Q&A: Is Blues Music on the Verge of Extinction?

[Ian A.]

Vanity Fair does blues again (following on from the Robert Johnson pic piece in another thread). Pointed out by Paul Vernon who says "This is worth reading - these guys have it right."

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/cultur ... ction.html

[Nigel w]

Thanks for posting this, Ian.

Interesting interview and I'd like to see the DVD made by the guys from The Cat Head in Clarksdale : it's one of the greatest record shops I've ever been in - books and Delta folk art,too. On a highly personal level, I will always remember the Cat Head because I was in the store when I took a call on my mobile phone from Magali saying her mother/my mother-in-law had died. Somehow, if I couldn't be with Magali at such a time, it felt like the place to be .

My travels around the Delta led to this conclusion (expounded at greater length in a chapter in my book, The Rough Guide To The Blues) :

As a creative force producing fresh and relevant music the blues has probably been on its death bed for some time. Any interesting new developments have come from fusing blues with other more contemporary forms like hip-hop - but even then none of them have sounded as interesting as what Beefheart did with the blues almost 40 years ago.

Fat Possum put out some interesting stuff for a while after it discovered a few unrecorded North Mississippi hill-country old-timers like Burnside and Junior Kimborough a decade and more ago. That was probably the last gasp. I heard some good music around the Delta but of those I encountered probably only T-Model Ford could be regarded as an original. The rest was people claiming to be the illigitimare son/long lost cousin/nephew of Howlin Wolf or John Lee Hooker or whoever and faithfully reproducing their repertoire, like a tribute act.

On that level the blues lives on as a heritage industry and people like Seasick Steve , although he writes new and original material, are basically part of that.

John Lee Hooker, in one of the last interviews he gave before he died, said to me repeatedly : "The blues will never die.'' The romantic in me wants to believe that but sadly I don't think it is true. The blues is dead/is dying out with John Lee and his generation.

The blues will continue to be heard - in the same way you can still hear people playing early English madrigals. But it doesn't seem to be a living, vibrant. still-evolving form capable of constant reinvention in the way that other forms of folk music are.

Why is that? I suspect it has something to do with it being a form of expression too closely associated with a specific experience and time - namely, that of African-American sharecroppers and descendants of slaves on the cotton and tobacco plantations of the Mississippi Delta in the first half of the 20th century. And I suppose we always knew that in our hearts - that's why during the 60s so-called 'blues boom' there was all that controversy about the lack of authenticity of white bluesmen from the lace-curtained suburbs of Surrey who had never even seen a plantation , let alone picked a bale of cotton.

That's just a theory. If there's an academic institution out there wants to pay me large sums of money to spend a few years researching the hypothesis, I'm open to offers.

I'd be interested to hear your views, Ian, as a 60s British bluesman of sufficient note to warrant that archaeological release of your work you were telling us about the other day. And Garth - your views would be more than worth hearing on this, too. Joe Cushley, also, and I'm sure plenty of others ...

[Charlie]

The blues will continue to be heard - in the same way you can still hear people playing early English madrigals. But it doesn't seem to be a living, vibrant. still-evolving form capable of constant reinvention in the way that other forms of folk music are.

Why is that? I suspect it has something to do with it being a form of expression too closely associated with a specific experience and time - .

Isn't this expressing the difficullty you and I have with English folk, Nigel?

I just ran across a radio interview I did with Bonnie Raitt back around 1976, in which I was excrutiatingly rude to her about a Hound Dog Taylor single she brought in and said she liked. I grumbled that it just seemed to be rehashing a formula that was dying out, but Bonnie graciously and undogmatically stood her ground and said that she thought the blues was still a viable live music, on the grounds that if if musicians liked to play it, it was /is still alive.

I'm a record man, as I've said before, but I can't bear to listen to the new B B King record; not even T-Bone Burnett can rescue the situation. It really has all been done before, and there doesn't seem to be anyone who can redefine it. Jimi Hendrix did, of course, but there's no sign of another like him on the horizon.

Although I do think Seasick Steve has rescued the idiom for his own purposes. I'm sure he doesn't care whether he's regarded as a 'real' blues singer or not. But he is, and a very good one too; especially live.

[Ian A.]

I'd like to see the DVD made by the guys from The Cat Head in Clarksdale

We've had both DVD and soundtrack CD of M For Mississippi through here for review recently, but unfortunately due to my workload they vanished off to the reviewer without me having a chance to play them. Database says www.mformississippi.com if you want to chase them up.

I'd be interested to hear your views, Ian, as a 60s British bluesman of sufficient note to warrant that archaeological release of your work you were telling us about the other day..

I think I already pretty much said it in another thread. If it is an evolving tradition, then a lot already mutated off into something so different from what recognisably linked (say) Charley Patton to Howlin' Wolf to maybe even early Beefheart that it needs a different name. And the old guys are dying out . . .

But . . . it's always dangerous to pronounce that a tradition is over and gone. Apparently (before my time) they used to say Big Bill Broonzy was the last of the 'real' country bluesmen, and then suddenly discovered that Big Joe Williams, Son House, Skip James etc were still around and unearthed new wonders like Fred McDowell. And they've been pronouncing English traditional song dead every time another great old boy has shuffled off all my life - and now the young upstarts are old boys!

In the late '60s, with the notable exception of Taj Mahal, the only young people playing "traditional" country blues were white revivalists like Jo Ann Kelly, Mike Cooper etc in the UK, John Hammond, Rory Block, John Koerner etc in the USA. However, when I first met Corey Harris in the early 90s, he was performing many of the same songs we'd been doing back then - learned from the same records we listened to, so who's more valid? - and it turned out he was just being born at that point! The Carolina Chocolate Drops are a decade or more younger than Corey. "Revivalists" get snided at, but I'm a great believer in Malagasy guitarist Etienne Ramboatina's philosophy that "you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you come from". Sometimes it's good to go back and start again from an earlier point, find some different/ unexplored tangents to fly off at, as Corey has by going to Africa, or the CCDs by "old timeying" hip hop songs.

But it doesn't seem to be a living, vibrant. still-evolving form capable of constant reinvention in the way that other forms of folk music are. Why is that? I suspect it has something to do with it being a form of expression too closely associated with a specific experience and time - .

Isn't this expressing the difficullty you and I have with English folk, Nigel?

I'm sure it is, but your - fully admitted - prejudices are so overwhelming that you aren't able to give things an objective listen, or listening at all. I bear in mind how you pronounced negatively on Vampire Weekend, only to - again, self admittedly - find you liked them when you accidentally encountered them without knowing what you were listening to. Fair enough, because you admit it, and it's not breaking any known laws!

[howard male]

Nigel W wrote -

John Lee Hooker, in one of the last interviews he gave before he died, said to me repeatedly : "The blues will never die.'' The romantic in me wants to believe that but sadly I don't think it is true. The blues is dead/is dying out with John Lee and his generation.

I don't really see the point of such definitive statements when it comes to the subject of music. At the risk of stating the obvious, the blues - as a form - permeates just about every kind of quality popular music, even Beyonce, so it could hardly be said to be dying.

But if you mean the blues as Hooker played it - in its purest form - then it will still live on in his recorded performances as a vital, electric force, to be discovered and built on, by generations of musicians to come.

To be frank, there is so much popular music from the past 50 years that sounds more trapped in its own time, and therefore cloyingly difficult to listen to now, than Hooker's peerless and still vital take on the blues, that you might as well say all music, pre hip-hop, is dying.

[Nigel w]

Don't think anything you've said there directly contradicts what I wrote, Howard.

But I'm not sure exactly how to interpret this:

[quote if you mean the blues as Hooker played it - in its purest form - then it will still live on in his recorded performances as a vital, electric force, to be discovered and built on, by generations of musicians to come.

[/quote]

Yes , Hooker's recorded performances remain as ''a vital, electric force''.
But what of those copying them in future generations - is that the blues as
an on-gong vibrant and still-evolving form or the blues as a revivalist heritage industry? That's the question...

And if it is still evolving - presumably by fusing elements of the blues with 1001 other styles - is it still the blues at all? The most vital, electric interpreter of elements of the blues traditon right now is probably Jack White. But there are so many other influences also at work in the White Stripes and the Raconteurs, would you call them blues bands? Probably not.

Perhaps, as Ian says, it is now

something so different from what recognisably linked (say) Charley Patton to Howlin' Wolf to maybe even early Beefheart that it needs a different name

I spent two years writing a book on the subject and I'm still not entirely sure. What I do know is that the social, cultural, economic and political circumstances that gave rise to the blues were unusually specific. Travelling around the Delta today, little or none of the conditions which created the music remain : even the physical landscape has changed beyond recognition. And so has the blues, to the point where I'm not sure whether on one level it exists any more - it is only preserved as a heritage industry, like an old disused cotton gin which still fascinates us because of it what it represents and the history it embodies but is no longer a useful or functional piece of machinery.

[Charlie]

However, when I first met Corey Harris in the early 90s, he was performing many of the same songs we'd been doing back then - learned from the same records we listened to, so who's more valid? - and it turned out he was just being born at that point! The Carolina Chocolate Drops are a decade or more younger than Corey. "Revivalists" get snided at, but I'm a great believer in Malagasy guitarist Etienne Ramboatina's philosophy that "you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you come from". Sometimes it's good to go back and start again from an earlier point, find some different/ unexplored tangents to fly off at, as Corey has by going to Africa, or the CCDs by "old timeying" hip hop songs.

Where does Robert Cray fit into this, if at all? His Hidden Persuader album, top 20 in the US chart in the mid-1980s, was declared to be the best-selling blues album of all time.

When we met, it became clear that, although he is from Georgia and played guitar like a bluesman, his own roots were closer to O.V.Wright and Little Beaver than to B.B.King or Albert Collins.

I do sometimes wonder how history would have been different if there had been a blues magazine whose editor had been as open to African music as was the editor of Southern Rag. What a poll that would have been...

[Jonathan E.]

. . . you might as well say all music, pre hip-hop, is dying.

And, of course, there are those — many of them in the hip-hop community — who say that hip-hop is dying, is even already dead.

[Dayna]

I heard quite a bit of good Blues on BB King's Bluesville. There were both the old Delta Blues & some newer artists still very much into it.



http://www.xmradio.com/onxm/features/bluesville.xmc

[Jonathan E.]

When I watched the Deep Blues documentary a few weeks ago, I was struck by how lively and vibrant and young many of the performers and listeners to the blues were. Of course, that was in deepest Mississippi — and maybe that was just what Robert Palmer wanted to show and it's not representative.

However, you might say that you bloody well ought to wish that the blues are dead — if that were to mean that the horrendous social and legal and economic conditions that gave rise to them were also over. Clearly, to some degree, they are indeed now history. So, too, are the conditions that made western classical music possible. Yet, it would be absurd to say that western classical music is dead. Yes, I know it's not popular as blues is supposed to be, but clearly in many ways it's quite alive. So, also, I suggest that the blues will remain alive in one form or another for a good long time and depending on where you look for them and what you expect to find. Expectations and old definitions are likely to be the problem.

[matt m]

I've often posted in replies to this topic online on different forums. It seems to be a perennial question. For me, a music is still alive so long as they are interesting and inventive musicians making it. It's irrelevant to me whether they are doing something "original" or not, or "moving something forward" or whatever. So long as it's saying something musically, I don't care.

I've often listed the names of blues musicians of today that I think are good evidence that blues (or near-as-damn it) is still very much alive. Whenever I do, interestingly, nobody ever comments on them, and I very rarely see any of these people reviewed. I often conclude that a lot of the people who think blues is dead actually don't want to have to change their mind. Here goes...

www.myspace.com/dukegarwood
www.myspace.com/sugarsmallhouse
www.myspace.com/pepebelmonte
www.myspace.com/thebobmeyer
www.myspace.com/smokefairies
www.myspace.com/hatfitzanditchy
www.myspace.com/boblog111
www.myspace.com/sambarrett
www.myspace.com/madeforchickensbyrobots
www.myspace.com/jasonsteelmusic
www.myspace.com/bcce
(the latter being a particular fave of mine)

[Adam Blake]

Thank you, Matt. That's great. Might I add Errol's MySpace page to that list?

http://tinyurl.com/5nyswu

[matt m]

whoops, yes, that's an obvious name I should have mentioned. So obvious I forgot to mention it...

Also forgot to add Steven Finn to the list, a very individual London-based blues songwriter: myspace.com/stevenfinn

[davidt]

Here's the next generation in training. Alabama Blues Camp 2008.
looks like there'll be a lot of drummers :-)

http://link.brightcove.com/services/lin ... 1569933446

Now if I'd only had Merseybeat Camp when I was a kid ...

David

[Adam Blake]

Oh how wonderful is that? Thank you for posting, David, brought a tear to my eye... (The Klan's worst nightmare, or what?!)