Bluesy and Bound

 BLUES and BLUES-ROCK – “The blues had a baby and they called it rock-and-roll” - Muddy Waters / McKinley Morganfield

African-American music is the main root of rock music in the U.S. – just as Muddy said. No doubt about it. European folk and indigenous music play second fiddle in U.S. music origins. All are actually working-class art forms. Gospel, blues, New Orleans, swing, big-band jazz, and torch songs inspired be-bop, fusion, rock, pop, R&B, Motown, soul, funk, hip hop and rap. For blues, many light-skinned people were introduced to the blues by bands who were better known – including many 'white' Brit, Chicago, San Francisco and southern bands. Some of those listeners investigated the root, so to speak, digging into origins after they heard the rock versions.

Muddy's cabin, Stovall Plantation, now in Clarksville Museum 

In this context, the issue of exploitation is relevant. Black artists were exploited, or super-exploited and stolen from, copied from, borrowed from – like the glass slide, the blues style, the jazz lick. Jim Crow didn't help, as it penetrated the North too. Huey 'Piano' Smith is an example – many of his R&B songs were covered, but his years in lawsuits to recover royalties led to bankruptcy. In fact most musicians are exploited – look at Spotify today and its tiny royalties. Labels, bars, other musicians, concert promoters, ticket vendors, managers, studios, book-keepers – all rip off musicians in various ways, not just black musicians. Many early jazz and blues clubs in fact were run by mobsters. Radio stations went through a payola period. Sex was done for work. Contracts were a joke.

ROOTS

Indigenous music played a role in the origins of the blues. If you listen to the drum and plaintive notes of southeastern native song, you can hear these repeated in the blues.  Charlie Patton and Howling Wolf, Delta bluesmen, were both Choctaw too.  The mystery of Mardi Gras Indians is solved by understanding the ethnic confluences of indigenous, African, French and other cultures in their role of developing New Orleans jazz. Link Wray probably invented heavy blues, and he was Shawnee.  Mildred Bailey, a Coeur d'Alene, set the style for vocal lounge jazz in the 1930s. Even Hendrix's mother was Cherokee.  So the blues didn't just come out of gospel and slave labor songs.  

On a personal note, which is really not limited to me - in our little farm town in the 1960s, we listened to old blues 45s & LPs, and we also listened to blues-rock band LPs. If they did a cover, you could look up the original. If you heard a common line (“Squeeze my lemon...”) or riff (grind pattern...), you could also recognize it in another song. In this process many music lovers were led from blues-rock to the original blues.

Because of this exposure to blues-rock I, like others, spent time in blues clubs in Chicago and Minneapolis. I traveled the blues trail in Mississippi, visiting grave sites, museums, significant locations, plantations, prisons and juke joints. I visited blues / R&B recording studios – Chess, Sun, Stax, Muscle Shoals' 2 studios and New Orleans' own J&M on Rampart. (Chess, by the way, was called “Cadillac Records” because you could buy a Caddie with your earnings.) I've read a number of books on the blues. I just heard 87-year-old blues-man Bobbie Rush, formerly of Chicago, now of Jackson, MS, play a show at a local club last week. That is how 'white blues' or blues-rock works with 'black blues.' I'm not the only one. If you actually give a damn about blues, this is what you do. Have you done this, dear reader? Odds are no...

The 'crossroads' - below Dockery Plantation in Cleveland, MS? 

Black blues players know they didn't make near the money the big blues-rock bands did. But without them many would have made much less, and many of them know it. After all, they are different styles, as rock's power and beat connect in a different and physical manner, making it massively popular. Listen to Robert Johnson's plaintive country-blues “Crossroads” then listen to Cream's acid-blues version - heavy, raging, electrified. Yeah, same song, but... As in any good cover, the band doing it makes it their own. Or the Dead doing Slim Harpo's “I'm a King Bee” - like riding a musical elephant in the Dead's version. The original blues style would have had a shorter lifespan without folk and rock's arrival. Blues is marginal now, just as rock is now marginal compared to pop, hip-hop, auto-tuned torch songs, DJ, dance, EDM, etc.

Can some 'white' blues people actually play the blues? Not all ... Can even some black 'party blues' bands play the blues? Perhaps not. Take Janis Joplin. Buddy Guy, echoing B.B. King, said of Janis Joplin:  “She sang black.  She proved that the color of your skin don’t have shit to do with the depth of your soul.”  Big Mama Thornton said of Janis, who covered her song Ball & Chain:  “That girl feels like I do.”  Etta James respected her style.  Mick Jagger told her he’d listen to a black singer if he wanted to hear ‘black.’  So much for cultural appropriation accusations.

SNYNERGY

How did this synergy work?  Folk festivals in the 1950s-1960s invited blues musicians, not just bluegrass, Americana, country or protest singers. Rock bands would bring on dark-skinned blues-men to open shows, as the Stones did. Rock venues like the Fillmore East and West regularly booked orthodox blues acts. Blues shows traveled to Europe, most famously the “Blues and Gospel Tour” which featured Muddy and the incredible Rosetta Tharpe.

Even today, 50% of the visitors to the town of Clarksdale, Mississippi are from Europe according to the locals. Clarksdale is one of the centers of the Mississippi Delta country, where the Delta blues were birthed. South of there, near Cleveland, MS, just south of Dockery Plantation, is the reputed lonely crossroads that Johnson and later Cream played about. This fact about the lack of local 'Americans' traveling to Clarksdale shows you how much they love the blues – not much. Prior to the blues revival in the 1950s pop was on the jukeboxes in Clarksdale, not blues. Blues had lost much of its popularity among African Americans and others. This is still true.

Muddy Waters did an album with Chicago and Memphis compadres Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Duck Dunn, Sam Lay and Otis Spann called “Fathers & Sons.” John Lee Hooker did an album with Canned Heat called “Hooker & Heat.” Howling Wolf did 'The London Sessions' with Brit blues-rockers Clapton, Jagger and Richards. The owner of Sun Studios, Sam Phillips, said that his recording of Howling Wolf was his most important find – not Presley. I've attended live shows by BB King, KoKo Taylor, Sugar Blue, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy, Lonnie Brooks, the Kinsey Report and others. At the Chicago Blues festival, it is not just black blues bands that play, but white and integrated ones. Were they slugging it out onstage about appropriation or theft? No. They might cut each other to show whose was a better player, but not actual cutting. Now there is even a version of desert blues performed by African musicians, including Nigerian and Toureg bands.

Integrated rock / blues bands during the 1960s - Santana, Paul Butterfield, Electric Flag, Chambers Bros., Sly and the Family Stone, Allman Brothers, Jimmy Hendrix Experience and Band of Gypsies, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Three Dog Night, War, Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Prince & the Revolution, etc. 

In my LP/CD collection, like many other people, I have original blues music from Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Charlie Patton, Leadbelly, Son House, Skip James, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, BB King, Willie Dixon, Lightnin' Hopkins, J.B. Lenoir, etc. But I also have blues-rock from the Stones, Butterfield, Canned Heat, Joplin, Mayall, Steppenwolf, Zepplin, Electric Flag, Free, Jeff Beck, the Allman Bros, Johnny Winter, Hendrix, Clapton, etc. Popular Brit bands like Fleetwood Mac and the Moody Blues started as blues-rock outfits, then gradually evolved their own styles. This is because of the intense interest in blues in England among working-class youth and art kids in the 1950s and 1960s. That is how blues-rock and blues interacted.

Like any art form, music styles collide and artists are inspired by other artists. They copy some of their methods and learn from covers.  In jazz a specific line is copied - it is calling quoting; in hip-hop, sampling. Blue-eyed soul is an example of style adopting. Fusion percolates, purity becomes more difficult, schools form, instruments blend or are adopted, borrowings increase - even on a world-level. And yes, outright theft too. The adoption of rock songs by orchestras, the adoption of classical tunes by rock bands, the construction of complex prog. rock compositions much like classical suites, the adoption of world or folk instruments and the adoption of folk tunes and styles by rockers, but jumped up in tempo and power. Even the multiple fusions – jazz-rock, folk-rock, blues-rock, electronic-rock, country-rock, rap-rock, orchestral-rock, space-rock, psych-rock - tells you something else is going on here.

In fact two or more things can happen at the same time, as happened here. It isn't just a story of theft or racism, misappropriation or identity politics.  It is a story of music. Its a subtlety that some might miss but musicians do not.

P.S. - The Guardian refutes 'cultural appropriation' as a flawed position:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/24/should-we-borrow-from-other-cultures-of-course-we-should

Prior blog reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 16 year archive, using these terms: “If It Sounds Good, It Is Good,” “In Search of the Blues,” “Cool Town,” “33 Revolutions Per Minute,” “Life” (Richards); “Janis,” “Kids” (Patti Smith); “Marie and Rosetta,” “The Blues – A Visual History,” “How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin,” “Echo in the Canyon,” “Treme,” “Long Strange Trip,” “Really the Blues,” “Music is Power,” “Zappa Plays Zappa,” “Laurel Canyon,” “We Have Fed You All a Thousand Years” (Utah Phillips); “Summer of Soul.”

Watch the documentary "Rumble" on the link between the blues and native music.

The Kultur Kommissar

March 6, 2023