Topic: What Is It About The Blues?

[Mike Billo]

 I took a look at the "Stuff White People Like" blog.

  I'm sure that when the thousands of African Americans who regularly attend Blues and Jazz Festivals, here in Northern California, find out that they really don't like this music, they'll adjust their tastes accordingly.
  To do otherwise, would mean that a blogger and his readers didn't really know what they were talking about.

  Obviously, one chooses to play a musical genre for the simple reason that, they like it.
   Because it speaks to them and strikes a responsive nerve and they feel inspired to do it themselves.

  I've never understood the "Old Folkie" (e.g. Ewan McColl) mindset that you should only sing songs that emanated from your own ancestors, in the place you come from.
 What rubbish.

    I'm half Russian and half Irish. What should I be playing instead of Blues? "Danny Boy" on the Balalaika?

  The best, most powerful, emotionally convincing, Blues Singer I've ever played with (and I've had the very good fortune to play with some good ones) is a woman who's half Greek and half Japanese. How would this theory work for her? 

    It's 2010 and I think we've all grown weary of the anachronistic, "Can a White Man play the Blues?" debate

[mr mando]

I'm half Russian and half Irish. What should I be playing instead of Blues? "Danny Boy" on the Balalaika?

I'd rather be interested to hear "Kalinka" played on the Uillean Pipes.

[Parlor Picker]

Many years ago, when Alexis Korner had a show on national radio here in the UK, he could always be depended on to play a lot of interesting and enjoyable music. He once played a record of Willie Clancy playing an Irish air on the Uillean Pipes and commented "If that's not the Irishman's blues, I don't know what it is!"

[manuel]

As a Mexican-Indian growing up in California  in the 60's and 70's we were taught to assimilate. Become as Anglo as possible. So when well meaning Anglos played  ranchero, mariachi music for me or began to talk about my indian roots. It made me feel uncomfortable. Why are you fooling around with this  backwards, old folks music and indian stuff.    I never thought they were trying to be a mexican  or indian,  they just loved the music or aspects of the culture. There were always one or two who try to out- indian the indian or out mexicanize the mexican or come to exploit a community but there are a few people like that  everywhere in  the world.

Now that I am older and  have learned to appreciate my roots, I have come to appreciate the efforts of these people to learn about aspects of my culture and teach me about these aspects of my cultures  that I turned my back on years ago.

 In other words the archival aspect of what aficionados like all you guys do to save,  recover or keep alive  and enjoy a community's past is important, especially for minority groups who  don't always  realize the importance of what they ignore or try to bury as embarrassing relics of a past as they try to survive or begin a new life.

[Slack]

Hi Manuel, I'm not sure we ever gave you a proper welcome -- so Bienvenidos!

Thanks for your perspective.  I think we all have people we can thank and be grateful to for keeping cultural customs and art alive - whether we belong to those cultures or not.  Then there are people that grate on one's nerves for taking aspects of the culture and hammering it, or twisting or as you say exploiting.  Already mentioned is that you must suffer to sing the blues -- and whenever I hear this I think the person does not know very much about the blues.  Another is the fedora hat.   

Thanks for posting.

[CF]

Damn, I gotta remember to burn my fedora 

[Slack]

Damn, I gotta remember to burn my fedora 

Nah cheapfeet -- you can play, so you get to wear one!   

[CF]

Ha, thanks Slack! I've never had any fashion sense whatsoever & I've only begun wearing hats somewhat recently . . . this has also coincided with the fact that my hair is going the way of the Dodo. I'll be wearing a hat 24/7 here soon 

[Mike Billo]

"Already mentioned is that you must suffer to sing the blues -- and whenever I hear this I think the person does not know very much about the blues.

"



        I once heard Steve Martin introduce his Banjo playing, by saying, "I suffered for my music......now it's your turn"  

[dj]

my hair is going the way of the Dodo

Hey, cheapfeet, I think a lot of us here suffer from that problem.  I know I do.  The real cause of it is we're getting smarter, so our brains are expanding, causing our skulls to enlarge, thereby forcing our hairlines back from our foreheads and off to the sides.  It's a well-know fact that in men the total area of our hair remains fixed while our brains expand.  I often wear a hat now just so I don't force the fact of my greatly expanded intelligence on others, making them feel inferior.   

 

[lindy]

Can't grow grass on a busy street.

[Stuart]

An old joke comes to mind:

"Men who's baldness is manifested by a thinning crown are great thinkers.

Men who's baldness is manifested by a receding hairline are great lovers.

Men who are completely bald on top just think that they are great lovers."

[Stuart]

Does anyone play or listen to music that they don't like just to keep it alive?

[DanceGypsy]

It's 2010 and I think we've all grown weary of the anachronistic, "Can a White Man play the Blues?" debate

I meant to respond to this earlier, but better late than never.

I respect the fact that this question has been asked and debated at length in the past, and I further recognize that some of you old timers are probably tired of the topic.  But each successive generation must wrestle its own demons, and as I am relatively new to all of this, this topic is far from being a "dead horse" to me.  In fact, there is a group of young musicians in Memphis, most in their mid-twenties, who are meeting at my place once a week to play and discuss this music, and the topic of why we are drawn to this music frankly fascinates us.

It apparently fascinated and engaged Peter Guralnick back in 1971 as well.  The following passage is taken from the introductory chapter of his book Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock & Roll.

There are lots of reasons, of course, why blues should attract a white audience of some proportions.  There is, to begin with, the question of colour.  Most of had never known a Negro.  That didn't stop us, however, from constructing a whole elaborate mythology and modeling ourselves in speech and manner and dress along the lines of what we thought a Negro would be.  Norman Mailer has expressed this attraction well in "The White Negro."  It was, really, the whole hipster pose.  But it was also, as Eldridge Cleaver has pointed out, that rock & roll represented not only an implicit social commitment but the explicit embrace of a black subculture which had never previously risen to the surface, so that we were set up, really - I was, anyway, along with my friends - for the adoption of a purely black music and a purely black culture.

Blues offered the perfect vehicle for our romanticism.  What's more, it offered boundless opportunities for embroidery due to its exotic nature, the vagueness of its associations and certain characteristics associated with the music itself.  For one thing it was an undeniably personal music; whatever the autobiographical truth of the words, each singer undoubtedly conveyed something of himself in his song.  The, too, the lyrics in addition to being poetically abstract, where often vague and difficult to understand; the singer made a habit of slurring syllables or dropping off the end of a verse, and the quality of the recording, often from a distance of thirty-five years, added to the aura of obscurity.  The life of the singer, too, was shrouded in mystery.  Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sleepy John Estes, Jaybird Coleman, Funny Paper Smith and Bogus Blind Ben Covington: bizarre names from a distant past about whom literally no facts were known.  We were explorers in an uncharted land.

But most of all there was the vitality of the music itself.  I knew it immediately, I still hear it today.  And while I have gone on to a number of ancillary enthusiasms, it remains central in my life.  For lesser attachments there are always explanations, but blues appealed to something deep seated and permanent in myself, it just sounded right to me.

This passage resonates with me and interests me.  It interests my friends as well, so obviously the topic lives on even if the older generation is ready to shrug it off.  We play a lot of American vernacular music from the period between the 1880's and the Second World War - fiddle tunes, Tin Pan Alley, rags and blues - and the fact is that this solo blues stuff is different than everything else.  For lack of a better word, it has more soul, more feeling, even when all the lyrics are floating verses and none of these make sense.  Gripping, powerful stuff, and there must be something in the black experience in America that created this.  DJ posted earlier in this thread about the "pain, etc." of the black experience being, essentially, a bunch of bunk, and then went on to cite "Banana In Your Fruit Basket," etc., as evidence that, I suppose, the blues are actually light-hearted and unreflective of the difficult experience of a disenfranchised people.  The true fact is that many turn to humor in dire straits to lighten the spirit, and it is also true that it wasn't poor whites in Mississippi who created the blues.  Nor was it urban blacks in Massachusetts.  This music came from the South and it came from underprivileged blacks, and I almost don't care who is tired of the question or trying to ignore the elephant in the room, I want to know why it has such a powerful effect on me.  Many of us here in Memphis have stopped listening to pop/modern music entirely - at first I could handle a smattering of source material/early commercial recordings, leavened with lots of Andy Cohen, Paul Geremia, etc.  But now it almost entirely the old records that I listen to, and it is interesting to reflect on how this music has hijacked my life.  I am currently embroiled in the aforementioned Guralnick book, as well as Ragged But Right, and while I may never land at the definitive answer to the philosophical questions I pose, I am sure enjoying the journey.

[Slack]

Nicely articulated DanceGypsy.  And thanks for posting Peter Guralnick's passage - it resonates with me (I'm sure a lot of us) as well.  I think many of us can also relate to not listening to pop/modern music... at least not voluntarily.  Mostly I just tell folks that I am just stuck in the 20's-50's

I need to pick up Guralick's books.