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.
