A totally nonpolitical diary, except to the extent that everything is in some sense meta-politics.
I was raised in a (borderline lower) middle-class family in Houston. Somehow, though, I became interested in old jazz, folk music, and most of all blues at an early age -- 12 years old or so. The resources available today, the vast number of reissues, internet sites, and scholarly works, certainly weren't available then, but somehow I was exposed to the music (probably first through reading) and quickly grew to love it above all others.
My son gave me a book for Father's Day: Delta Blues by Ted Gioia. It's not perfect, but it's wonderful; anyone with any interest in this music should read it. Follow me below the fold and I'll tell you where time machines come in.
I think the timeline was something like this: I heard Louis Armstrong on one of my parents' old records and liked him, a lot. So I started checking out books about old jazz from the library. Some of these contained perfunctory discussions of the role of blues in jazz. Somehow, I found out about BB King and others like him. Good, wonderful stuff, but pretty much mainstream. But one Sunday morning there was a TV show that featured Son House of all people -- I just happened to tune in.
I had heard of Son House, again probably from the jazz books, but never seen or heard him. It was a revelation!
For those of you who don't know, Son House was an early blues guitarist and vocalist from the Mississippi Delta. He recorded a handful of records in the late twenties or early thirties then disappeared. (They didn't sell all that well, especially after the Depression hit.) Several years later, in the early forties, Alan Lomax "discovered" him again while on a field trip documenting traditional music for the Library of Congress. (More on that in a bit.) House recorded some songs for Lomax, then disappeared again.
But in the late 50s, a new generation of young white record collectors discovered House and the other early bluesmen, through old scratched 78s. They rescued the music for posterity, and started tracking down some of the few surviving old bluesmen. Son House was among those who were rediscovered. He was an old man by then, in his late sixties after a hard life of poverty and manual labor. But he could still sing and play the bottleneck guitar, like no one else on earth. Hence the TV show I caught by chance -- a half hour of Son House performing and talking, a little, about his music. To this day, I remember him saying that the blues is "about a man and a woman. Anything else is just monkey junk." At the end they brought out a more contemporary blues guitarist, I believe Buddy Guy (who himself is now an elder statesman of the blues), and they played a number together.
So I heard him sing, and play, and I was enamored. Luckily, Columbia records had recently issued a new album, the first recordings he had done in over 20 years, "Son House, Father of the Folk Blues." I bought it and played it over and over. It was incredible. House's singing was unearthly, pure raw emotion; it puts you into an altered state of consciousness.
In later years, I acquired reissues of his old recordings, and they are even better -- the sound quality of course is not as good, in fact terrible, but House was a young man then, and his voice even richer and stronger.
So back to the book, and time machines. I've often mourned missing out on so much great music, through lack of knowledge or availability. I fantasize what it would be like if I could have a time machine. Imagine going back to the Cavern Club to hear the Beatles before anyone had heard of them. Or going to a southside Chicago blues club in the fifties to hear the Muddy Waters band, with Little Walter and Otis Spann. Or Chuck Berry before he hit it big. Or going to San Francisco in the summer of 1967 to hear the Airplane and the Dead and Country Joe and the Fish play at a Love-In.
But now, I've found the ultimate musical time trip I wish I could take. It's when Alan Lomax recorded Son House in the Delta for the Library of Congress. It's set out in the book, and any paraphrase I tried wouldn't do it justice, so I'm just going to quote from the book. I hope this whets your appetite and encourages you to seek this out:
"Lomax found Son House living on a plantation a few miles away from [Robert] Johnson's mother, and surprised the tractor driver with his interest in talking about the blues. 'I'm used to plowin' so many acres a week and saying Yessuh and Nossuh to the boss on the plantation, but for sitting down and talking about my music with some man from college like you, I just never thought about it happenin' to me.' House . . . [put] on an impromptu performance, which Lomax would later recall as one of the highlights of his career. 'I don't know where Son took me. Down dusty roads, along a railroad track, into the back of an aging country grocery store that smelt of licorice and dill pickles and snuff. There was a jug there that gurgled, and it was so hot that Son House and his buddies stripped to the waist as they played. Of all my times with the blues this was the best one, better than Leadbelly, better than Josh White, Son Terry, and all the rest of them.' "
Oh, how I wish I could have been there and heard that. But we are fortunate -- the Library of Congress sessions have been reissued and are available on CD. Thank God these treasures were preserved.
I'd be really interested in comments from anyone who loves this type of music -- also in hearing what your fantasy musical time trip would be (doesn't have to be blues -- think about being in Bach's church as one of his organ works debuts).