjoy his stuff quite as much as his evident technique and emotional commitment should lead me to.
I assigned the video in my class, needless to say, because I thought it deserved our time and attention. I thought Hammond did an excellent job in it.
@Iceman: I'm not sure what "authentic" means anymore in a blues context, especially when a performer is covering fifty-year-old songs, but I'll agree with you in a provisional way: the Tom Waits element is so strong in Hammond that he doesn't really sound like a white guy playing black music. He sounds like a hipster playing his own blues-based music.
For the record, and because it's interesting, here's a website that offers a fair bit of info about the Vanderbilt family. John Hammond Jr. and Anderson Cooper are both Vaderbilts:
@ Adam- As a blues player from England I am very aware of singing with a different voice than your speaking voice. If you are singing Opera you try and sing in correct Italian or German. I am sure a black American singer like Jessye Norman would agree. I do not feel like I am performing in blackface though, because over time I found my singing voice. John Hammond started off with a very forced voice , he was very young and to an extent sounded like an american version of Mick Jagger. I think his best vocals were on his Live albums in the seventies. You can hear he has found his voice and is using the different shades and colors in it as you would an instrument. I am less fond of his later studio albums as the part of him who loves Mose Allison won through.The overly mannered aspect that puts you off creeping back in. Adopting a mask or persona is actually an African concept- used by Robert Johnson in many of his songs, sometimes apeing Skip James, sometimes Charlie Patton or Son House.. So it makes sense to me a guy starting off as a total Robert Johnson head should try on different vocal personas. The most fully realised studio album to me is Got Love if You Want it, which actually has Rick Estrin blowing harp on a couple of tunes, give it a try. Stay well, Tom
