Topic: What Is It About The Blues?

[dj]

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...

Sorry, I guess I didn't make myself clear.  My point was that there are a lot of cultures, peoples, tribes, nations, whatever, who have led a painful existence for one reason or another, and whose music has survived and is still played today.  And the blues is the only one of those musics that gets regularly saddled with the "pain & etc." baggage.  Partly that's because in English "to have the blues" means (and has meant for at least several hundred years) to be feeling sad.  And partly, that's just the way we romanticize this particular music.  Other music we romanticize in other ways.  And when I say "we", I include myself.  There's nothing wrong with that romanticization - it gives us a starting point to appreciate the music.  With the blues I've been through the "whole hipster pose" thing and the "pain & etc." thing, and a few other things and, if I live long enough, I'm sure I'll go through a few more as I work to appreciate different facets of the blues and related music (right now my romance is for circus, vaudeville, and tent show bands from the 1890s through about 1925 as I grapple with very early blues and it's antecedents).  

Please note that I'm NOT saying that blacks living in the Jim Crow South didn't live a hard and often painful existence, or that this existence was never reflected in their music.  What I AM saying is that virtually every style of music you can name, including the blues, reflects the gamut of human experience, the pleasure and the pain and everything in between and off to the side.

And, when it comes right down to it, I just love this music and I can see the path I took to my interest in it, but as to why this particular music has caught my ear more than any other, well, damned if I really know.          

[DanceGypsy]

(right now my romance is for circus, vaudeville, and tent show bands from the 1890s through about 1925 as I grapple with very early blues and it's antecedents).  

DJ - have you read or are you currently reading Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff's Out of Sight or Ragged But Right?  And where are you finding recorded music for this stuff?  I know that the band The Old 78's from Arkansas do some of this and as an individual performer Clarke Beuhling does modern versions of some of this stuff...

Apologies for being off my own topic, but I am developing a keen interest in this direction as well, and it would be nice to find some recordings from the big tent show bands (Black Patti Troubadours, the Smart Set, etc.).

[dj]

DJ - have you read or are you currently reading Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff's Out of Sight or Ragged But Right?

Yes.  Abbott and Seroff got me started on this area.  The first thing I read by them (other than their aritcles in 78 Quarterly) was their essay on early blues in David Evans' Ramblin' On My Mind.  I'm currently reading Peter Muir's Long Lost Blues, which is a worthwhile read.

As for sources of music, Document's Earliest Negro Vocal Quartets and Earliest Black String Bands sets are good but unfortunately are mostly out of stock at the moment.  Plus they have later recordings by teams that worked the tent shows and TOBA circuit, like Butterbeans and Susie.  Archeophone - http://www.archeophone.com/ - is a good source, with great sound on the discs I've heard and lengthy, well illustrated essays in the booklets. 

For listening online there's the Red Hot Jazz archive at http://www.redhotjazz.com and the University of California at Santa Barbara's Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu.  I'm sure others will point out excellent sources that I've missed.

[Gerry Clarke]

I sometimes wonder whether academics and others haven't over analyzed the blues.  As far as I can make out, most of it (like most folk music the world over for centuries it seems) was primarily intended as dance music - a relief from tough times.

It just seems like a pretty cool thing the way Scrapper or Tommy Johnson or dozens of others play the guitar and sing.  I can't be any more analytical about it than that myself.

Gerry

[Parlor Picker]

Very well put, Gerry.

[Mr.OMuck]

The analysis thing is basically an ancillary entertainment accruing to this music, play if you want to, don't if you don't. That's not to say that there isn't plenty to analyze or contemplate, there is. That's particularly true if part of how you see this music is as a historical - political artifact of a relatively unknown (to white folks) culture. If you feel that this notion de-aestheticizes the music remember that Greek sculpture can also be viewed this way as well as being experienced as great art. The idea that the music may have been intended primarily as dance music, while probably true, doesn't negate the fact that a considerable number of blues lyrics are startlingly poetic, beautiful, moving, and deal with the vagaries of human relationships with a directness, concision and haunting pathos not often found elsewhere in art. One classical composer I know said of Blues that it is the most robust, widely disseminated, and influential folk music that has ever existed. If we factor in that it is only a century or so old and that Elizabethan ballads, another wellspring of persistent folk music (god damn that persistent folk music!  ), are almost five hundred years old and compare their worldwide dispersion and influence, we'd have to conclude that he's on to something. Then there's all the possible ways to talk about the music itself, the outrageous proliferation of individual styles, the wild flights of invention, the myriad of instrumental approaches, the seemingly endless variations on time within a given structure. Plenty to analyze for them what wants to.

[DanceGypsy]

I sometimes wonder whether academics and others haven't over analyzed the blues.

This is from Feel Like Going Home, the chapter on Muddy Waters.  The long quote is from Muddy himself.

It is a situation about which he cannot help but have mixed feelings.  He thinks a great deal of the white kids who have tried so hard to understand his music.  He can't see them as blues singers, though.  "I think they're great people, but they're not blues players.  Really, what separates them from people like Wolf and myself, we're doing the stuff like we did way years ago down in Mississippi.  These kids are just getting up, getting stuff and going with it, you know, so we're expressing our lives, the hard times and different things been through.  It's not real.  They don't feel it.  I don't think you can feel the blues until you've been through some hard times."

Muddy was a man of few words, and I don't think anybody has ever accused him of over-analyzing anything.  Yet he, too, found the question relevant and gave his opinion.

I was a history major in college, so maybe I have an excuse for my interest in this topic.  After college I drug my life down into the depths of alcohol and substance abuse, etc., and in so doing manufactured some pretty hard times for myself - losing everything, living on the streets, even doing some time.  So I have more than a passing interest in the philosophical/spiritual/soul aspects of this music and my connection to it.  I've been clean and sober for almost a decade now, and listening to Tommy Johnson's "Canned Heat Blues" can take me right back to a place that is otherwise difficult to even remember from the vantage of so many years.  I believe there is merit to Muddy's statement, that blues comes from a pained or damaged place within ourselves and that to recreate it one must be able to touch that feeling in themselves.  It must be authentic to be effectively and credibly transmitted to others.

Of course it is possible that this and other theories are a bunch of nonsense, that the blues is simply music that we like and no other explanation is necessary or possible.

[dj]

Really, what separates them from people like Wolf and myself, we're doing the stuff like we did way years ago down in Mississippi.

Yeah, but you could say that about any music, or any art form, for that matter.  You can't really play and feel Haydn, the way Haydn, his associated musicians, and his audience played and felt his music, unless you've lived in an 18th century princely estate and all that that world entailed.  But that's ultimately a dead-end.  Performers and audiences take music for what they want, and that want is always changing.  We play Bach or Haydn or Civil War marching songs or ragtime or blues or the Beatles or early hip-hop today, and if people from the time and place that the music originally sprang from could hear us do it, they'd shake their heads and say "you just don't have the right feel".  But of course we feel it.  We just feel it differently.  

With that said, I was a history major as an undergraduate, too, and the historian in me does want to somehow touch an earlier era through its music.  

So there you have it.  I'm a mass of contradiction.  

I guess one of the reasons that I've been so active in this thread is that I've been relatively blessed in my life - family, friends, not rich but not poor, fewer hard times than 90% of humanity, yet I feel a deep connection to this music that's lasted for over 40 years.  So you and I came to the blues through very different paths, DanceGypsy, but we ended up at the same place.  Maybe we get taken to different places when we listen to "Canned Heat", but we both get taken somewhere.  That's what's important.
  

[CF]

You can't equate excellence with suffering in Blues music. There were thousands of musicians who would have lead a tougher life than Muddy, but they still couldn't play like Muddy. Talent defies a lot of its environmental influences.
Certainly, I believe the best 'Blues' music ever made was by black men & women who recorded, performed & created from the 1920s-1970s. The golden age is over. So now? Maybe this kind of musician doesn't play blues anymore.

[doctorpep]

Stuart, I tried to listen to Coltrane's 'Giant Steps', which I dislike, just because all music critics said it was magnificent and that Jazz like it no longer exists. I found myself unable to listen to it. You have a good point.

As for the suffering/black & white deal, to me, there are plenty of whites who can play Blues. Speaking of Muddy, he said that Johnny Winter and others could play Blues much better than him (he?), but that "the white man just can't vocal [sic] like the black man". Isn't the Blues a type of music that is essentially vocal? Therein lies my point, which will probably draw a great deal of criticism. If you disagree with me, feel free to send a message. I don't want to hijack this thread.

Any takers for my psychosexual theory of why Blues is so great? Those piercing high notes generated by the slide certainly resemble some kind of moan!

[dj]

I tried to listen to Coltrane's 'Giant Steps', which I dislike, just because all music critics said it was magnificent and that Jazz like it no longer exists. I found myself unable to listen to it.

Keep at it, Pep.  Music is like food, if you keep trying something you don't like once or twice a year for years, eventually you'll find the interesting part which makes other people like it, and you'll start liking it too.  It works for me, anyway.  (And yes, I love Giant Steps.)       

[Lyle Lofgren]

I don't think music is quite like food when it comes to learning to like it. My theory on food is based on the fact that I hated beets when I was a kid, and then, coming back to them 30 years later, instantly loved them. There was no "getting used to them" phase. The only explanation I can think of is that my taste buds degraded over the years so I can no longer taste whatever I found objectionable about beets in the first place.

Maybe that applies to Coltrane, too. I do admit to liking some types of music that I did not care for when I first heard them. I learned to appreciate Stravinsky, but I haven't achieved that with Coltrane and his cohorts yet. On the other hand, Gus Cannon's music was foreign to my ears when I first heard it, but I loved it instantly -- and still do.

Lyle

[Johnm]

Hi all,
Re the question of whether the Blues is over-analyzed, I would contend that it has not been analyzed nearly enough, at least musically.  Most writing on the blues does not really get into the music in any kind of depth at all.  I think that if more people understood the way blues have been put together historically and the enormous range of forms and phrasing archetypes employed, it's possible that the music would be better made and have a great deal more variety now, as it did in the past.  In a lot of present-day playing of blues, the form plays the player rather than the reverse.  I suppose there may be something wonderful about having such a universally understood sense of how the music should go--it is a form of communication, after all, but it's hard for me to see the ossification of the music in the formal sense as being anything other than a diminishing of the range of the music's expression. 
All best,
Johnm

[Rivers]

I heard an interesting thing on NPR the other day. I can't find a link so I will paraphrase, as I remember the main points.

Why do people prefer a particular form of music over another? What makes them passionately state their preferences in discussion with others who do not share the same appreciation?

Emotional response. It makes you feel good, sets you up for the day, gets you through hard times, etc. The psycho-chemical & cultural response is overwhelming. Art, in other words. There is no dry "computational" model for this, we just feel that way.

Personally I'd extend this to describe how musicians, historians, musical historians, and / or hipsters build on this to relate in an even stronger way. Having an intellectual (I mean musical theory & performance, historical bent, anything non-auditory etc.) just cements and anchors that passion.

Personally I listen to a lot of stuff I wouldn't listen to if I wasn't totally interested in the subject on several levels other than the immediate emotion.

[DanceGypsy]

Here's another one, this from Howlin' Wolf:

"You can't play no blues unless you have some hard times.  Young people today, I don'y care whether they're black or white, they didn't come up like Muddy and me, they come up too easy."

We will never know what Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson or Lemon Jefferson would say about all this because they were gone long before we got interested.  But Skip James and Son House were around - does anyone know if they ever commented on what it was about their music that gained them a new audience in the early 1960's, and what they thought about members of this crowd trying to reproduce their material on acoustic guitars around the nation?