By Jon ParelesThe blues? Or shadows of the blues?
Can a media blitz save the blues? Do the blues need to be saved? And if the blues were to be saved, what would be their 21st-century role? Those are some of the questions raised by the Year of the Blues, which began, by proclamation of the U.S. Congress, on Feb. 1. Concerts and club gigs have been tied to it all year, and beginning Sept. 28, PBS is to broadcast "Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues A Musical Journey," a weeklong series of documentaries.
Meanwhile, recording companies have been reissuing every blues track they can digitize, blues-concert DVDs are appearing and the Experience Music Project rock museum in Seattle is about to begin its own Year of the Blues series on Public Radio International.
All this history mongering suggests that the blues needs preserving, though it hasn't disappeared. But most contemporary rock and pop is at least a generation removed from the classic electric blues that inspired musicians like the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith and Bonnie Raitt. Lead guitarists tend to prefer heavy-metal shredding or punk blare to the patient tension and release of the blues. The street-level perspective once claimed by the blues, along with the hard-living gangster and hustler archetypes that date back to Stagolee, have long since moved into hip-hop, which has its immediate roots in funk and rarely even samples a blues track.
Still, any night of the week, in big cities and rural outposts, blues bands continue to play. The 12-bar, three-chord structure of the blues feels ingrained and familiar. In Mississippi, blues and Southern soul are still regular radio fare.
Yet the audience isn't getting any younger. Once fierce and disquieting music, the blues is often marketed now as something comfortable, good for selling jeans and beer. The Year of the Blues risks becoming another attempt by baby boomers to enshrine the pleasures of their youth, as they have with rock and soul museums in Cleveland, Seattle and Memphis.
The pretext for declaring 2003 the Year of the Blues is that in 1903, a bandleader and cornet player named W.C. Handy heard a man at a train station in Mississippi, playing slide guitar with a knife and singing a plaintive blues about the railroad junction "where the Southern crosses the Dog." (The Dog was the Yazoo Delta Line.) To judge by the description Handy published years later, all the hallmarks of the deep Delta blues were already there the lines of lyrics repeated, the European instrument that had been taught new ways to moan, the uncanny vocal style, the thoughts of distance and loneliness. The song even invoked a crossroads.
Handy later described it as "the weirdest music I ever heard," and he didn't forget it. He became the first composer to publish a blues song when he reworked his "Mr. Crump," a 1909 mayoral campaign song, as "The Memphis Blues" and published it in 1912. Handy's 1903 discovery was the beginning of the blues' relationship with the music business, as vexed a liaison as anyone has ever thought to celebrate.
The paradoxes of the blues begin with its very existence. It was born twisted, as music that repaid a bitter historical injustice - slavery and racism in America - with generous gifts a contagious joy and a profound transformation of what art can mean. It grew up to teach America, and the world, about mixed messages. The blues came out of a particular place and time, yet spoke to an audience that would never pick a cotton boll. It was a remnant of African cultures among people forbidden to express those cultures openly. Yet the blues is also unmistakably American music, linked to hymns, parlor songs, country tunes, military bands and dance combos. That's because it had the ability to infiltrate nearly anything in its path.
In the PBS documentaries, fans and musicians describe the music as "the truth." Yet despite the blunt, unvarnished lyrics and elemental structure, the blues is rarely a straightforward confession or chronicle. Sharp-dressed men sing about hard times; threats arrive sweetly, accusations with a laugh, sorrow with matter-of-fact acceptance. In Scorsese's documentary, "Feel Like Going Home," the bluesman Willie King says that the early blues' tales of mistreating women may well have been veiled complaints about the boss.
Compare the blues to the straight-faced Tin Pan Alley pop from before World War II, and the blues may use fewer chords, but it sounds infinitely more wise and adult, full of secret clues and sly sexiness. The blues' legacy is not only its unflinching stories, but the levels of subterfuge and indirection that were essential to its survival.
The blues has found itself on various sides of America's divisions of race and class. It has been treated as a symbol of innovation and of backwardness, of evil and of righteousness, of times best forgotten and of lore that should never be lost, of frivolity and of revelation. It has been repeatedly discarded by listeners both black and white, only to be reclaimed by unlikely benefactors. The makers of the PBS series long to join the ranks of blues disseminators from Handy to Alan Lomax to Moby.
Every artistic revival repudiates the present by creatively distorting the past, and the blues revivals that carried the music out of the backwoods and ghettos were no different. In the 1950's, earnest collegiate folkies heard a lost rural purity in the blues, and they enforced their vision of the music by pressuring plugged-in bluesmen to abandon the latest styles and go back to their acoustic guitars. In the 1960's, the next bunch of blues converts embraced the noise. They heard raunch and rebellion in electric Chicago blues, and responded with crude imitations, histrionic frenzies, extended guitar solos and, when Jimi Hendrix came along, psychedelic fantasias. The latest blues revivals are more limited. They treat the blues as a throwback, a way of making music by hand in an era of technology.
The PBS series doesn't offer guidelines for what makes great blues, or for what makes the blues great. The films are not made for novices who don't have at least a vague idea of who Robert Johnson or Howlin' Wolf were. They seem likely to satisfy no one. Unlike Ken Burns's chronological PBS overview of jazz, "The Blues" is fragmented and impressionistic seven auteurs rambling through more than a century of music.
There are overlaps (an irresistible clip of Son House singing "Death Letter Blues") and broad swaths of omission. Apparently by coincidence, the series does bring out the kinship between blues and gospel, which deliver contrary messages in a shared style.
All that unites the PBS documentaries is their adherence to the series' subtitle "a musical journey." Scorsese's film follows Corey Harris, a dreadlocked blues singer and preservationist, on two trips. He goes to Mississippi to visit Otha Turner, a nonagenarian farmer whose family preserves an ancient black-American tradition of fife-and-drum music, and to Mali to visit Ali Farka Toure, whose electric-guitar music is clearly kin to the blues. Toure heard Malian roots in John Lee Hooker's modal boogies.
Richard Pearce and Robert Kenner's "The Road to Memphis" takes the tour bus with Bobby Rush, who's in his 60s and still singing his cheerfully raunchy blues on the chitlin' circuit of Southern clubs. He puts on his Sunday suit to go to a gospel church, where, he says, he sees the same people he saw at a club on Saturday night. The directors Charles Burnett and Wim Wenders both ruminate over early Mississippi blues Burnett with a stiff childhood reminiscence framing history lessons, Wenders with stylized, sepia-toned silent-movie-style recreations of Blind Willie Johnson and Skip James that end up looking more like alienated Europe than desolate Mississippi.
Too much of the series focuses on intermediaries rather than the musicians themselves. Marc Levin's "Godfathers and Sons" visits Chicago to reconvene the 1960's psychedelic-jazz-funk band that made albums with Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. Trying to forge a contemporary blues hybrid, they cut some new tracks with the rappers Chuck D and Common. But the segment's central figure is not a musician but a producer, Marshall Chess, whose father Leonard and uncle Phil started Chess Records, the label that made pivotal recordings by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and others. Without rebuttal, Marshall Chess rationalizes the low royalty rates the label paid those pioneers, saying "It wasn't about record royalties. If we got it on the radio you could work that weekend." Diddley might disagree.
The best parts of the documentaries are the finds from the archives films and videos of musicians like Skip James, Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Big Bill Broonzy, Pinetop Perkins, Lenoir and others at work. The impact of the series may register best offscreen in the flood of CD reissues. The branding is oppressive; does a Robert Johnson reissue really need "Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues" above the title? Yes, that Robert Johnson collection is mighty skimpy, a mere 42 minutes of music. But the five-CD set named after the series, on Hip-O Records, and the inevitable spinoff book add up to a more organized introduction to the blues than the documentaries themselves.