The Rebirth of the Blues
Blues begat rock and pop, thereby losing its soul. Can blues win it back?
The Economist
May 4, 1996IN 1903 a young black musician named W.C. Handy found himself drowsily waiting for a train in a small Mississippi town. Handy was a well-schooled professional—a singer, cornet soloist and conductor--but he had never heard anything like the sound spontaneously produced by a ragged black guitarist, singing and playing a strange, hypnotic tune. As he later recalled, "Life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start."
This was W.C. Handy's first encounter with the blues, a form which, in a few years, would have the same galvanizing effect on America and the world. One of the agents of its dissemination was Handy himself, who became known as "The Father of the Blues" for classic compositions such as "St Louis Blues" or "Beale Street Blues". But he never claimed to be more than the populariser of an indigenous music which he sought out, notated and formalised.
The popular music of this past century is unthinkable without the blues. Its earthy immediacy--with uniquely pungent "blue notes" which refuse to be classified as major or minor but are somehow both at once--has had its effect on everything from jazz to Broadway shows. The first jazz recording, in 1917, was the Original Dixieland jazz Band's "Livery Stable Blues". Three years later a black singer, Mamie Smith, created a sensation with "Crazy Blues", which opened the way for blues- shouting divas like Bessie Smith, who commanded huge audiences Eve on the black theatre circuit throughout the 1920S and among record-collectors, black and white, ever since.
In 1924 George Gershwin brought a version of the genre to high-society concert-goers with his sassy, romantic "Rhapsody in Blue". Popular songs like "The Birth of the Blues", though far removed from the blues form, at least acknowledged the spirit. In sundry derivations, the.blues became a universal language, recognised in different ways by suburbanites and jazz musicians. As a great jazz tenor saxophonist, Lester Young, put it laconically, "Everybody plays 'em, everybody's got 'em."
The reasons for this emotional and musical appeal maybe hard to pin down, but a new book, "Portrait of the Blues"*, at least conveys much of the genre's essential flavour. The author, Paul Trynka, has inter- viewed scores of blues musicians, whose piquant reflections make up the body of the text. In the foreword, for instance, the singer-guitarist John Lee Hooker sums up the music's irresistible democracy: "presidents, rich people, poor people; they can all relate to the blues. There's something big about it, a deep feeling they can all relate to. The blues is misery if you want misery. Happiness if you want happiness."
The book also presents a chronological view of the development of the blues from their Mississippi origins to the present, excluding jazz and the more diluted varieties of blues-tinged popular music in favour of the unalloyed thing itself. Disregarding tangents, the blues as a pure form evolved along an axis running from rural Mississippi to urban Chicago. The country players provided the basic vocabulary. When they and their descendants migrated up north, a new big-city intensity emerged, impelled after the second world war by amplification. The result became popularly known as rhythm and blues, a heady new form which fuelled the rock 'n' roll revolution, inciting millions of teenagers to scream at Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers.
But Chicago blues was still the purest and hardest. Giants like Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker and Howlin' Wolf may not have commanded mass audiences, but they inspired a corps of young white musicians--particularly British ones--with a hunger to imitate their uncompromisingly passionate music. To Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, the group's success was simply the result of a yearning to approach the domain of their idols: "The idea of playing with Muddy Waters was 'when I get to heaven' ...But I actually got to play with him, John Lee, Howlin' Wolf…I actually got to play with them all...And I got paid!"
An understatement. A fortune rolled in from around the world, rewarding the Stones' plangent, blues-drenched rock. Some of the money and popularity rebounded to their Chicago masters. But pop music being by nature ephemeral, audiences were inevitably lured away by new sounds. Today, the Rolling Stones have become classics, cherished relics of an era, their music an endearing, energetic throwback. It could not be more different from contemporary pop, which is nervously stylish, knowingly manufactured, as far from the near-ruthless integrity of the blues as any music can be. Blur, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Take That--each contemporary group has its carefully made image, a kind of music-and-entertainment computer program aimed at a specially chosen segment of the market.
The blues resists all such packaging. Part of its appeal in the 1960s was its spontaneity, its quality of joyous affirmation even in the face of trouble. That sense that the blues consists of strong music by strong people comes across vividly in the photographs by Val Wilmer which illustrate "Portrait of the Blues". The spell cast by lived-in faces is just as potent in another, purely graphic volume, "The Blues: Album Cover Art”,** a collection of the photographs and paintings which adorned records by the blues masters in the 1950s and 1960s.
In its self-conscious obsession with style, a desire to reduce experience to a hip post-modernist game, the pop-musical spirit of the 199OS may be the antithesis of the blues. Indeed modern pop seems more attuned to "virtual reality" than to the genuine, problematical thing itself. But the blues have kept their place. Specialist record labels have discovered a growing demand for authentic music. Though the great guitarist Buddy Guy fell on hard times after the 1960s, he has seen his fortunes improve: "People are turning back to this music now--maybe it's because they're catching hell with the economy. There's a lot more people now beginning to realize what blues is about."
Perhaps actuality will break through the pose of cool detachment, awakening people with a start, as a potent new music awakened W.C. Handy in rural Mississippi 90-odd years ago. And then the rugged relevance of the blues may have its day again. Or, as a Chicago disc jockey put it, "The old blues singer's sayin' no matter what the world is makin' out of you, how you allowing the world to twist your mind and break your spirits down, I'm gonna keep on pushin', I'm gonna get by somehow."
* By Paul Trynka, Hamlyn; 160 pages; £20
**Edited by Graham Marsh and Barrie Lewis, Collin & Brown; 111 pages; £17.99