Topic: Country/City, Pre/Post-War Blues--What about it?

[Johnm]

Hi all,
It has become commonplace in recent years to divide Blues into pre and post-WWII eras, with the implicit assumption that most Country blues occurred in the pre-War era.  Additional ways of distinguishing between the Blues of the two eras have to do with amplification of the guitar becoming more prevalent in the post-War era and Blues becoming more of an ensemble music and less of a style played by an individual musician.  I have been thinking a lot about the issues around Country vs. City Blues and ensemble vs. solo player Blues.
I think Country vs. City blues is a more valid distinction than pre vs. Post-War Blues.  There is a lot of pre-war acoustic Blues that I would classify as City Blues:  Papa Charlie Jackson, Blind Blake, Lonnie Johnson, Bill Broonzy in his small ensemble work and duets with pianists, likewise Tampa Red in his studio player capacity and work with Georgia Tom and Frankie Jaxon and female singers, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, spiffy duet players like Tarter and Gay, etc.  Characteristics of City Blues, whether from the pre or post-War era, I would see as relatively heavy emphasis on an expanded chordal vocabulary, and relatively strict adherence to formal conventions having to do with bar structure and when changes fall.  Result--more predictable and shared sense of phrasing, enabling such players to work easily with like-minded players in ensemble situations.  The expanded chordal vocabulary allows for movement into Blues that use more than three chords, and occasional Pop material, in some instances
Characteristics of Country Blues, I would see as a pared back chordal vocabulary, and less strict adherence to formal conventions having to do with bar structure.  The result--a music which is driven more by strong pulse and phrase length than by meter, with individual players altering the form as their own senses of phrasing dictate.  On the chordal side, the countryness manifests as a heavier reliance on riffs and drones and less on nifty chord changes or devices like turn-arounds.  A further result is that the individuality of phrasing makes ensemble playing a bit tougher.
If you apply these defining characteristics to individual players, you will find some who wind up in one camp in one regard and in the other camp in a different area.  Lemon Jefferson and John Jackson come to mind--they both had a love and appreciation of harmony in blues and could come up with as nifty a series of chordal moves as anybody, but both were strongly country with regard to their time and phrasing.  A surprising number of musicians, though, come down squarely in one camp or the other, and it turns out to have virtually nothing to do with whether they played electric guitar or were from the pre or post-War period.  Musicians from the post-War period who come down squarely in the Country Blues camp, whether or not they used amplification (or actually lived in a city), include Lil' Son Jackson, Smoky Babe, Robert Pete Williams, Robert Belfour, RL Burnside and Lightnin' Hopkins.
What do you think?  Obviously, there are great players in both camps.  It makes more sense to me, though, to divide players on the basis of their musically defining characteristics than to divide them on the basis of a date, however significant the event it signified was for the country in which they lived.  Is there a need to make such a division?  Probably not, but I just have a hard time thinking of Robert Pete Williams and Lonnie Johnson being considered as playing the same style of music.
All best,
Johnm
       
 
 

[uncle bud]

I agree, John, that the pre and post designations are essentially inaccurate. Mance Lipscomb is another "postwar" player who is squarely in the country blues camp. Fred McDowell as well, who did dabble in electricity. There's a number of contemporary players, sometimes referred to as prewar or country blues stylists, who are really country blues players to me, despite some smoother, modern touches, expanded chord vocabulary and occasional forays into electric, R&B, or what have you. For me, I tend to think of country blues and modern electric blues as my generic labels. The modern stuff I mean is mainly descended from Chicago style, though other styles as well, and generally holds little interest for me. 

[thumbstyle]

I agree with your take John (as usual, you express yourself and back your points so well that one reads it and says, "yes, of course he's right").

When people ask what I play, I usually say something like "old pre-war acoustic blues" (trying to give them enough adjectives to at least put the ball near the green), but I know it's sort of nonsense. And futile: I get the "you mean like *** ****?" response anyway, where *** **** is one of: a) Bill Monroe b) Eric Clapton or c) B.B. King. :-)

Anyway, back to the topic. It's a shame we're stuck with the Country vs. City labels -- so much baggage goes along with them. But I guess they're as good as we got.

So where would you put someone like Bo Carter? In some ways, he's all Country (downhome style, bass notes going all over the place). But on the other hand he has a real tightness of form, and some pretty sophisticated harmonies.

Unencumbered by a point,
Dave

[lindy]

I actually like the pre- and post-war designations, but like, you know, hey man, I try not to get hung up on that time thing.? I use the pre-war designation the same way I use the words Dixieland, New Orleans, Chicago, Swing, and Bop to describe certain kinds of jazz.? All of those terms evoke thoughts of a specific time period, but also of a playing/song style.? If I had to come up with definitions for all those classifications, I would use the same kind of approach JohnM used to describe country blues, and sleep peacefully knowing that there's a lot of fuzzyness in terms of cross-pollination and transition.

Thus, Mance Lipscomb is a pre-war player because that's when he developed his style and because of his song selection.? The only difference between Mance and Mississippi John Hurt is that Hurt recorded pre-war and Mance didn't.? John Jackson was a pre-war player even though he was just starting to take his daddy's guitar out of the closet to practice a few songs in the 1930s, because he fits the chordally-spare-strong-pulse definition.

I think we all agree that the electic/acoustic distinction is false. Larry Johnson fits my personal pre-war definition? because of the chordally-spare-strong-pulse thing, although to my ear he expanded the chordal possibilities compared to the guys who did record in the 1920s/1930s.? When Larry picks up his big ol' electric Gibson (as he does exclusively on his last two CDs) and plays "Charley Stone," I find it easy to define that tune as pre-war.

The fun starts with some of those artists that JohnM listed as being on the edge of the chordally-spare-strong-pulse thing (Lonnie Johnson, Broonzy's ensemble work, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell etc.).? In some cases you might say a pre-war player was playing jazz, or a Charleston-era jazz player was getting into the pulse.? When I heard Wynton Marsalis play "The Saints" last month, I viewed it as a modern player having fun playing a Dixieland tune.? And when I heard Ornette Coleman play Body and Soul? Well, um, I better get back to work. . . .

Lindy

[Slack]

John,

I like your 'ensemble' and 'solo' classification - I think it works pretty well to qualify Country/City, Old/Modern, Pre-war/Post war.  In addition to being fun, I think it is useful to classify and catagorize,taken with a grain of salt (as you point out) as there will always exceptions. And even more fun finding the exceptions. Could another distinction be 'dance music'/ 'listening music'? (I dunno, the dance tempos and styles have chagned so much that one may not be very useful)

Interesting that you classify Lightin' Hopkins as squarely Country Blues.... agree that he was about as far from an ensemble player as you can get. But I think of him in terms of city or post war or even a semi-modern player because of his influence on modern electric blues.  (I think others have described him as transitional.)  He played mostly in bars and halls in the city and for a primarily black audience... which seems a different experience from other 60's 'rediscovered' bluesmen.

My sophomore year in college was at U. of Houston and I talked a buddy into going with me to see Lightin' at Liberty Hall in Houston (Fall of '71 or Spring of '72).  I remember being nervous about going to the black area of town for this concert (being a skinny white boy from El Paso).  I also remember being nervous for Lightin' - he showed up about an hour late with his trademark 5th of gin in his back pocket and proceeds to play (I think all his songs were 20-30 minutes in length).  I did not understand at the time that "Lightin' changes when Lightin' wants to"  and thought the audience would not be kind to him for missing so many chord changes(I surely thought they were going to start throwing objects at him any moment!) - he missed so many, I thought he was drunk! (he may have been anyway).  Of course the audience understood and knew Lightin' well and give him enthusiastic applause throughout the concert.  I was relieved.
 

cheers,
slack

[Cambio]

I'm reminded of the recording of Lemon doing How Long Blues with a piano player.  They never manage to get in synch.  Lemon drops a beat here and picks one up over there while the piano player rigidly plods along.  The resulting clash of city and country is Lemon's most uninspired work in my opinion.
I don't really like to try and classify everthing because there are so many exeptions to any rules you may try to create, but here goes:   
I think of City Blues players as doing more of a concert performance.  It's toned down a notch.  There may be great playing, and bawdy / clever lyrics but there's something missing.  They can't afford to be really off and wierd because it has to be presentable to an audience.  I personally don't find too much of it to be soulful or moving.  Think of all of the tunes by different artists that, for the most part, sound the same.  They almost beat the genre to death. 
I think that Country Blues players have that extra little bit.  They're wierd, goofy and slightly freakish.  They develop unique, distinct styles because they have spent lots of time alone.  They have figured out how to get to that very personal space inside of them and convey it into their music.  They may have developed their technique for singing and playing on the street or at house parties, or they may have developed it for sitting around the kitchen and playing for themselves.   Whatever the reason, they've got it and it sounds good to me.
Now I know that there are tons of holes in this argument.  Frankie Jaxon is about the biggest freak that ever lived, and Victoria Spivey sends chills down my spine.  On the other side there are lots of country blues artists that are totally unispiring to me.  I'll shut up now.
Todd

[outfidel]

What do you think?? Obviously, there are great players in both camps.? It makes more sense to me, though, to divide players on the basis of their musically defining characteristics than to divide them on the basis of a date, however significant the event it signified was for the country in which they lived.? Is there a need to make such a division?? Probably not, but I just have a hard time thinking of Robert Pete Williams and Lonnie Johnson being considered as playing the same style of music.

Hi John,

I agree that the post-/pre-war is an unsatisfying way to divide blues guitarists. However, it's hard to think of any single dimension that allows you to divide players into 2 camps.

Take the examples of Mississippi John Hurt and Charley Patton: they're from the same era (pre-war), the same geographic location (Mississippi), the same living environment (rural), and the same demographic group (poor & black). Yet they don't sound anything alike.

Maybe that's because these artists were unique individuals who, by definition, defy our attempts at categorization & classification. It reminds me of what one of Kurt Vonnegut's said:

"If only it weren't for the people, the damned people", said Finnerty "always getting tangled up in the machinery.? If it weren't for them Earth would be an engineer's paradise." --

Player Piano[/list]



Michael

[Richard]

I think the pre and post war labels form a sort of natural divide and maybe even if the war had been say 10 years later that natural divide would probably still stand on the basis that those pre-war artists that we revere would have been still playing (just) and fading out by natural causes anyway.

In which case the discussion would logically move onto the dreaded acoustic v. electric which now being post-war in 1956 instead of 1946 then everything would be whizzo and Muddy Waters et al could bask in the electric limelight (pun) without the need for an acoustic apprenticeship! The other advantage being that Big Bill would then have come to England in the 60s, not the 50s and I could have seen him

Whilst on the electric guitar subject I have to say that it overall it does not do a lot for me, other than when the likes of Lonnie J, Memphis M and Big Bill took over - and I think that was because they continued to play essentially as before but with a new toy and did not need an electric band to prop them up.

As for the country and urban blues titles, thats partly subjective I seem to be on autopilot as to deciding in my own mind which category a piece fits in, but in the main I think JohnM has it.
And, being a jazzer I think Lindy's comparison to classification jazz styles makes a lot of sense as well.

I rest my case. Feet, brain, ummm..

[Rivers]

Thanks for making us think about this Mr M. It's natural for us college-educated denizens of the 21st century to look for parameters for sorting large piles of stuff, particularly music, art, literature. We do it every time we file our CDs or explain to people what kind of music we're into.

As we all know the cross-pollination, pluralities and exceptions within make these endeavours imperfect at best so any parameters we set can only ever be guidelines, ciphers, shorthand. I think we are stuck with imperfection.

The way we think about it can be represented accurately, but not simply. You can set it out as?a two-dimensional array. Time on one axis, Location on the other - time to play with the table functions of this software perhaps:

? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?	______PREWAR______	_____POSTWAR_____	_____MODERN_____
RURAL? ?	? ? Broonzy, Patton?? ?	? ? ? Broonzy? ? ? ? ? ? ?	? ?AYH?
URBAN? ?	? ? Broonzy? ? ? ??	? ? ? Broonzy ? ? ?	? ?AYH

So Big Bill is in a few squares. Patton's in one. So Charlie's a prewar rural player, Broonzy's a Both-War Rural Urbanist...? Alvin dabbles with all kinds of stuff so he occupies both location boxes but he can't get out of the Modern players column.

You could add other dimensions to this array, think of it as a cube. Electric / acoustic, geographical styles etc. You could also devise a way of indicating how strongly a player resides in a given box, shades of grey perhaps. This would bring out whether a player just dabbled in an area sometimes or was firmly rooted there. These refinements to the matrix would make it much harder to talk about in words of one syllable but would probably reflect the way we tend to think about it intuitively.

Slicing it by geographic style, e.g. Piedmont, Delta, Texas etc. would put many players in a lot of boxes a long way from their home towns, which reflects the amount of discussion that goes down on that whole topic.

[blueshome]

Thistype of debate is always amusing, arousing different levels of passion and interest. I don't really know how you can be specific - there are so many overlaps - how much influence didthe country background have on "urban" players? Did the "country" guys aspire to play like the more refined  urban or jazz style players?

The rule I apply without any theoretical foundation is "I know it when I hear it!"

By the way, just as a pebble in the pond, is stuff like early Howling Wolf (pre-Willie Dixon) not  "country"?

[Rivers]

Quote:
> By the way, just as a pebble in the pond, is stuff like early Howling Wolf (pre-Willie Dixon) not  "country"?

Exactly my point. Wolf is firmly in Post-War Rural & Urban boxes. So are Muddy, Fred and Houston Stackhouse.

What about Gospel? It somehow transcends rural and urban, being both and neither.

[frankie]

The country vs. city distinction is one that's informed Yazoo's latest bunch of releases - using that distinction rather than blues/country allowed them to put together some pretty nice anthologies that transcended racial and stylistic boundaries.

Rivers, you have the right idea with the grid - I think I may have used many (if not all) of those categories at one time or another to try and describe aspects of the music.? Interestingly, any one of them taken in isolation inevitably yields unsatisfactory results at some point.? Not that I'm against thinking about the music in any way...? I don't necessarily have a problem with fuzzy definitions.? If I like it, that's good enough.

Slack - I was also thinking about the distinction between a dance musician and street musician.? A dance musician would place emphasis on danceability & rhythm - the phrases would most likely fall into predictable patterns, but not always so, depending on the type of dancing that they played for.? For example, for a long time, it was thought that fiddler Willie Narmour never played for dances since his tunes were irregularly structured, even though they had a constant beat.? Turns out that at the time in Carroll County, everybody danced a two-step that didn't require predictable patterns the way squares do - the two step only requires a regular beat!? A street musician would place emphasis on expression and individuality without a whole lot of regard for predictability.

Someone like Lemon probably would fit in both camps - players like Frank Stokes, Mance Lipscomb and Blind Blake might be a better fit for the dance type.? Players like Ramblin' Thomas, Skip James (Drunken Spree notwithstanding), Bo Weavil Jackson or King Solomon Hill I tend to see as street musicians.?

In thinking about it, maybe there's some overlap between the dance/street comparison and the country/city...? oh well - seemed like a good idea at the time!

[Johnm]

Hi all,
Thanks for your thoughts on this this idea.? I was out all week-end teaching at a music camp in Canada and didn't get back 'til today, so missed the discussion while it was going on.? As I thought about the classifications later, I realized I had problems, not with the musically defining characteristics, but the names--"Country" and City" don't really cut it, because they don't correlate consistently with the origins of the different players, based on where they came from and their stylistic characteristics.? In addition, the terms have loaded connotations, as Dave pointed out.? Incidentally, I would put Bo Carter in the "City" category, based on his formal consistency and attention to harmony, despite being all over the place with his bass notes.? Lindy made a good point by bringing Jazz into the picture.? In many ways, I see Papa Charlie Jackson, Blake, and Lonnie Johnson as being Jazz players of a type in their era, rather than Country Blues players.? I am dubious of ascribing more "soul" to the country than city players, or making assumptions about their process of making and learning music, simply because I have never felt like I know how anyone other than myself experiences music--in fact I don't.? I think Mark's grid idea is interesting, particularly since it can show how a particular musician's music has changing qualities over time.? The various alternative classifications are interesting--ensemble/solo, dance/listening, dance/street.? At this point, I think I would set the classifications at:? "Received sense of form" and "Self-created sense of form".? They're pretty clunky,? but they get at the musical qualities I hear differentiating the musicians better than do terms like City/Country.
All best,
Johnm?

[Rivers]

At this point, I think I would set the classifications at:? "Received sense of form" and "Self-created sense of form".? They're pretty clunky,? but they get at the musical qualities I hear differentiating the musicians better than do terms like City/Country.

Nice. I agree, and to extend your thesis (and cunningly revive this thread ), it certainly applies to us individually as players today. Perhaps modern players, given the access to the whole history of recorded music, tend to pick and choose more. This makes for more variety but maybe it waters down what we would have done otherwise. To use your categories modern players seem to me to be a mix of received- and self-created sense of form.

Personally I love the 'fly trapped in amber' thing about the old recordings. We can say 'Lemon lifted that lick from so and so piano player' but mostly that's just an exception that illuminates the rule. My thing at present is to find my own stuff, or more accurately steal from people and music nobody's ever heard of or played on guitar and make it my own somehow.

Just occasionally I happen, always by a circuitous route, to find myself working on a lick or passage or something I've never heard anyone else do. When it works and then finds its way into my repertoire that is the best buzz. But if I'm honest it's always derivitive of something. I don't know if it's possible to be truly original in this day and age. In my case it's just in very short bursts.

[Johnm]

Hi Mark,
Good to hear what you've been working on recently, and how it has been going.  Re your comments on originality, I agree, it's very difficult to be truly original--more often what passes for originality may just be recognizing the possibility for some musical connection that has always been there but you've never heard expressed before.  And as far as that goes, if you are "too original", the connection between what you are doing and the tradition you're trying to work in may become tenuous to the breaking point, or be apparent only to you.  The description of your approach sounds somewhat like what I've tried to do over the years, which is sort of like, "Listen to everything, and then just do what you do."
All best,
Johnm