SUBJECTIVE GUIDE TO THE BLUES – A MANIFESTO

I’ll put this ridiculous vanity project into context.I’ve always been a huge fan of American roots music – country, folk, blues and all the rest of their weird inbred family, before they got militant and became rock and roll. These pre-war genres feed directly into rock music, without ever being really visible. They’re like some sort of enormous Basilica Cistern, lurking unseen underneath a well-known city. Roots music just sits there, feeding pure water into the polluted system of modern pop music, but without ever really being noticed by anyone other than a couple of crazy-eyed people whose job it is to maintain the system.

It’s probably a good thing that no one pays attention to this music. First of all, the music that’s preserved from the pre-rock and roll era isn’t too welcoming. It’s crackly and alien. The blues doesn’t sound like blues, the country doesn’t sound like country, and it’s best not to talk about the folk music at all. It’s all wrong you see; it’s actual folk music, from olden times. But there’s a second reason why I’m glad old folk etc doesn’t really get name checked: pre-war roots music’s such an unknown musical world, that it’s open to any huckster or snake-oil salesman to talk whatever they want about it, and there’s barely anyone to call them on their nonsense. The worst casualty of all this has been blues music. It’s the richest musical source of all, but unlike country, which was popular enough to be well documented, and folk, which is a bloody academic discipline, information on the blues is always a bit murky. Take this particular gem from the Wikipedia article on Robert Johnson, relating to the well known legend that he gained his musical ability by making a deal at the crossroads with the Devil:

“When African-Americans born in the 19th or early 20th century told interviewers that they or anyone they knew had "sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads," they did not intend to convey thereby that the person in question was an evil, hell-bound anti-Christian. The confusion arises in the eyes of white interpreters who don't understand that the crossroads deity is a survival from polytheistic African religions and that he has been assigned the only name he can be given in a monotheistic religion. There is ample evidence supporting the African religious retentions surrounding Legba and the making of a "deal" (not selling the soul in the same sense as in the Faustian tradition cited by Graves) with this so-called "devil" at the crossroads.”

See! If white interpreters were just a little more aware of syncretistic survivals of West African Voudun rituals in American popular music, they’d have realised that the myth about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil was actually about him communing with Legba. Stupid interpreters! They were probably too busy noticing the similarity of the Johnson myth to exactly equivalent myths relating to non blues musicians selling their souls at crossroads (e.g. Paganini) and wondering why the myth wasn’t supported by any folktales at all. They also might have noticed that’s it’s total and utter nonsense. This is a relatively benign bit of nonsense, but there’s worse out there, but that’s all a bit aside from the point. This is still music, and it’s the musical bullshit that’s most damaging, especially to blues.

Blues from poorer backwater areas of the American South hit in the middle of the 1920s. Rural blues is the ancestor of all modern blues, and, through its son jump blues and its nephew country, it’s the grandfather of rock’n’roll. Blues music had first broken ground in 1912 in Tennessee, and then soon became successful in the early twenties as a sort of urban comedy music, sung by big fat ‘comediennes’ like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.It was billed as a type of folk music, so it became popular with Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and the New York communist folk groupies. But it wasn’t taken particularly seriously. At this point blues wasn’t really widespread even in the southern states (ragtime was still in its ascent in the South), but it was growing, especially among younger musicians. In 1923, Fiddlin’ John Carson’s version of the folk-pop song ‘Little Log Cabin’ was recorded and became a hit, kicking off a boom of hillbilly folk music. It occurred to record company execs that there might be money in recording in-bred black musicians too. Somehow they hit on Blind Lemon Jefferson, an enormously overweight blind professional wrestler and musician who specialised in Gospel, Folk and Blues, sounded like he was fucking insane and had a great name. Listen to a blues track like ‘Matchbox Blues’ and you can hear it. It’s him bellerin’ away (can’t hit the notes, doesn’t care), strange modal music, no discernable rhythm at all, just this weird man and his guitar. Listen to his recording of the traditional folk-gospel song ‘Two White Horses’ (his version’s called ‘See that my Grave is Kept Clean’). He’s got this trick where, whenever he gets to the line “have you ever heard that coffin sound”, he really plucks that guitar string, and it goes “boing, boing”. That must have really impressed his audience when he did it live. On record it doesn’t really work, but he does it anyway, because he’s on a level and he doesn’t care. What I’m trying to say is that this man, Blind Lemon, makes music that is so alien to what we consider to be necessary to music that it barely registers as music. It just hits you in the gut. Muddy Water’s records are great – they’re tough and sexy – but they don’t have that effect at all. That’s why I like older blues so much (I get a similar kick from the folk equivalents of the time too).

Jefferson’s records were decent hits, and suddenly the rural blues boom burst into being. It was actually centred in the Piedmont region, and especially Atlanta, Georgia, but there were other big regional scenes like Tennessee, the Appalachians, Texas, and of course Mississippi. This is before radio, so all these different types of blues sound noticeably different to each other. Piedmont blues is particularly different to other types of blues; it’s all complex and ragtimey. Piedmont’s my favourite. Appalachian blues was a funny mostly white outgrowth that eventually matured into Country music. Blues from Tennessee tends to have a simple, quite standardised jazzier side (in the sense of classic jazz, dismiss Charlie Parker from your head right now), and was famous for its jug-band music. Mississippi blues is pretty heavy.

Here it is then, coming to the Great Atomic Power: my one man crusade to rescue blues from the bullshit that everyone else writes about it and instead cover it with my own unique layer of bullshit. A subjective guide to the great blues styles. Stay put for a tour of the various regional styles of the blues as it grows and evolves. First stop, the Mississippi Delta.