Tuesday, April 7, 2009

THESIS STATEMENT


Blues music in America is often or always considered roots music—music which precedes other music but which can never be new, creative, commercial, or experimental in its own right. This playlist project will be about blues music removed from the context of white historical revisionism; blues music can be “authentic” without being acoustic, anachronistic, confined to genre, and written without consideration for profit or for the white audience which can produce profit. Creative and commercially minded artists such as Muddy Waters, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Slim Harpo, Little Willie John, Etta James, Charley Patton, Keb’ Mo’, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Derek Trucks Band, Ry Cooder, Ali Farka Toure, and the Rolling Stones will, then, prove that the blues is an active and creative form, one which not only inspired the music to follow but which continually inspires itself to work against genre. (Photographs, album covers, song selections, bibliographic information, and suggestions for further reading are also provided throughout the playlist, as an additional resource in understanding this, the more accurate of the blues identities.)
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HISTORY: Female Modernism


The history of the blues is one of consistent self-consciousness; in other words, the prevailing notion (principally among white scholars and enthusiasts) that the blues were born entirely out of circumstance fails to give credit where credit is due. Blues artists are just that—artists. And artists, despite the fiction which says that blues music is stable, orally communicated, and bound to region, can owe inspiration to musical and socioeconomic conditions even while also independently creating, driven both by their own imagination and by the profit which in America an imagination can produce. This section, on history, will or at least should show two things, the first of which is that there is an inexact public conception of what the blues are and how the blues developed. This conception, namely, is that blues is roots music only, born in one specific sound and region and most notable only as the basis for later, more complex music. The history, secondly, shows that such is an imagining of real facts: that blues musicians have profitably pushed their own music to new borders, in and of itself.

The first blues music, to this end, was made not by men in fields, singing traditional songs—but rather by women endowed with all the glitz and glamour (however false, given their racial setting) of the vaudeville stage. Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, and Ma Rainey were all more popular and more powerful in the 1920s, when the term “blues” was first being used, than were their male and rural counterparts. Some historians, however, tend only to think of field labor, prison camps, and paternalism alongside blues verse, even though all three come up much more often in country-and-western lyrics, and far less often in the blues than sexual innuendo. The real history here proves that blues was, from the very first, music made for performance and profit, not solely for local consumption and later appropriation by "better" white performers. Calling only music made locally, indigenously, and non-profitably “authentic”—or, in other words, listening nostalgically to music from 1930s Mississippi (not quite nostalgic for black people)—is the privilege of white projection. And, again, projection of this sort ignores the creative control blues masters do have over their music.

The stock market crash in 1929—an anomalous end to what had been an era of showy, swanky blues—mired the music consuming public in an abject poverty. Record labels and music producers too faced the grim burdens of the new decade, which helps explain why omnipresent female vaudeville stars were soon replaced at the “race” labels by male, transcendentalist country blues soloists such as Son House. Bessie Smith had once been an example of black success (bedecked in gold sequins and an opera gown, her onstage presence is perhaps the very reason why her blues is not considered “authentic”). But now, the shows that had been most popular with both black and white audiences had become too expensive and racially ostentatious to remain practicable. The labels could not afford salaries, songwriters, bands, or the stage renting fees charged by the Theatre Owners Booking Association. The apparent solution, since demand for race music was and would remain high, was to find race music for cheap in Mississippi, and so began the process of change by which the blues became known as the music of male guitarists.
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HISTORY: Male Postmodernism

The blues, hence, changed—something one might not expect from music preordained to be roots music. In Ed Andrews and Papa Charlie Jackson, the first two men to record, record labels saw artists for whom no songwriters, backup musicians, or even recording studio slots had to be purchased. And, as always, folklorists and liberal art connoisseurs aimed to seek out “authenticity” in all its forms and hiding places. Alan Lomax headed the flood of white field researchers who all hoped to find and record the true sound of the black race (voicing its affliction rather than its spirit). Nothing could seem more genuine than backwoods guitarists who relied on guttural sounds, visceral imagery, roots frameworks, and the violent produce of their surroundings. To complement that set of attitudes, folklorists focused in on prisons such as Parchman Farm and also on the Delta region generally, both of which were home to more men than women. So were male forms regimented into the public consumer consciousness as “authentic” blues. But the first blues were made by women and for stage profit, driven as much by current taste as by the abiding fact of tradition.

Yet, even among the male forms to follow, blues music was music of real and consistent innovation. The second generation of blues musicians, now more than ever made up of men, were self-reflexive, seeing themselves (just as the women had) as professional artists. This means, in other words, that no legitimate blues master could disregard the need for new material and for marketability, as is supposed. He had no other job beside making music, and for that reason alone he—the second generation singer—had to not only best his competition but also cater to his audience, which was becoming majority white. Keeping an eye on the audience had any number of manifest effects on the music itself. First, the blues tended now to betray the trademark inflections of mass culture; some songs were learned from sheet music and the radio, others codified into an AAB 12-bar format with I-IV-V chords. So, even within the genre misclassified as “authentic blues”—blues that stays true to itself by avoiding the other, outside world entirely—artists were in fact most notable for creative commercialism.

Blues music lost none of its originality but became, at its core, popular music—not the static mouthpiece of an ancient rural tradition. In Charley Patton, perhaps the first popular second generation bluesman, the music was altered to fit new themes; Patton was topical about his lyrical subject matter, including in his songs images of boll weevils and ruinous floods. Not only was he willing to confront new themes— instead of often obsolete folklore—he also sexualized blues. Sexual lyrics, and the sexual stage presence he worked so hard to perfect, were simply most popular with both black and white listeners, and his was an opportunistic generation of bluesmen. What made Charley Patton “of the second generation,” then, was not only the fact that he did not record until 1928, but also the fact that he knew what his audience wanted from him: topical music, sexual music, recognizable music—popular and standardized music that was still as authentic as anything that had ever come before. Robert Johnson, of course, was the man to complete this change to postmodernism, and his music is living proof of active creativity in the blues.
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HISTORY: The Great Migration


The third and last generation of blues musicians and music (the very fact of changing “generations” shows that the blues creatively transforms its own roots) is the electric generation: music in the cities. Much as Charley Patton changed the blues on the basis of an audience, this third generation was driven at least in part by concerns for what listeners wanted. After the “Great Migration” to northern cities, black people did not want to hear country soloists singing blues from down home; the music had to be adapted to city paces, city sounds, city philosophies. White people, for their part, wanted electricity, showmanship, ensemble style, and an energetic beat to go with their brand new radios and jukeboxes. (These trends can also be seen in the shift from first to second generation: with an increasing concern for real popularity came the increasing use of rhythm, energy, and complexity from Robert Johnson on). Thus, the blues changed not once but twice because its makers came to an awareness of themselves, their audience, and the tools available to capitalize on that audience.

With each shift, musicians in the genre could clearly see themselves as artists, professionals, remakers of what would always remain an old and oral tradition—all the more aware of the world around them. No self-reflexive, professional musician strives only to recreate the music of another generation without adding something of his or her own. And this is precisely the fact that sums up the history of the blues. In the case of the two generational gaps, exponents of the changing styles wanted to play whatever was novel, relevant, popular—and not whatever field hollers and folk ballads their parents and grandparents had passed along and preferred. All of this analysis, then, is aimed at the refuting of an outright fiction: that the blues are old, unchanging, written for communal sharing rather than for commercial profiting, and authentic only as an exact genre at the core of later, creative musical scenes. This is an authenticity which white revisionism has imagined: the blues have always been about change and creativity, and just because black people deservedly profit does not make them inauthentic.

And, arguably, this idea of authenticity is an illusion also of modernism. In the sense that modernism is interested in how the present differs from the past—how the present is either an “expanding upon” or an “erosion of” the past—an imagined distinction is made. Blues and other roots music only fit into the construct of past versus present if their authenticity is hinged on prohibitive closeness to an original, on sticking completely to an original media, instrumentation, performance style, subject matter, etc. But, again, this is an illusion. The blues, at least, were never rooted in one social practice or one region; bluesmen and their music have always traveled. In fact, travel is an essential component of the music. Nothing could be more absurd than to think about the blues without concomitantly thinking about speed, escape, fatality, “riding the blinds,” hoboing, getting lost somewhere with only an instrument to win friends and make money. As this playlist will show, pinning the blues to one region, one culture, and one sound is an outgrowth of too-easy racial grouping.
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IDENTITY


This particular playlist creates an identity out of this history. Whereas another playlist might focus on the “roots” aspect of the blues, this playlist focus on the “routes” aspect, the process of morphing from which later versions of the blues itself came about. This is not, of course, to diminish the role of roots; after all, there is no arguing that the blues in its original forms—folk ballads, field hollers, work songs, syncopation and the pentatonic scale—is not the foundation for later American music. But, then again, Scottish and Appalachian ballads affected both the blues and later music based on the blues, so music in America has always been more about familial communication than about one static style transmuting into another. In any event, this playlist will just as little be about the roots blues identity as about the rural or urban blues identities, the Texas or Delta or Piedmont blues identities. This playlist is molded from an identity transcending these “titular” identities: that of the particular blues music that best exemplifies the broader truth that the genre is based on creative progress and profit.

These songs, then, are “exceptional” rather than “representative,” at least in the sense that what is representative to most people who talk about blues is also limited by their own misconstruings of fact. This is to say, plainly, that the blues music here ought to be more about original intentions—how were the artists defining themselves creatively?—than about postdated projections—how do audiences tend to use the music to create an inaccurate idea of others? For example, white acoustic ideologues like to think that blues, as an identity, is about the process of an acoustic, rural music being slowly alienated from “itself” by urbanization and electrification. And yet the bluesman Big Bill Broonzy played electric before he played acoustic; when he realized the white demand at 1960s college campuses for the music of plain, noble black people, he “went acoustic” and even started wearing overalls. John Lee Hooker played either electric or acoustic based only on what he perceived an audience to like; if the audience was black (and therefore authentic?), chances were he would know to play electric.

All of this is absolutely not to say that the blues here is not authentic, that an artist remodeling himself in order to make an honest living precludes his eventual art from being something grand in and of itself. Rather, the conceptualizing of this blues identity is meant to give due credit—to reverse the sense that black men (and women) doing something for themselves somehow cripples their role as simple folk who can culturally embody all the weight of white illusion and remorse. The mostly white listeners who hear in the blues the “cri de Coeur” of an oppressed people, one that is simple, static, and directly opposed to the capitalism into which their ancestors were forced, are engaging in an atonement which fails to correctly value the positive creative force of the music reacting to only itself. This playlist, ultimately, is designed to honor that creative identity. Each one of these songs, in some way, reinstates what its creator was doing to his or her music; the notion of the blues as “one thing” is too dangerous to the fact of authorial experimentation which was always its engine.

Notable and important artists not included: Dr. John, Howlin’ Wolf, Jonny Lang, Delbert McClinton, Robert Johnson, Albert King, Buddy Guy, Professor Longhair, Freddie King, Lightnin’ Hopkins.
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GOAL


And, in so doing, this playlist should and will annul the sense that the blues is dead. The roots music misapprehension places the blues in the past, as something which happened but which lives on only as the basis for further happenings. But blues is an active creative process—just like any popular music, from classical to rock-and-roll (both of which are adaptable to alterations and yet are still themselves). Even in earliest 20th-century America, there was simply too much musical communication for any sound to be called regional roots music, and this becomes all the more true both during World War II and after. But the blues was still the blues, something hard and human and yet quite amenable to the processes which affect and remodel any other sort of music, such as popular audience requirements and the need for personal and original expression of meaning. The goal of this playlist, therefore, is to demonstrate that blues music never was and still is not dead—as displayed by the more recent selections included— and that consequently the blues ought to be listened to as an active identity just like any other.
Note: Look for various versions of the same song on the playlist; often, both are included for listening with one descriptive paragraph discussing the song itself.
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The Real Roots: First Blues


Bessie Smith, Saint Louis Blues (78rpm Version). The Essential Bessie Smith. Legacy, 64922, 1997.

This is Bessie Smith at her most powerful and profitable. “Saint Louis Blues” is not only one among the first blues records labeled as such, but also an example of the creative space in which blues works (and the creative distance blues has traveled). This song is one of an active female voice, echoing from the stages of the vaudeville circuit rather than from the cotton fields of an agrarian illusion. In the end, Bessie Smith is the queen of the blues, its originator and inspiration, and so this song is selected mostly by way of correcting the notion that the first blues were not made for performance. Listen for horns, jazz stylings, and the soaring power of the singing: this music is not rural and yet is one of the first blues. In other words, this music is of the genre precisely for its working against the genre, for its ability to draw on the outside influence in popular jazz and yet remain true to itself—all of which are not often considered qualities of roots music.

Charley Patton, Stone Pony Blues. Charley Patton Volume 3. Document, 5011, 1990.

Charley Patton is an exponent of the sort of blues which the playlist takes as its identity: not because what he sings is so different from the male, regional, roots music stereotype, but because even as such his songs are daring in their creative control. What Charley Patton did best, in fact, was take this control away from the fact of tradition and into his own hands; the sexual innuendo here is crackling and fresh, inspired almost surely by an audience. His experimental take on guitar patterns, straying ever so slightly away from 12 bars per verse, shows that the blues built on itself before other music built on the blues. Charley Patton changed the musical life: his songs reinvent what blues means and what being an artist who works with the blues can entail.
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Roots Are Melded


Robert Johnson, Love in Vain. Legacy, 92579, 1970.

The Rolling Stones, Love in Vain. Let It Bleed. ABKCO, 719004, 1969.

This playlist, evidently, will go in ideational rather than chronological order. This second song, for instance, is included for its taking in another direction of an original song; the fact that blues musicians (who can either be black or white) can master an original and remake that original proves that central to the blues is the driving force of creative rethinking of roots. Listen for exactly what the Rolling Stones do here—shifting from minor to major on the pentatonic scale, adding another guitar to the mix, even inflecting the vocals with the tinge of hillbilly yodeling. This music recognizes that no music is static, that the blues in particular have never been isolated from white music or the white audience. In keeping with what is, in fact, the most traditional about the blues, the Rolling Stones take an active artistic role in working out of roots and making something new and freshly meaningful.

Mississippi John Hurt, Nearer My God to Thee. Rediscovered. Vanguard, 79519, 1998.

What is most intriguing about Mississippi John Hurt is that, despite the fact that he lived deep in the hills above the Mississippi Delta, his music displays an incredible melding of disparate traditions. In this song, one can hear the lyrics and spiritualism of backwoods gospel played over the 12 strings and 12 chords of the most soulfully satanic sort of blues music. Even more so, this blues music is notable for an active role in instrumental technique; Mississippi John Hurt almost seems to be playing with four strong hands, as with an old ragtime duet. Two hands move away and toward the other two, and over the music the vocals ring out soft but clear: if even music from an outpost such as this can manifest the influence of ragtime, gospel, and Appalachia, then no blues or American music can wholly be considered “roots.” “Nearer My God to Thee” is, plainly, an example of the audacious innovation most often associated with later, white appropriators of original blues.
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1950s City Blues


Muddy Waters, Still a Fool. His Best: 1947-1955. Chess, 99370, 1997.

This is the first electric selection, and its electricity packs some pop. Muddy Waters is, appropriately, famous for powerfully delivering vocals, and this song is no exception. Here, his voice and its power—the power of black voice generally pushing against the walls of expectation—propel the music forward over an unchanging, dramatically visceral guitar riff. There are no 12 bars here, no predictable pattern of I, IV, and V chords, no AAB repetition in the lyrics; there is just the powerful bluesiness of an artist molding his art to the requirements of its meaning. The shouts heard in the background, meanwhile, prove further that blues music is more than anything live music: built not on one tradition or audience but on the demands of the evening, met only by change and improvisation. The voice of an urban male asserting himself in the second half of the century is the voice of the blues, forcefully declaring itself as something of its own as much as an opposition to victimization.

Otis Spann, Otis in the Dark. Otis Spann Is the Blues. Candid, 9001, 1960.

This song was similarly chosen for its incredible use of improvisation, this time at an instrument not quite as associated with the roots music myth: the piano. Otis Spann played piano for Muddy Waters, and his music is worthy of close listening for this reason alone. But more than that, what he did for piano is just what blues musicians have always done for the blues: change its identity, its social purpose, its makeup and meaning, and its role in the musical life. The creative experimentation evident here is actually no more than the simple fact of instrumental prowess; Otis Spann demonstrates time and again that virtuosity is not the privilege merely of later, learned users of roots music. Rather, virtuosity is part of the blues itself, part of the framework of change and improvisation which can mount an attack both on the static music of the past and on the myth of simple black artistry.

Bobby “Blue” Bland, Stormy Monday Blues (Single Version). Greatest Hits Volume 1. MCA, 11783, 1998.

Bobby “Blue” Bland as an artist is characteristic of this playlist identity firstly because his music was dramatically popular and profitable, especially with the black juke joint audience. While some might argue that his was more “popular music” than “blues music”—he did not write his own songs and he did not even play an instrument—this is just the impression that fails in light of the facts of history. How can blues revisionists argue that the blues music that was most popular among the black people who made the blues in the first place was not even authentic blues at all? The notion that authenticity comes from songwriters, not singers, fails to honor the songs in and of themselves; the fact that Bobby “Blue” Bland was profitable for an entire decade takes nothing away from his powerful voice and role in the blues life. Listen for that voice here—you will be amazed. He changed the way blues singing thought of itself.

B.B. King, Ain’t Nobody Home. Anthology. Master Classics, 8028, 2004.

This song is characteristic of an identity, and therefore chosen over others, particularly because B.B. King himself is an example of coming from—and yet entirely changing—what was previously thought to be an exact musical and cultural tradition. Specifically, “Ain’t Nobody Home” signals the changing of course from original blues toward another and more artistically personalized sort of blues, inflected with horns, backup singers, church organ, and the sound of soul. B.B. King made the blues (personalized blues) into something soulful and complete, and this song is worthy of listening because of its ability to negate what the blues do spiritually; this song makes you happy. Changing philosophies, changing meaning, changing music generally by way of creative experimentation—yet still remaining “of the genre”—these topics are the subject matter of this playlist.

Slim Harpo, I’m A King Bee. Blues Gold. Hip-O, 571402, 2006.

Slim Harpo is the same man who the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Eric Clapton, and Led Zeppelin ALL said made them want to play music; his is the emerging sound of sexual boogie blues that rocks electrically and rolls all night along. This specific song is part of the playlist for its taking of roots (an easy, repeating 12-bar and three-note hook) and adjusting ever so slightly and creatively for dramatic new expression. The blues, before this song, had never been so overtly “badass”—no other word fits—choosing instead to stay true to the thematic material of sexual longing and unfulfillment. Slim Harpo is most certainly not sexually unfulfilled in this music, and is another example of how, paralleling the new politics of the time, black sound that asserts itself daringly can actually be the most viscerally popular (and profitable).

Little Willie John, “Need Your Love.” The Very Best of Little Willie John. Collectibles, 2822, 2001.

Here is another man working within the blues genre yet pushing that genre, in some sense, away from its original meaning and musicality. What is bluesy about “Need Your Love”? For one thing, its themes, relating mostly to sexual and romantic nostalgia or loss, and for another, its structure, 12 bars over just three chordal changes made chromatically or pentatonically on bass. What is not traditionally bluesy, though, is the rolling piano in the background—listen, and your ears will tingle—along with that other facet of an emerging rhythm-and-blues style, the raspy and elegiac singing voice. This song, therefore, shows the outside influence of new and popular trends on what is still an internalized category of music. Little Willie John molded current taste to both his genre of choice, the blues, and the meaning he meant.
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Electric Goes Acoustic


Big Bill Broonzy, Black Brown and White. Black, Brown, and White. Evidence, 26062, 1995.

Big Bill Broonzy, as mentioned, was first an urban and electric 1950s performer of the sort that has recently been catalogued in this playlist. His acoustic sound on this track is the direct result of what he perceived his audience—1960s white college campus liberals—to want. In other words, his blues were made in part at the behest of what the music could do for him, not what the music was originally, and to the students themselves this could not have sounded more authentic. And yet, despite an arguable sort of artifice in his motivation (again, arguable), what Big Bill Broonzy manages to end up doing here is to readapt roots (acoustic guitar soloing) to drastic new meaning: the meaning of civil rights. Thus, blues is about beginning with roots, assessing an audience, and still making an art of new meaning.

John Lee Hooker, Boom Boom. Urban Blues. Beat Goes On, 122, 1967.

John Lee Hooker, Boom Boom. John Lee Hooker, Live At Newport. Vanguard, 79703, 2002.

Here is another example of how common beliefs about the blues—among them, that music made for an audience is less authentic than music made for the soul, and that the authentic spectrum of history follows blues from acoustic to electric—are simply false. “Boom Boom” is famous for its hard electricity, that urban boogie beat and sexually satanic expressiveness; yet, in this rendition, John Lee Hooker takes the music in an entirely different direction, at the request and encouragement of the liberal thinkers at the Newport Folk Festival, for whom acoustic sound is the only vehicle for real and personal expression. This is, in some ways, the opposite of what Bob Dylan was doing one stage over; this song is the taking of electric roots and molding an individual niche with the audience by “going acoustic.” Yet, bluesmen who take their cue from an audience still hold the trump card of owning the music, owning its meaning, and owning the experience from which that meaning was made and can still make an honest living.
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"Blues with a Feeling"


Ray Charles, Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I). Blues Gold. Hip-O, 000571402, 2006.

Ray Charles is the consummate artist—in other words, he better than another takes his experience, thinks about and uses that experience, experiments with how best to express these thoughts, and looks for an appropriate medium (genre) and audience in which to offer what he has expressed. No art comes from any one of these things alone, and that is precisely the idea of this playlist, that authenticity in art comes from originality joined to meaning, no matter the public or monetary results (in fact, arguably, the result of success might contribute to authenticity). This song specifically is worth listening to, and is included in the playlist, because its sound changed the musical identity of the blues. While sticking to the format of the blues, Ray Charles here offers the new bluesiness of his own soul.

Etta James, I’d Rather Go Blind. Blues Gold. Hip-O, 000571402, 2006.

Etta James, At Last. At Last! Geffen, 001172902, 1960.

This is another experiment in the soul of blues: sexual and romantic thematic philosophies wed to what the new decade had to offer an old genre musically. Etta James was more than just an amazing vocalist; her music, and the singing she puts into her music, voice an entirely new sort of meaning for the blues—the blues of women left behind by bluesmen. For all the “sexual and romantic” longing of the blues, what is often ignored is the fact that the men who pursued and then sang about that longing left behind scores upon scores of women with bluesy longing of their own. Etta James, here, takes an original form and makes that form her own, plainly by the very fact of her gender. Beyond the stunning spirituality with which she sings (listening to these songs is more important than doing anything else on this site), there is here the creative, cultural change in blues from male individualism to female assertion.
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The Blues Revival


Jimi Hendrix, Red House. Blues. MCA, 11060, 1994.

Here perhaps more than anywhere else on the playlist there is an obvious shift being made from one sort of music to another—although that is just what the playlist itself is about: the shifting of both form and function even within what is traditionally thought of as an exact roots tradition. This is Jimi Hendrix, taking on the 12-bar roots of rock like nobody else had done before, melding the steady, straightforward bass progression with the psychedelic guitar soloing of an aggressive new era. In this song, he takes both what means something to him (colorful, oblique, narrative-oriented lyrics and slashing solo guitar) and what is expected from his audience (psychedelia on six strings), adding both to an old, still tradition. This song is indisputably, undoubtedly the blues—how else can one become so enraptured, as you will, than by those lusting pentatonic diatribes of an individual guitar?—yet is also something daringly fresh, laden with the new experiments of new performers owing themselves to new audiences.

Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Pride and Joy. Greatest Hits. Epic, 66217, 1995.

This next song is chosen over other and perhaps comparable songs, similarly, for its changing of culture and specifically the culture of the blues. What is meant by this is that “Pride and Joy” is the first song on this playlist both written and performed by someone who is not black. And, in this sense, while the song is incredibly entertaining and an example of the virtuosity then being entered into the blues repertoire, its most consequential attribute is the fact that Stevie Ray Vaughan and others of his mold took on what was until then an art form for black artists. While with some of these performers the art consists more in imitation than in creation (especially vocally), Stevie Ray Vaughan made an original his own. He spoke to the blues world the essential truth that the blues is not fixed—musically or racially—and exists rather in the taking of prescribed form and basic feeling and then inserting yourself, no matter who you are.

Taj Mahal, Corrina. In Progress & In Motion 1965-1998. Legacy, 64919, 1998.

Taj Mahal embodies the reality that blues music and mentality are things living. His generation is neither the generation of blues originators nor that of what are considered to be blues masters, and yet still there is for him an expressive form called the blues—that fits his needs as well. “Corrina” is not his song in content, but rather his in the fact of performance. Not only can you palpably feel the contents his soul pouring into this piece—the vocal and harmonica are mesmerizingly wrapped around the beat—but his simple choice of an old song shows that lasting performance of the blues is something personal. Some might argue that Taj Mahal does not fit with the identity of creatively confronting the blues genre, that his music is mostly an exact homage to roots. But “Corrina” is proof enough that creative mastery (or rather, the improving-on of an original form) can completely please an audience, and can also mean something special and new in and of itself.

The Derek Trucks Band, Crow Jane. Songlines. Phantom, 744719, 2007.

Derek Trucks began as an expert guitarist with the Allman Brothers and others of the movement to imitate, appropriate, and repackage blues into an expression of white racial meaning. But in taking his original expertise of an instrument, similar to the mimicky expertise of Stevie Ray Vaughn, for example, and making something palatable and popular—complete with an offbeat rhythm, falsetto, and the sort of melody which is just as immediately catchy as stubbornly bluesy—he is engaging in the experimenting which has always been what makes the best blues work. This song takes from the blues tradition, building itself particularly around slide guitar, and adds the outside influences of pop and jazz-rock. What could be more authentic than an artist, of whatever race, playing on record the music he loves? The fact of production and profit makes the art no less real than that made at an outpost in the Delta, despite the fact that the music originated in the Delta and its imagery aids in creating mood.

Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. Hoochie Coochie Man Live in Montreal. Just a Memory, 001265002, 2002.

At the same time that new artists were making their contribution to the blues life, old artists were also reasserting themselves artistically and commercially. This is an example: listen to the brash guitar solo; those moody piano runs; that slow, propulsive blues beat—and you will both be captivated and know that blues is about the combining of old (the slow, sexual mood) and the new (the guitar). Blues is, thus, something which is bendable and adaptable even among and over the lives of individual performers. Muddy Waters is, here, putting his own take on the way the genre has progressed (toward guitar solos and the live flavor of folk music revivals) and also involving himself fully in commercial performance. Montreal provided an audience, and so he went to Montreal, to play what was his but in new ways and all in the process of profiting.
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The New Frontier



Keb’ Mo’, Every Morning. Keb’ Mo’. Okeh, 57863, 1994.

In “Every Morning,” Keb’ Mo’ returns to the roots of blues—notice, the blues themselves have roots, and have evolved over time, in addition to being roots for other music—in an acoustic bottleneck solo. And yet he is essentially an artist of the popular strain; his other songs tend to be jazzy, soulful, melodic, lyrically simple, and fully instrumented depending on the case and its requirements. This fact is perhaps the best evidence of all that blues is just one more of the forms under which an artist can make his art, and is equal to other forms rather than merely being their predecessor. “Every Morning” is plaintive, moving, and structured, working its magic and meaning without resorting to anything complex or too innovative to still be pleasantly harmonic. Here is blues pop, expressing self yet intended to be pleasing, creative in its merging of sounds yet rooted always in the concerns of an audience.

Muddy Waters, Trouble No More. The Best of Muddy Waters. MCA, 11946, 1999.

Bob Dylan, Someday Baby. Modern Times. Columbia, 87606, 2006.

What is characteristic and significant about this song, as with so many songs by Bob Dylan, is its lyrics. An adaptation (musically) of “Trouble No More,” by Muddy Waters, this song flips the original lyrics into the words of an old man: regretful, remorseful, bitter, violent. Listen also for the old blues technique by which an obvious, material-world lyric is joined to an existential follow-up (“Living this way ain’t natural/ why was I born to love you?”) The main theme—hardscrabble, vengeful, but true human love—is also straight from the blues canon and philosophy. In other words, what Bob Dylan is doing here lyrically is confronting the genre head-on, but the words are all his own; this is not to say, of course, that lyrics are the only way to be freshly expressive. Music is, for an artist, equally embodying of new meaning.

Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure, Diaraby. Talking Timbuktu. Hannibal, 571381, 1994.

Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure, Amandrai. Talking Timbuktu. Hannibal, 571381, 1994.

These songs, from this album, are excellent examples of how blues can be blues and go in just about any number of different directions, creatively and commercially. One might contend that this—teamwork between Ry Cooder, the great blues slide guitarist and songwriter, and Ali Farka Toure, an artist from West Africa whose singing is stubbornly and still pentatonic—is the final return of blues to its real roots. Syncopation, scat singing, crossroads and catharsis imagery, the role of “griot” as both the worshiped holder of communal narrative and the scorned dealer with evil spirits: all of these are, of course, pivotal to the blues and holdovers from West Africa. And yet “Talking Timbuktu” as an album is mostly about an African artist falling in love with sound that formed in American place; none of what Ali Farka Toure had previously recorded felt at all like the music here. Ry Cooder was not rediscovering the old blues—rather, he was bringing the blues somewhere new, and adding to the blues the new sound of old Africa singing mournfully the way any bluesman can. This is blues adding an outside influence, not cutting back on itself to become more authentic, although that might be how the record was sold. The daring move of blues moving outside of the American region changed the musical face of blues forever, and nothing could sound better as music, simply music.

G. Love, Sunshine. The Hustle. Epic, 394, 2004.

Perhaps this last song represents also the last frontier for the genre of blues, but if this playlist is right, then most likely not. G. Love is an artist mostly of the hip-hop tradition, although his schooling in blues and in guitar instrumentation generally founds him squarely in the mold of those who pick and choose from previous art to make their own as is fit (and popular). “Sunshine” is an acoustic solo blues song, straight from the Mississippi John Hurt and, later, Bob Dylan tradition, but is not so much an indulgence in pure roots music (dabbling in roots, as an exotic throwback) as meaningful new music of its own. This analysis can be proven by the simple fact that G. Love is widely popular and profitable. If his blues are still available and successful in the commercial market, then the blues is still living, and talking about the blues as an anachronistic holdover—one decade of music appropriated for the rest of the century— is wrongheaded, hurtful to the process of continuing and profitable creation, and disoriented in time.
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Monday, April 6, 2009

CONCLUSION


In conclusion, blues music in America—as an identity of its own—is not just roots music. Its musicians have masterfully and consistently worked against the restraints of an existing genre, molding the music to new meaning and new potential. The blues, along these same lines, have always taken an interest in what an audience requires: in the prevailing popular taste, in what is profitable, in the influence from outside which can actually make the music more true to itself. And, by meeting these ends, blues music has become the music of masters, proficient in the roots of the genre and in its extending possibilities—prone to the sort of bold and enterprising experimentation thought to be beyond the realm of roots. Thus, this playlist has been about music which changed the blues life and therefore the American life. No American music, after all, can accurately and unsentimentally be more about “roots” than “routes”; the bouncing around and conflict between ideas and forms is precisely what is American about America. And what is bluesy about the blues is its assertive force, as music which is more than static reaction.


This assertion—of the positive black voice which, though inspired by circumstance, is capable of taking from circumstance an interest in something new—seems to parallel an emerging black political identity. As Josh Kun writes, the potent presenting of an oppositional voice is key to self-reflexive racial identity; yet white revisionism avers that the more assertive the voice, the less authentic the music. Pride in blues is something not often discussed, pride being an opposition to the pitiful sound of roots and rural music; yet pride is exactly the artistic life force of the blues. In other words, the blues is about artistic othering, by which an “othered” underclass of the prevailing society (namely, black people) offers itself positively as an alternative to that society simply by engaging in the invention of its own art. And invention, again, is what has always and pridefully moved the blues forward, pushing against itself and against the history which that self has come to represent. What is left for the caretakers of the blues, politically, is to retake the meaning of the blues as something existing outside of political projection.


There is, lastly, the question of how this blues identity both fits into and affects the identity of America and American music generally. If this playlist has proven the existence of an identity, or categorization, marked by its movement within and against genre, its understanding of the broad commercial audience, and its forceful and improvisational assertion of itself in order to change the political life, then what can be said more consequentially about music in America? First of all, according to Adelaida Reyes, America exists primarily in difference and diversity—forms, ideas, sounds, candidates coexisting and competing without an obvious process of roots becoming something superior. Secondly, American identity is partly given by the drive for individual innovation, voiced correspondingly in the creative commercialism blues has always been indebted to. But, most of all, America is about the politics of race living nonracially: histories merging, styles drawing on one another even while in brutal opposition, the whole of this place running into itself and into an idea that will not die.


That idea, that something can be made of oneself if only by an act of reimagining, lives on in the blues, the music of experimentation, imagination, and eventual profit despite the fact of race.
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