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Dirty-South Blues Harp forum: wail on! >
Revivalism, Jack White, and Howlin' Wolf
Revivalism, Jack White, and Howlin' Wolf
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tf10music
187 posts
Jun 11, 2014
2:35 PM
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I posted this on Gawker's platform in an attempt to get hired. I figured it might start an interesting discussion over here:
Jack White, Howlin' Wolf and Gasoline
Cheers,
Ben
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jnorem
262 posts
Jun 11, 2014
3:22 PM
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Very well-written, that's a great little bit of erudite op-ed there. And I like what you're saying. I hope you get the job.
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Call me J
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Goldbrick
484 posts
Jun 11, 2014
3:26 PM
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You neglect to mention that Wolf took that line from Tommy Johnsons " Cool drink of water blues"
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tf10music
188 posts
Jun 11, 2014
3:30 PM
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Wow -- I had suspected that the image predated Howlin' Wolf, but I couldn't find any evidence of it, until now. I really like the vocals on this track as well. It doesn't change my argument, but I really appreciate this.
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tf10music
189 posts
Jun 11, 2014
3:38 PM
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Made a note of it in a comment right under the article. thanks again.
also thanks jnorem for the kind words
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BronzeWailer
1305 posts
Jun 11, 2014
4:01 PM
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Well written piece. I can't help thinking that if you were a bit harsher on Jack White you might have a better chance of landing that job. Let the anger out! Denounce him! (Of course, restraint is such a rare quality on the net that itself might make you stand out from the crowd.)
BronzeWailer's YouTube
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tf10music
190 posts
Jun 11, 2014
4:12 PM
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Haha I actually considered that myself briefly, but I really do like Jack White. I thought his cover of Death Letter Blues was horrendous, but apart from that, I've been into the white stripes for years, and liked his first solo album quite a lot.
The next music piece that I do will probably delve into Townes Van Zandt worship a little bit, but before that, I'll probably just stick to making fun of world cup commentators and the way they almost 'serialize' their catch phrases in order to make them part of common 'football speech.'
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DukeBerryman
390 posts
Jun 11, 2014
4:20 PM
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Jack White should have just lifted the line "I'm drinking TNT and smoking dynamite" if he wants to be portrayed as tough in the song.
But Wolf was talking about the kind of woman that hands you a glass of water when you're drowning. (you can hear this line in Buddy Guy's new album).
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tf10music
191 posts
Jun 11, 2014
4:44 PM
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I absolutely agree with your interpretation of Wolf's line. But my point is that regardless of how you choose to interpret White's version, we are prone to reading a causality into the line "You drink water, I drink gasoline" that wouldn't have been implicit without Howlin' Wolf. All I'm saying is that I don't want the real thrust of the line's legacy as a blues trope to be reduced to a 'therefore' in between "you drink water" and "I drink gasoline."
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Goldbrick
486 posts
Jun 11, 2014
5:04 PM
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I did not feel Jack Whites song had anything in common with the blues of Tommy Johnson or Wolf.
I think he just liked the line and spun it his way-not really hinting at the evil woman angle.
I dig Jack White's stuff for the most part-especially his work with Loretta Lynn.
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tf10music
192 posts
Jun 11, 2014
5:09 PM
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It's not about commonality, though, it's about usage. I'm making a point about language. We use turns of phrase originally coined by Shakespeare in entirely non-Shakespearian contexts all the time.
I agree that White obviously liked the line and then spun it, but that's neither here nor there. Language is iterable -- I'm not really concerned with its original intention so much as I am with its received 'signification.'
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kudzurunner
4740 posts
Jun 12, 2014
5:24 AM
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tf10: I don't know Jack White's music very well, but I enjoyed the song in the video you posted on your blog, and I'm afraid that I don't hear the two songs--White's and Wolf's--the way that you do. I hear White signifying wittily on the water/gasoline line from Wolf's song. "Wittily" in this case means that I hear him making no attempt to hold down a blues pose, but instead shading decisively away into a rock attitude, very much like Jagger and the Stones.
Since you're accusing White of something like bad faith, or maybe simply an aesthetically invalid or invidious form of appropriation (i.e., something that degrades rather than reinvigorates the blues' linguistic inheritance), I'm curious to know what White could have done to "get it right," in your terms. Would you have preferred, for example, that he simply remake Wolf's song, keeping the lyrics more or less intact rather than stealing, streamlining, and repurposing one particular line?
Your blog comments suggest that you, not White, are the revivalist--the one who wants the good stuff (i.e., old blues) to be left alone in some profound way, rather than being remade, refashioned, reconstructed, for a changed historical moment. Revivalism, in my view, asks us to pay a high and unacknowledged price for bringing the old stuff back to life. It asks us to forget that the old stuff was once new stuff, embraced in its moment AS new stuff, with all the excitement of discovery that that creates. I know and like Wolf's song, but I also admire what White has done, and I don't see any aesthetic downside to it. I don't think that most of his audience has any idea, in fact, that he's signifying on Wolf's blues line. They just hear it as a song about a guy and a girl who don't see things the same way and probably shouldn't be together. There's some rock for you. Congrats to White for coming up with some new stuff by way of the oldest story in the book
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jun 12, 2014 5:25 AM
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walterharp
1405 posts
Jun 12, 2014
9:27 AM
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would this one strike you the same way? really takes heavily from the idom, but maybe uses it more in the same spirit I suppose
here are some of the lyrics .... quite a bit of borrowing going on here.
Woke up this mornin'
Got yourself a gun
Your mama always said you'd be the Chosen One
She said, "You're one in a million.
You got to burn to shine"
But you were born under a bad sign
With a blue moon in your eyes
And you woke up this mornin'
And all that love had gone
Your Papa never told you about right and wrong
Hey but you're, but you're looking good, baby
I believe that you're a-feelin' fine
Shame about it
Born under a bad sign with a blue moon in your eyes
Mister D. Wayne Love
When you woke up this morning everything was gone
By half past ten your head was going ding-dong
Ringin' like a bell from your head down to your toes
Like some voice tryin'a tell ya there's somethin' you should know
Last night you was flyin' but today you're so low
Ain't it times like these makes you wonder if you'll ever know
The meaning of things as they appear to the others
Wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers
Don't you wish you didn't function, don't you wish you didn't think
Beyond the next pay check and the next little drink?
Well you do so make up your mind to go on
'Cause when you woke up this mornin', everything you had was gone
Last Edited by walterharp on Jun 12, 2014 10:33 AM
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Goldbrick
488 posts
Jun 12, 2014
10:03 AM
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Dig it. cant listen without wanting a piece of Jersey Boardwalk pizza from the Baltimore Grill
Ana a bluesy cut to( I think the TV shot in the video is Son House)
Last Edited by Goldbrick on Jun 12, 2014 10:07 AM
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tf10music
193 posts
Jun 12, 2014
12:10 PM
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Kudzurunner: Oh I am not at all accusing White of bad faith. I'm not addressing his intentionality at all, actually. I am absolutely calling White a revivalist, I'm just making the argument that sometimes revivalism can be harmful to the material that you actually want to revive, precisely because you run the risk of forgetting that it was once new. It is rarely, if ever, an intentional process, and is certainly never malicious. I am literally talking about that one line (and that one trope). I am not talking about White's treatment of the blues tradition as a whole, because I feel that if we left a large chunk of its uptake in White's hands, it would do surprisingly well.
I think a better way for White to have gone about it would have been to have allowed the allusion to come more subtly. I suppose the issue (at least for those of us who know the Howlin' Wolf song) is that the reference is rather heavy-handed, and seems to appropriate the original grammatical and causal structure of Wolf's phrase without actually connecting all of the dots. Something like 'the gasoline you gave me to quench my thirst' might have escaped that pitfall and kept the original phrase in a better place in terms of its 'ordinary use.' Obviously that line isn't ideal either due to the rhythm of White's song (and also it could maybe just be better), but I hope it carries across what I'm saying.
Never would I advocate for White to just replicate Howlin' Wolf. I'm pretty sure I said in the article that nobody can or could replicate him, anyways. I've always been a proponent of innovative songwriting (and especially inventive lyric composition). As such, I appreciate what White does, even in "Just One Drink" -- apart from the one line in question.
The inaugural post in that blog attempts to explain my mission, which is to examine both novel and revivalist uses of language -- interesting combinations of words, phrases, etc. Here it is, for reference:
Who Are We Talking To When We Blog?
Thanks for engaging me, your comment was very discerning and forced me to question my own argument. I couldn't ever ask for more.
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tf10music
194 posts
Jun 12, 2014
12:15 PM
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Walterharp: unfortunately, I'm not in a place where I can listen to music, and I don't have headphones with me. From perusing the lyrics, though, I'm tempted to just call them weak, but that doesn't mean that the song itself isn't great. They certainly appropriate lines pretty heavily, but I fail to see how those lines could possibly used to do anything other than cultivate a specific atmosphere within a song based on what others have done. That said, I'll have to listen to the song, so take all of this with a grain of salt until I've done so. I hope to be surprised.
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isaacullah
2805 posts
Jun 12, 2014
3:14 PM
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@tf10: I haven't had a chance to read your Blog post yet (just checked in and found this thread), so I won't comment on that yet. But I just wanted to say that your response to Adam's comments is a shining example of how to respond to critism, both on the internet and in real life! One has to have thick skin, especially if one is to be writer (either popular media, or academic). I've seen criticism literally break the will of budding young scholars, which is a really sad thing, because that's the only way one grows, in science, art, and life in general. Bravo!
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isaacullah
2806 posts
Jun 12, 2014
3:21 PM
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Interesting blog post. Concise, and focused on one issue (which I find to be more informative than most other music blog posts I read, which tend to ramble on). I don't find any fault in your arguement, but I would have perhaps extended it beyond just this one instance. It would be interesting to look for other similar instances in other contemporary "revivalists" (Black Keys, Mumford and Sons, etc.) to see how the revivalist genre treats their sources in general. One other thing I've often wondered about, and to which you don't comment: How do these "revivalist" snippets of lyrics come across to those that don't know the source? Does it sound "out of time" - antiquated - and stick out to them? Does it intrigue them enough to search out the source? Or do they not notice at all?
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walterharp
1406 posts
Jun 12, 2014
7:42 PM
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@tf10 I should have prefaced my post by saying your blog was thought provoking and a good read. It got me thinking about appropriating lines and the appropriateness off it. The song I put up was to ask where the line is drawn? The Alabama 3 are an English band but clearly have strongly been influenced by US music, jazz and old blues. This discussion has come up here in other guises. What is real blues? What is modern blues?
It also brings up the whole controversy over how Dylan uses material from other writers and poets without attribution.. again a long history of this in folk and blues music. In your post you seem to draw a pretty fine line, and I was just asking you to expand more on it. Probably my point was not that different from Adam's
Last Edited by walterharp on Jun 13, 2014 9:05 AM
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Frank
4501 posts
Jun 13, 2014
3:37 AM
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Always thought this tune should be updated into a a kick ass blues tune, it has the lyrics - now just needs a great blues groove and a singer with some umpaas - bet the "Nighthawks" could do it justice :)
Last Edited by Frank on Jun 13, 2014 3:39 AM
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tf10music
195 posts
Jun 13, 2014
4:29 PM
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Isaac: thanks for the comment. And don't worry, I'll be sure to come at Mumford and Sons. I like Jack White, but I think Mumford is harming the folk tradition and isn't even worrying about the consequences. I obviously can't confirm empirically how fragments of appropriation in these lyrics come across to people who don't know the sources, but I'd be willing to bet that it'll still be informed by the original iterations. That's why 'discourse' is such an important word -- it sets precedents, cements certain forms of language use into a generational (and eventually hereditary) mould. After centuries in the West, can you even say 'apple' or 'fruit' in any sort of literary context without it feeling biblical?
Walterharp: I think the difference with Dylan is that he presented his lyrics as literature to a certain degree, and challenged us to interpret. It's not enough to simply unite a bunch of tropes and then wash your hands of the rest of your responsibilities as a songwriter (and as a 'revivalist,' for that matter). I think there are loads of ways to make your music 'modern,' but there is no fail-safe avenue. Fusion is always an option, but eventually, you're going to have to commit to following certain patterns. Lyrical content is certainly another option. There's nothing wrong with appropriating tropes, so long as you don't force the tropes to do the work. It has to be yours, and it has to be your authorial voice that drives the contextual placement of any appropriated material within your song. That's why Dylan rarely gets much heat (especially not anymore) about his borrowed material.
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tf10music
196 posts
Jun 13, 2014
4:30 PM
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Frank: again, I'll listen to the song as soon as possible. I have no internet where I'm staying currently, and my headphones are broken.
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Goldbrick
489 posts
Jun 13, 2014
7:34 PM
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Mumford is harming the folk tradition and isn't even worrying about the consequences? Why should they care-they might be an entry to folk for those who have not been exposed or they may be merely forgettable faux folkists like Dexies Midnight Runners. Bottom line thay are making lots of $$$-they are not here to educate any more than Led Zep was when the did the Lemon song.
Plenty of old folkies still dislike Dylan for selling out Joan Baez and goin' " lectric
Categories are for the convenience of the music marketing people and deep dissection of " primitive music forms' is probably pissing in the wind( a trope of sorts).
A song writer either writes for himself or for $$$--
I doubt Robert Johnson was thinking about responsibility when he borrowed from others before him
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tf10music
198 posts
Jun 14, 2014
1:05 PM
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Dylan is in no way analogous to Mumford, I'm sorry. Dylan innovated, whereas Mumford have self-consciously presented themselves as 'revivalists' (they even made a documentary about themselves that portrays them in that light), and yet are really writing pop songs using folk instruments.
Robert Johnson also innovated. I don't really see what your point is here, with all due respect.
I do take your point about led zep, though.
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Goldbrick
490 posts
Jun 14, 2014
2:40 PM
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My point is innovation is in the eye of the beholder .
I am not saying anyone is an innovator -it is all a judgement call.
If you knew your music history - many felt Dylan was a blatant pilferer -especially of tunes ( you might like to read The Mayor of MacDougal Street or Positively 4th St.) . The bottom line is who cares as long as you ( or someone ) enjoys the end result.
Last Edited by Goldbrick on Jun 14, 2014 2:44 PM
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tf10music
199 posts
Jun 14, 2014
5:58 PM
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I'm aware of Dylan's 'borrowing.' I don't worry about it, though, because Dylan operates referentially. The point of the article I wrote was to determine what sorts of referencing harm tropes -- and that can be determined by analyzing use, because use determines long-term reception. I, myself, am borrowing, or 'referencing' Wittgenstein, here. Dylan's music has nearly always presented itself as self-consciously referential. Even the name 'Bob Dylan' possesses an element of that.
Mumford do something different than Jack White, which is shift the use of certain tropes so dramatically that their reception is fundamentally altered. People still believe that Mumford is 'folk music,' and that's the problem. White, on the other hand, simply allows the Howlin' Wolf image to account for a grammatical function, thereby 'reducing' it.
For what I consider to be 'good' revivalism, I would point to Hiss Golden Messenger (and I will certainly review their forthcoming album). M.C. Taylor (the lead singer/songwriter/guitarist in that project) is a folklorist in North Carolina, and writes innovative, stunning folk songs based on his vast knowledge. Another example is The Tallest Man On Earth, a Swedish folk singer who uses abstract euphemism to express traditional folk themes and has taken open-tuned Nick Drake-style fingerpicking to what can only be called the next level. Joe Pug is another one -- he's taken the topical folk song and re-packaged it for the 21st century. His "Nation Of Heat" EP is stunning.
Claiming that no substantive judgements can be made about art is being purposefully obtuse, and I suspect you know that.
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Last Edited by tf10music on Jun 15, 2014 2:35 PM
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walterharp
1408 posts
Jun 15, 2014
5:51 AM
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I think Dylan steps over the line at times, because he can get away with it given his position in the music world. An example of that is on Modern Times he does a version of Rollin and Tumblin, uses some old verses and writes new ones, uses Muddy's arrangement, and claims authorship.
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tf10music
200 posts
Jun 15, 2014
12:53 PM
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Walterharp: fair enough, actually. I didn't think much of that album aside from "Thunder On The Mountain," which is a great tune. When people think about Dylan, though, they'll usually reference his 'important' material, which certainly predates Modern Times. At this point, Dylan could get away with murder.
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Goldbrick
492 posts
Jun 15, 2014
2:37 PM
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Lots of versions-- the blues were an oral tradition - everybody stole from everybody
or take the tune and change the lyrics
Last Edited by Goldbrick on Jun 15, 2014 2:45 PM
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tf10music
201 posts
Jun 15, 2014
2:42 PM
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Signification changes when the tradition is recorded, though. You see that in the rabbinic era of Judaism (the talmud standardized the oral tradition by recording it). You also see it in the blues. It's not necessarily an ownership level, but borrowing/stealing means something different when each instance of that borrowing/theft is indefinitely and universally iterable. All of a sudden, each individual who records a version of something wields a power that they wouldn't have when the tradition was predominantly carried on orally.
And again, I don't necessarily have a problem with appropriation as long as it's done in a way that doesn't harm the tropes/structures that it employs or 'revives.'
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Last Edited by tf10music on Jun 15, 2014 2:44 PM
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kudzurunner
4743 posts
Jun 15, 2014
7:13 PM
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"Signification changes when the tradition is recorded, though. You see that in the rabbinic era of Judaism (the talmud standardized the oral tradition by recording it). You also see it in the blues. It's not necessarily an ownership level, but borrowing/stealing means something different when each instance of that borrowing/theft is indefinitely and universally iterable. All of a sudden, each individual who records a version of something wields a power that they wouldn't have when the tradition was predominantly carried on orally."
By "recorded," I assume you're talking about sheet music, not audio recordings, right? Sheet music was what changed everything--or at least that's the argument underlying Handy's claims about his own music in FATHER OF THE BLUES. He said "All this common-stock blues stuff was in the air. Anybody could have written it down. But I was the one who actually wrote it down."
You're talking about sheet music, right? That was the moment, for example, that music copyright became a huge issue.
As for "universally and indefinitely iterable," I don't think there was a single African American blues musician in the 1920s--the period when actual musical recordings came into huge currency--who thought in those terms. (Especialy the indefinitely part. Blues musicians were, for a range of reasons, much more interested in this-worldly rewards than in whatever afterlife their recordings would guarantee them.) I'm sure that some black professional songwriters such as Clarence Williams thought in those terms, but I don't think there's any significant evidence that any of the classic blues queens, for example, who were the big blues stars of that period, thought about the universal and indefinite iterability of their recordings, at least not in any way that measurably impacted their approach to music making. They had some sense, perhaps, that that way of thinking was important to white folks. But mostly they simply wanted to create hits, by any means necessary, that would drive their popularity as live performers. And as live performers, they wanted to put their personal stamp on any song they played. So they were strongly disinclined, for example, to preface performances of specific songs by saying, "Here's a song made famous by So-and-so." But that was always true. Power was the charismatic personal power that a performer was capable of manifesting on stage in front of an audience. The advent of recordings didn't change that basic dynamic. I don't remember any evidence in Abbot and Seroff's RAGGED BUT RIGHT suggesting that Bessie Smith, when she was being billed as an "up-to-date coon shouter" in the tent shows that went through the Mississippi Delta between 1910 and 1915, for example, suddenly changed her approach to repertoire once she became a recording star after 1922. The only people whose orientation towards "borrowing and stealing" changed after the advent of sound recordings were the copyright lawyers and record men. (And of course in the 1950s, once whites started covering black hits and killing their profitability, your claim makes more sense. But that was a much later period.)
Do you have any evidence for your claim?
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jun 15, 2014 7:32 PM
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walterharp
1409 posts
Jun 15, 2014
7:38 PM
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I think that at some level there was thinking in those terms. Take Juke for example, Junior Wells claimed he played it before Little Walter, the first lines are from Snooky and Moody's Boogie and Jimmy Rogers claimed parts were from Sunnyland Slim. Why are these claims made after it became a hit? This is later than the early 20's, so maybe royalties were in mind, but I suspect bragging rights of being the first, and having a song belong to you has always been quite important and a matter of pride. Once there is a verifiable record, either written or recorded, then such claims can be substantiated. Otherwise Wells can claim Juke was his all he wants, but there is no proof.
But that is off the original topic. A self professed revivalist who does not admit to their sources, or uses previous material in a way that does not honor the original, is taking short cuts of appropriation.
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tf10music
202 posts
Jun 16, 2014
11:24 AM
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Kudzurunner: To begin with, I do think that the phenomenon that I described in my last post intensified in the fifties and sixties, certainly. However, none of this is a 'historical' matter, to be clear. I'm not attempting to prove that the blues musicians of the 1920s and 1930s weren't okay with sharing/borrowing material due to the advent of recording. That's actually irrelevant to me.
I'm mostly talking about historeography -- what happens when we listen to the tradition after the fact, how we are able to read it once is has been recorded as a 'history' (muddled though it may be). The fact that it has been recorded changes things entirely, changes the mode of its signification. It's not about the intention of the artist -- the entire point is that their output, once recorded, exits the bounds of their intentionality. The author does not die (to be clear), but the author is certainly separate from the text. Studying Muddy Waters is different than studying the music recorded by Muddy Waters. Leaving an indefinitely iterable document of one's expression (because all methods of permanently documenting linguistic expression -- audio recording, writing, etc -- are indefinitely iterable) fundamentally alters its reception. As a result, we receive material from the 1920s that wouldn't even have been available to us otherwise, and our reaction is, undoubtedly, quite different from that of the first generation of listeners. And that's just a very basic example.
I believe that W.C. Handy was correct in terms of copyright, but copyright has nothing to do with what I'm arguing. I'm talking about how recording the tradition changes the manner in which blues tropes are transmitted, revived, and degraded. I wouldn't have even been able to conceive of the connection between Howlin' Wolf and Jack White with anywhere near the degree of precision that we all have grown accustomed to in our listening -- the subtle differences between Wolf's line and White's line are only uncovered because both have been recorded and are therefore available in their exact, unchanging forms indefinitely. They're iterable. That means there is a certain amount of responsibility with regards to the use of blues tropes if one intends to be a revivalist -- and Jack White, by and large, does a good job of that. Just not in the case of the particular line that I originally wrote about.
Walterharp: that's a good point, and I suspect that there's something to that, although I don't consider myself enough of an expert (especially compared to some on this forum) to really confirm or deny that bragging rights were a large factor in that orally transmitted tradition.
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