Topic: A Great contemporary Country Blues song: Possible or not?

[Mr.OMuck]

Is it possible to write a CB song in the present day and invest it with the enduring qualities that make up what most of us would consider the "canon"? The idea being that in seventy five years it would fit seamlessly with the work of the 20s & 30s? I somehow doubt it but am curious to hear why others might think that its possible.

[oddenda]

No reason why not!

pbl

[Johnm]

Hi Mr. O'Muck,
I certainly think it's possible.  Musically, why not?  I think you'd have to be alert enough not to employ a lot of harmonic moves that would seem anachronistic when heard in the company of material from the heyday of the music.  Similarly, the lyrics would need not to be too "now". Maybe the follow-up question to the one that you posed is whether self-consciously working under such constraints is liable to produce something that will have the natural sort of musicality of the best stuff of the earlier era.  Music or art of any type that has as its guiding star a sort of idiomatic correctness often ends up having a sort of Little Jack Horner quality--"Oh see what a good boy am I."
All best,
Johnm

[lindy]

O'Muck:

I need to ask if you think it's possible to produce a painting, sculpture, symphony or opera with the enduring qualities that are associated with those forms. If so, then I think it is possible to do the same for CB and other genres.

Really hard to imagine the line between lyrics being too "now" or not. Two of my favorite examples of someone trying to write a new CB song with original lyrics are "What's It All About" and "Many Miles of Blues," both by Jerry Ricks, who certainly had the pedigree to write "new" CB tunes. To my ear, the lyrics of those two songs have a contemporary feel--for example, "I said reality ain't reality, and why you need to know." Whew, that's not the kind of lyric I associate with CB tunes recorded in the 20s or 30s. But I admit, I can't come up with a third example.

That same Jerry Ricks CD has a version of "Red Cross Blues," one of dozens (hundreds?) of topical songs from the 1920s. I suppose anyone interested in writing a contemporary CB tune might try writing topical lyrics. At this moment I can't think of any topical songs in acoustic blues that are less than 50 years old, since L. B. Lenoir's "Alabama Blues" and "Vietnam." Any obvious examples since then that I'm overlooking?

Lindy

[Mr.OMuck]

Music or art of any type that has as its guiding star a sort of idiomatic correctness often ends up having a sort of Little Jack Horner quality--"Oh see what a good boy am I."

I agree with this completely John and the Jack Horner image is exactly right.

I need to ask if you think it's possible to produce a painting, sculpture, symphony or opera with the enduring qualities that are associated with those forms. If so, then I think it is possible to do the same for CB and other genres.

Well, its a complicated issue really. More later....

[eric]

Why not?  Bob Dylan made some some creditable attempts that were pretty original.

[eagle rockin daddy]

I believe this is possible, in fact I know it is because I myself have written several songs that I am sure meet O'Muck's bar:

"the enduring qualities that make up what most of us would consider the "canon"? The idea being that in seventy five years it would fit seamlessly with the work of the 20s & 30s?"

In fact, I have little doubt that my songs will last 100's of years and rattle around the universe long after Blind Blake's name has been forgotten.

Seriously, I do think it is.  I look at CB as a form, and I think it is possible to write a song that is in the style of classic country blues.  Some people just do it better than others.

Mike

[Rivers]

Personally I think Steve James has written a few great tunes.

I'd cite "Stack Lee's Blues", "Sonny Day", "Talco Girl", "Saturday Night In Jail", probably others but those were the ones I thought of off the top.

Steve has a great grasp of the vernacular, plenty of history, humor and an ability to write about today without jarring. The man can also play and he does so in a very distinctive way, which is perhaps another element in crafting a classic, gives him some natural differentiation.

[blueshome]

Nothing is impossible, but the trick would be avoiding it being a pastiche as so many efforts are.

What sets the "canon" apart is that spark of originality musically, a feel it is not always possible to analyse. I think the lyrical side is a little simpler as there is a lot of common stock available to repeat or adapt just as many of our heroes/heroines did.

A problem to me is that, whilst we can saturate ourselves in the CB of the 20's, we don't really know too much about what they were hearing coming up. This must have set the scene in their heads to produce some of the stunning music we so enjoy. The richness and variety of the CB is something I find fascinating and pretty inexplicable.

I'm with Lindy in asking about parallels in other forms of art - I'm sure it is possible to get as close as "from the school of" but more than that.............

[dj]

Of course it's possible.  But it's not likely to happen as often as it used to for several reasons.

1.  There are fewer people of top-notch talent trying to write blues songs that there were.  That's not to say that there aren't talented people writing new blues material today.  It's just that 80 or 90 years ago almost every good songwriter would attempt a blues or at least a blues-influenced song once in a while.  That's not true today.

2.  The form has become standardized.  When you look at the variety of forms that were thought of as "blues" in the 1920s, and what's considered to be blues now, it's pretty obvious that it's harder to break out of the 12 bar mold now than it was then.

3.  We live in an age where we don't do canons.  Back in the heyday of the blues, the songwriter was still king.  If Joe Pullum wrote Black Gal, a ton of other artists would pick it up for their stage act and a dozen of them would record it, or at least variations on it.  Now, if Mr. O'Muck writes a great blues song, no one else will perform it because it's O'Mucks, and no one will record their own little twist on it for copyright reasons.

As a bit of an aside, last week I had a very close, very long time friend visit.  We did a lot of listening to and talking about music.  One of the things we did was to survey some of the stuff we were listening to in high school, including the British blues singer John Mayall's work form the 1960s.  Frankly, I was impressed by his songwriting.  He had a stab at writing in virtually any blues-related form he encountered.  At the end of the 60s he seemed to settle into a form that worked well for him: a more-or-less strict 12 bar blues, but without any repetition of the first two lines, so that the text form was A B C.  If we lived in a songwriter age instead of a singer-songwriter age, I think a few of his songs would have entered the canon.
           

[uncle bud]

Rivers, I agree, Steve James has written some really good songs, though I would argue that material like Talco Girl, which is a great song, is not going to fit the bill of country blues from the 20s and 30s. Did you mean Sonny Payne? Great tune though more like Tom Waits meets Howlin' Wolf or something, no? Change the instrumentation and I could imagine the Harlem Hamfats hamfatting it up like Root Hog or Die. I would put up Galway Station Blues as a contender.

Alvin Youngblood Hart has originals that would fit in. If Blues Was Money is a classic that can stand beside the work of the St. Louis players, as is Sallie, Queen of the Pines. Joe Friday would be anachronistic given that the Dragnet reference is not going to fit into the 20s and 30s, but aside from that it's pretty brilliant and put it on a scratchy 78 and tell someone it's Kokomo Arnold's previously unknown cousin and it would fit.

John Miller's New Cairo Blues is without a doubt a great contemporary country blues song.

[lindy]

We're raising issues that make the original question something to run away from as fast as we can, IMHO. The biggest one is what constitutes "the enduring qualities that make up what most of us would consider the 'canon'"? If we limit the task to writing melodies with strong rhythmic foundations behind lyrics about "male and female" (all else is monkey junk, according to Son House), I think there are lots of people who are capable of creating good country blues songs.

But what constitutes "enduring qualities"? When This Old Hammer was in the gestation stage, I remember John stating during one of our Port Townsend classes that as he was trying to write new material, it didn't take much to cross a line from country blues to something else. (I seem to remember jazz being mentioned as that something else, but that might be my mind filling in a blank.) To my ears, there are some real uptown-sounding licks and riffs on that CD, which add to rather than detract from the songs.

It?s fun to listen to the CDs made by John, Steve James, Del Rey, Alvin Hart, and others who are trying to write new material or reinterpret old material?reinterpretation and lick-stealing being two ?enduring qualities? of country blues. On those new recordings you can hear elements of music written 80 years ago, as well as influences from all the other kinds of tunes that those players have been listening to and messing around with. That makes me wonder about the kinds of songs our dead heroes would be writing if they weren't so frustratingly dead. The books I?ve been reading lately repeatedly make the point that they were fully capable of performing waltzes, polkas, jazz, hillbilly?all kinds of good stuff, but they were told by white record companies that they had to limit themselves to blues, so we never got to hear them play anything else. Trying to recreate some elusive idea of a country blues canon or pure country blues might have the same limiting effect.

Lindy

[uncle bud]

I take everything Son House said with a grain of salt.  But I think if someone played a set that included, say:

I'll Go With Her
Judge Harsh Blues
Shake 'Em On Down
Mamlish Blues
New Cairo Blues
Slidin' Delta
Drive Away Blues

etc., there are a bunch of people who wouldn't notice New Cairo was not of the time, they would just be thinking, "Man, these are some really cool tunes." Same thing if you sub in one of AYH's songs mentioned above. It doesn't mean that's the only valid goal or motivation for writing songs in the country blues genre. But I think it does answer the specific question, i.e. yes, one could slip some of these songs in. I guess it also depends on the size of one's canon.

[Mr.OMuck]

Another way to state the question might be, has life changed too drastically in its particulars, that is the ubiquitous stuff of people's lives, in this case things like mules, plows, chickens, shaggy hounds, white only signs, wooden sidewalks, certain kinds of church music, horse drawn wagons, chain gangs, bootleg whiskey, frequent passenger train service, and all the other signifiers in Blues lyric imagery to allow for successful modern efforts that don't rely on the use of these now historical, and therefore largely unexperienced things (whut? chickens? I can hear Terry Jones saying). Did these things constitute a NECESSARY component of the form in the way that Picasso's having grown up around goats, bulls and roosters made those characters signatory staples of his language?

[Rivers]

Sonny Payne it is UB. The recording is pretty hopped-up electrified Howlin' Wolfish but that's mainly the distorted harp. When performed live I thought it a memorable number in his solo set.

Talco Girl I take your point,  I'm not sure what genre it is, has CB elements. Solid song, has been covered. Thanks for reminding me of Galway Station Blues. There are probably more.

O'Muck mentioned the changed cultural landscape, strip-mall zeitgeist. Others have commented on the lousy music business climate. Personally I have not the slightest clue how to write a great song in any genre so I have no idea whether these things are killers of CB songwriting creativity or not. SJ does seem to be able to wrestle some good contemporary songs out of the air and get a choke-hold on them without having to pretend the clock is stuck at 1928.

[Rivers]

I've added a 'songwriting' tag to this thread in the hope it inspires more posts, threads & general discussion. The fact that we didn't have such a tag before now, twelve years after WC first spluttered into life, reinforces its validity.

[Rambler]

I think if someone played a set that included, say:

Judge Harsh Blues
Shake 'Em On Down
Mamlish Blues
New Cairo Blues
Slidin' Delta
Drive Away Blues

 there are a bunch of people who wouldn't notice New Cairo was not of the time,

For New Cairo, substitute Louise (Paul Rishell), Will and Testament (James), or any number by Paul Geremia (My Kind of Pace, Slidell, Kick it in the Country, Somethings Gotta be Arranged).

[Rivers]

Right, Will & Testament is another good SJ one, and I agree with the others you mentioned. There really is a lot of great CB songwriting happening out there. We should make a point of identifying and elevating it, for the simple reason that if we don't, who else is gonna do it?

[doctorpep]

I really like a lot of Paul Geremia's recordings, but I can tell quite easily that his originals on Love, Murder & Mosquitoes are not songs that were recorded in the '20s or '30s. The lyrics simply seem forced, too clean or, at worst, like a parody. This doesn't mean the songs are bad, but just that I can tell they are not of a certain time or place.

[Bob B]

For contemporary blues that fit seamlessly into the early country blues genre, you can't beat John Miller's Chester County, Spanish Breakdown, and Titanic.  As I look at the back of the  First Degree Blues CD, I am amazed to see that these were recorded close to 40 years ago.  Time goes by at warp speed!!  Anyway, great picking and singing by a modern master.

Bob

[Stumblin]

Lick stealing and reinterpretation. That would be one or two ways to attempt to keep a musical form relevant yet still within a hypothetically proscribed aesthetic. Or something, I'm going to bed now...

[Michael Cardenas]

Modern Country Blues certainly exists, but some would ask how traditional it is and that in itself is a bag of worms. I would cite three components in any contemporary attempts - blue ribbon picking, stellar singing and the time-honored ideals of storytelling. While comparing now to then in these three areas it could be said that a few players exhibit prowess with their instruments, yet on average tend to fail at the lyric and it's physical delivery. Unfortunately, when you have a shoddy verse delivered by a low-rent singer the listener will demand twice rebates. Guitarists are a dime a dozen or a barrel of monkies depending how you look at it, rarely will an audience give a free pass to players who can't deliver a vocal. Musicians who do carry the free pass based on instrumental skill are often overcompensating and I can't reckon how healthy that is for musical "progress" in general.

[funguy]

I have to say that Stack Lee's Blues fits the bill for me (if I'm thinking of the right version, Stacker Lee... with the course about the Stetson Hat)
Also Guy Davis' Georgia Jelly Roll, and how about Jorma Kaukonen's True Religion?