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.
