When I explored jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery for #BlackMusicSunday last week, I promised readers I would also dive into blues guitarists. This is a major task since they number in the hundreds. These musicians range from the early days of rural southern blues before transitioning into more urban forms using electric guitar—which birthed rhythm and blues (R&B) as well as what became rock and roll.
But before I home in on blues guitar, I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the blues, its history, and its role in the Black community.
While blues has had a global influence and is played by musicians of all colors and nationalities, let us never forget its roots, the pain and suffering intertwined with its birth, and its role in aiding a people’s survival and resilience.
Be prepared to spend some time listening today, or bookmark some of this amazing footage for later. Though no single documentary can encompass all of the blues and its history, Jay Levey’s Blues Story makes a good start on capturing both blues and the musicians who made it happen.
Hallgeir Olsen, writing for Born To Listen, penned this review of the “classic” 2003 film in October 2020.
Blues Story presents an impressionistic history of one of the most lasting art forms America has ever produced – as told for the first time through the eyes of the artists who lived it. Combining exclusive interview and performance footage with vintage clips and the music of many Blues legends long gone, the history of this richly felt music is illuminated – from its African roots to its American urban expression – along with its profound place in our cultural heritage.
The result is a rare, first-hand glimpse into the lives of these vanishing artists, and a moving, insightful and informative look into a music that continues to be loved by millions throughout the world.
Blues Story features (in alphabetical order): Bobby “Blue” Bland, Charles Brown, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Ruth Brown, R.L. Burnside. Honeyboy Edwards, Willie Foster, Lowell Fulson, Buddy Guy, John Jackson, B.B. King, Willie King and the Liberators, Robert Lockwood, Magic Slim and the Teardrops, Little Milton, Pinetop Perkins, Snooky Pryor, Philadelphia Jerry Ricks, Hubert Sumlin, Koko Taylor, Rufus Thomas, Henry Townsend, and Othar Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band.
The same year, PBS and Martin Scorsese produced The Blues.
The Blues™ anchors a multi-media celebration that raises awareness of the blues and its contribution to American culture and music worldwide.
Under the guiding vision of Executive Producer Martin Scorsese, seven directors will explore the blues through their own personal styles and perspectives. The films in the series are motivated by a central theme: how the blues evolved from parochial folk tunes to a universal language.
The seven-part film series includes:
Feel Like Going Home by Martin Scorsese
The Soul of a Man by Wim Wenders
The Road to Memphis by Richard Pearce
Warming by the Devil's Fire by Charles Burnett
Godfathers and Sons by Marc Levin
Red, White & Blues by Mike Figgis
Piano Blues by Clint Eastwood
Here’s the series’ trailer.
While most of the histories of the blues cover its genesis in the enslavement period in the U.S., David “dopper0189” Reid, Managing Editor of Black Kos, recently explored its Islamic-African roots.
The Blues is a musical genre born in the Deep South, created by African-Americans in the 1860s. The Blues also form the base from which jazz, R&B (rhythm and blues) and rock and roll all later came from. The Blues is one of the most influential musical art forms in the world, and forms a large part of the DNA for most modern American popular music. But as well know as the Blues are, two important historical facts of its origins are often overlooked. The first is that many elements of the Blues, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be directly traced back to the music of Africa. The second is that many features of the Blues including the long “wavy intonation” notes and the instrumentation, have direct origins from West African Muslims. From the 1600s to the mid-1800s, tens of thousands of Muslim slaves from West Africa were taken by force to the United States. Based on where most American slaves were taken from, 20%-30% percent of the African slaves taken to the United States were Muslims.
This history was also explored by Jonathan Curiel, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Sylviane Diouf knows her audience might be skeptical, so to demonstrate the connection between Islam and American blues music, she'll play two recordings: The Muslim call to prayer (the religious recitation that's heard from mosques around the world), and "Levee Camp Holler" an early type of blues song that first sprang up in the Mississippi Delta more than 100 years ago.
"Levee Camp Holler" is no ordinary song. It's the product of ex-slaves who worked moving earth all day in post-Civil War America. The version that Diouf uses in presentations has lyrics that, like the call to prayer, speak about a glorious God. ("Well, Lord, I woke up this mornin', man, I feelin' bad . . . Well, I was thinkin' 'bout the good times, Lord, I once have had.") But it's the song's melody and note changes that closely parallel one of Islam's best-known refrains. As in the call to prayer, "Levee Camp Holler" emphasizes words that seem to quiver and shake in the reciter's vocal chords. Dramatic changes in musical scales punctuate both "Levee Camp Holler" and the call to prayer. A nasal intonation is evident in both.
"I did a talk a few years ago at Harvard where I played those two things, and the room absolutely exploded in clapping, because (the connection) was obvious," says Diouf, an author and scholar who is also a researcher at New York's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. "People were saying, 'Wow. That's really audible. It's really there.' "
If, like Diouf’s audiences, you need to hear it to believe it, this video was made for you.
No historical exploration of the blues would be complete without Blues People: Negro Music in White America, the seminal work on Black music published by a 29-year-old writer and poet named LeRoi Jones in 1963. Jones would go on to become Amiri Baraka, a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement.
"A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music." — Langston Hughes
"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music—through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America—not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.
A year before his death in 2014, Baraka’s book would be revisited and celebrated by Eugene Holley Jr., writing for NPR.
The year 1963 saw the March on Washington, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers, the bombing of the Birmingham church that resulted in the deaths of four black girls and the passing of W.E.B. Du Bois. That same year, LeRoi Jones — a twentysomething, Newark, N.J.-born, African-American, Lower East Side-based Beat poet — published a book titled Blues People: a panoramic sociocultural history of African-American music. It was the first major book of its kind by a black author, now known as Amiri Baraka. In the 50 years since, it has never been out of print.
"The book was originally titled Blues: Black and White," says Baraka, now 78, by phone from Newark, while he was working on his son Ras Baraka's mayoral campaign. "But I changed it because I wanted to focus on the people that created the blues. And that was the real intent of that title: I wanted to focus on them — us — the creators of the blues, which is still, I think, the predominate music under all American music. It cannot be dismissed, even though you might give it to some pop singer, they change it around. But it will come out. It will be heard."
Blues People argues that in their art, Louis Armstrong, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and countless other black bards confronted the forces of racism, poverty and Jim Crow. This gave birth to work songs, blues, gospel, New Orleans jazz, its Chicago and Kansas City swing extensions, the bebop revolution (which in turn spawned the so-called cool and hard bop schools), and the then-emerging avant-garde of the late '50s and early '60s, characterized by the forward-thinking artistry of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. For Baraka, jazz is "the most cosmopolitan of any Negro music, able to utilize almost any foreign influence within its broader spectrum" — a cultural achievement Baraka says was downplayed and ignored by Eurocentric whites.
This cartoon by Keef Knight illustrates my thoughts on racism’s role in the creation of the blues.
Thinking about Jim Crow and racism reminds me of these three blues tunes.
The first is “North Bound Blues,” a song by Maggie Jones, who was born in Texas in 1894 and recorded with Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Charlie Green, and Elmer Snowden. Her date of death is unknown.
Check out the lyrics:
Got my trunk and grip all packed
Goodbye, I ain't coming back
Going to leave this Jim Crow town
Lord, sweet pape, New York bound
Got my ticket in my hand
And I'm leaving dixieland
Going north child, where I can be free
Going north child, where I can be free
Where there's no hardships, like in Tennessee
Going where they don't have Jim Crow laws
Going where they don't have Jim Crow laws
Don't have to work there, like in Arkansas
When I cross the Mason Dixon Line
When I cross the Mason Dixon Line
Goodbye old gal, yon mama's gonna fly
Going to daddy, got no time to lose
Going to daddy, got no time to lose
I'll be alone, can't hear my northbound blues
Next, the great Huddie Leadbetter, known to the public as Lead Belly, was born on a Louisiana plantation sometime around January 1885, though other records give different years for his birth. In his introduction to “Jim Crow Blues,” Lead Belly tells the story of going into a place in Las Vegas with a “white feller,” where he is told: “We don’t serve colored.”
Again, check out the lyrics:
Bunk Johnson told me too, This old Jim Crowism dead bad luck for me and you
I been traveling, i been traveling from shore to shore
Everywhere I have been I find some old Jim Crow
One thing, people, I want everybody to know
You’re gonna find some Jim Crow, every place you go
Down in Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia’s a mighty good place to go
And get together, break up this old Jim Crow
I told everybody over the radio
Make up their mind and get together, break up this old Jim Crow
I want to tell you people something that you don’t know
It’s a lotta Jim Crow in a moving picture show
I’m gonna sing this verse, I ain’t gonna sing no more
Please get together, break up this old Jim Crow
Boogie-woogie piano player Charles Edward “Cow Cow” Davenport was born in Alabama in 1894, and recorded his own “Jim Crow Blues,” about leaving home and heading up north in 1927.
The lyrics:
I’m tired of being Jim Crowed, gonna Leave this Jim Crow town
Doggone my black soul, I’m sweet Chicago bound
Yes I’m leaving here from this old Jim Crow town
I’m going up North where they say money grows on trees
I don’t give a doggone if my black soul is free
I’m going where I don’t need no baby
I got a hat, got a overcoat, don’t need nothing but you
These old easy walkers going to give my ankles the blues
But when my girl hears about this, oh, that will be sad news.
I’m going up North, baby I can’t carry you
Ain’t nothing in that cold up there a ?? can do
I’m gonna get me a Northern girl, see that I am through with you Lord
But if I get up there, weather don’t suit, I don’t find no job
Go and tell that boss man of mine, Lord I’m ready to come back to my Jim Crow town
The topics covered by the blues span the experiences of Black American life. Worksongs were the music of plantations, and the blues became the sound of postslavery life: reconstruction, migration, segregation, as well as the daily struggle of trying to get a job and keep it, or get a partner and keep them.
Blues itself as a musical form follows a particular pattern. Those of you readers who are nonmusicians (like me) may find this PBS Sound Field program, hosted by L.A. Buckner and Nahre Sol, very educational. Sol demonstrates the blues on piano, explaining its musical components.
No matter what the situation, the politics or the headlines, there will be a blues tune that speaks to it. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that PBS News Hour recently did a story on “The Coronavirus Blues.”
Musician Pat “Mother Blues” Cohen has long met adversity with music. She lost her New Orleans home to Hurricane Katrina and relocated to North Carolina with assistance from the Music Maker Relief Foundation, a group that supports blues musicians. But now, the coronavirus pandemic has hit very close to home.
For those of you unaware of the work of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, check out their mission video and their website.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve got the quarantine blues, the coronavirus blues, the “sick of Republicans blues,” the “I’m not getting any younger blues”—and more.
Join me in comments for more on blues, and to share your favorites.