Psst. Don’t tell anyone, but the blues is back.
Some would undoubtedly say it ain’t never left. But the current resurgence of the blues as a pop culture fad first began last year, when Congress got its mojo working and officially mandated 2003 as the “Year of the Blues.” (Given our political and economic climate just now, looks like they picked a winner.)
Confessing the blues: James Blood Ulmer Juke-joint jam: Cafe R&B at Eli’s. Credits: Sam Bortnick
Heading into the YOTB’s final months, the biggest attempt to tap into the zeitgeist’s bloodstream with twelve-bar progressions has arrived: PBS’ new series The Blues, in wh ich executive producer Martin Scorsese and six other directors attempt to do for blues what Ken Burns did for jazz. In addition to the official series box set, there’s also a thirteen-part comprehensive radio series airing nationally, and at least 35 individual blues albums and compilations bursting forth from major labels to slake America’s expected thirst for the seminal genre, which devout disciples continue to call the true father of rock, soul, jazz, and rap, shouting from the mountaintop until they’re blue in the face.
Moreover, if the just-concluded SF Blues Festival (headlined by Taj Mahal) wasn’t enough, YOTB celebrations still rage on at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland, the Bistro in Hayward, and Biscuits & Blues and the Boom Boom Room in SF, among other fine local establishments. Now don’t that just make you want to wang dang doodle all night long?
But this makeshift blues renaissance has provoked discussion as well as celebration, as evidenced by a recent panel discussion and preview of The Blues sponsored by KQED. The event drew an enthusiastic crowd of dyed-in-the-denim devotees to SF’s staid Herbst Theatre, where Charlie Musselwhite jammed with two students from Berkeley’s Jazzschool, and Ronnie Stewart of the Bay Area Blues Society waxed poetic about West Coast blues and announced plans for a Blues Walk of Fame.
The predominantly white audience also got an unexpected reality check from Zakiya Hooker, John Lee’s daughter and an artist in her own right. In the midst of what was announced as a spoken-word poem, she launched into a not-so-subtle diatribe against racism and co-optation of the blues. For Hooker, it remains a touchy — and undeniably political — subject. In a separate interview, she suggests the blues began the day African slaves first arrived in America.
“When they brought us across the middle passage,” she says, “they offered us this wonderful opportunity. The opportunity was to pick cotton. We didn’t bring anything. All we had to draw upon was what we brought with us. So this is what we used when we were put in those fields.”
The tribal chants of the motherland, Hooker says, segued into the field hollers, which in turn laid the foundation for the down-home blues of the Mississippi Delta. Because the juke joints and roadhouses of the South were often not equipped with electricity, the music was usually acoustic — the electric blues developed later, in Chicago and other northern cities. Once the blues took recorded form — initially promoted by a host of black-owned independent labels — early pioneers such as Robert Johnson and Lightnin’ Hopkins found a tremendous following among African-American listeners.
Hopkins’ “Katie Mae” — featured on the new Blues Kingpins set (see sidebar) — tells listeners just about everything they need to know about the blues in one fell swoop, delivered in a shrill voice trembling with vibrato:
Yeah, you know Katie Mae’s a good girl
Folks say she done run around at night
You know you can bet your last dollar
Katie Mae will treat you right
His devotion, desire, and frustration all tangled up in blue, Hopkins’ testimonial aches with longing and regret, painting a provocative picture while leaving much to the imagination.
Yeah, you know I tried to give that woman everything in the world she needs
That’s why she don’t do nothing but lay in the bed and read
You know she walks like she got all the wealth in her backyard
Yes, you’ll never hear that woman hooting hollering and crying
And talking about the times being hard
As for those hard times, Hopkins lets his guitar speak for him. The solo that follows is a staccato needlepoint of rapid-fire atonal “blue” notes, which somehow soothe even the most worried mind.
Apparently a real stickler for aesthetics, Hopkins didn’t go for much excess instrumentation on his tunes. He generally played bass, rhythm, and lead guitar on most of the songs; a few were embellished with ragtime-y piano runs. Even without drums or percussion, however, there’s plenty of rhythm there.
John Lee Hooker began his career in a similar mode: On his early sides, the singer is typically accompanied only by his own guitar, tapping the beat with his feet. He could get away with such minimalism because of his unforgettable voice, a rich instrument of remarkable tonality and subtle inflection. As his daughter — a spitting image were it not for her dyed-blond hair — reminisces, that voice holds warm memories for her. “I have never in my life heard anyone who sings like my father. His voice is so unique,” she said, using the present tense to describe her departed dad. “I picked up a lot of his riffs, the way he says things.”
So did practically everyone else. John Lee’s lyrics, phrasing, and cadences influenced such white rock artists as 10cc, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, the Yardbirds, George Thorogood, and ZZ Top, to name a few. Yet it wasn’t until his later years, after he moved to the Bay Area, that he began to collect richly deserved royalties.
Evolved, but not too evolved
If the blues don’t just represent a museum piece — and indeed comprise a still-vibrant art form — we need more compelling new releases like James Blood Ulmer’s No Escape from the Blues.
Ulmer’s 2001 album, Memphis Blood, traced the blues back to its rural Southern roots. Appropriately, No Escape from the Blues represents a progression, paying tribute to the music’s migration to big urban cities and Jimi Hendrix’ psychedelic voodoo style. No Escape consists entirely of covers, with a few songs from Ulmer himself — including his underappreciated mid-’80s tune “Are You Glad to Be in America?,” whose bittersweet observations seem just as relevant under the second Bush administration as they were during the Reagan years. Ulmer’s gravelly vocals shred like a rusty nail through a stained-glass window, while producer Vernon Reid adds blistering lead guitar and banjo riffs to the proceedings.
No Escape‘s crown jewel is Ulmer’s reading of “Who’s Been Talking.” He doesn’t outdo Howlin’ Wolf’s version — that’s just not possible — but the fact that he’s able to put his own spin on a tune so identified with such an iconic artist pegs Ulmer as a master of the blues, too, dropping his voice down to a faint, guttural, strikingly poignant whisper as he sings the tale of loss and regret.
Over the phone, Ulmer’s grainy voice resonates with the authenticity of a man on intimate terms with the blues. No Escape‘s title, he relates, is both an observation and a lesson learned from personal experience.
“The blues is the soul of a man,” he says. His words come slowly, like molasses. “How can you escape your soul? I don’t know.”
As Ulmer explains, the blues can take many forms: “I don’t really think it’s always music. I think you could have the blues without playing music. I mean, you don’t have to be a musician to feel the blues. But when a musician starts speaking in the language of the blues, people understand it.”
He feels the continued relevance of the half-protest song, half-patriotic anthem “Are You Glad to Be in America?” has as much to do with America’s continuing social ills as its diverse population: “The question needs to be asked, but you’re almost afraid to ask it. It’s like asking your woman, ‘Do you really love me?'”
Ulmer came to the blues like innumerable bluesmen before him: against the express wishes of his parents. His mom and dad were churchgoin’ people; as a boy, Ulmer wasn’t allowed to have a record player in the house. His folks, he says, regarded the blues as “devil music” and refused to encourage their son’s musical aspirations. “I guess the way they’d tell was, if you couldn’t do it in church, then it wasn’t good,” he reminisces. “You have to admit, some of that blues, you just couldn’t go into church and play that.”
Even so, he still considers the blues a fountain of positivity: “I think blues is a very valid, very important part of bringing the message to the people to stop degrading themselves, and start upgrading themselves.”
Although Memphis Blood and No Escape marry tradition with updated technology, Ulmer’s not too keen on newfangled contemporary blues. “It’s like jazz,” he ponders. “How can you change jazz from what jazz has already put down? See, blues is something that should be kept, not changed. Kept in its original form. All jazz, all black music of America, should be kept in its original form.”
Reverent, but not too reverent
Ulmer has a point, but it’s hard to deny a hot-shit 21st century blues band like LA’s Cafe R&B. Recently the band knocked the socks off an all-ages crowd at the newly reopened Eli’s; Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign” should not be sung by the faint-hearted, and Cafe vocalist Roach is anything but — she’s a blues diva out of the Etta James mold, wrapping her voice around a lyric like I’ve been down since I began to crawl and refusing to let go.
Cafe R&B originals such as “Snatch It Back and Hold It” — which drew repeated requests from the audience even after it had been played — went over just as well as classic covers. Watching Roach vamp on stage, exhorting the crowd into spontaneous expositions of tap-dancing, it was hard to argue against the blues as a still-vital and still-evolving art form.
Of course, the authentic juke-joint atmosphere of Eli’s, off-and-on “home of the West Coast blues” since 1974, helped out the vibe considerably. Club proprietor Frank Klein is practically giddy about this blues resurgence: “I think it’s fantastic, and it’s just gonna get hotter,” he says. The PBS series “is gonna help everyone that’s stuck it out with the blues for so long.”
Excitedly, he mentions upcoming Eli’s shows with Bobby Rush, Joe Louis Walker, and Elvin Bishop. Glancing over at the city-owned parking lot next to the venue, he confides, “I hope they let me use that. We’re gonna need it for Elvin Bishop.”
Klein is clearly enjoying America’s renewed love affair with the blues, but some lingering questions remain: After the Year of the Blues has passed, will the nostalgia for the art form fade also? And does increased awareness of the blues among white audiences mean anything if young black people aren’t up on the history?
This last point is especially significant because hip-hop (and to some extent neo-soul and dancehall reggae) currently fills the niche blues and R&B once held among young African-American listeners. Ironically, with very few exceptions — like Jay-Z’s version of Bobby Bland’s “Ain’t No Love” — the blues hasn’t been sampled extensively by hip-hop producers. Still, its outlaw attitudes and lyrical themes have been referenced in rap time and time again, knowingly or not.
John Lee Hooker’s “I’m Bad Like Jesse James,” for example, would probably be considered gangsta by today’s standards: Hooker tells his friend, whom he suspects of having an affair with his wife, Look guy, I’m gonna warn you/Next time, I’m gonna use my gun on you. But though Hooker leaves no doubt about his meaning, he doesn’t overstate his point. Read between the lines/What’s gonna happen to you, he calmly states. His words are graphic, yet contain a subtlety not often found in the music of today’s urban storytellers, who could learn a lot from an O.G. like John Lee.
Whether the YOTB momentum will continue in 2004 remains to be seen. But even the most skeptical will have to admit that Ken Burns’ Jazz, while far from perfect, increased awareness of the artists outside the genre’s core group of aficionados. The Blues will do the same. After all, there’s no denying that the blues are the backbone of all American pop music. When the latest fad du jour — boy bands, electroclash, neo-folk, thug-pop — has come and gone, the blues will still be around for later generations to discover. Maybe not at the forefront, but certainly in the background. Because as long as people have problems, gut feelings, and stories to tell, the blues will remain relevant.
Whether the musical element of the blues can be kept in its original form, as Ulmer suggests, is a trickier call. After all, American life continues to change; American culture changes along with it. But it’s fair to say that once something is considered classic, it never really goes out of style. It just gets recycled and updated. In any event, Ulmer’s right about one thing: There really is no escape from the blues, especially when they keep coming back.
Bringin’ Home the Blues
A few recorded suggestions for the curious or uninitiated.
Blues Kingpins (The Right Stuff/EMI)
In addition to remarkable early recordings by Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, this series also features influential material by B.B. King, Ike Turner, Fats Domino, and Elmore James. The set spotlights the evolution of the blues from back-porch ditties to big-band production numbers, foreshadowing the birth of rock ‘n’ roll in no uncertain terms.
20th Century Masters: The Millennium Collection (Chess/MCA)
A good choice for music fans on a beer budget or folks just getting hip to the blues, this ongoing series includes a new single-disc set by Howlin’ Wolf (which shows why he’s considered one of the greatest blues vocalists ever), as well as three basically interchangeable new collections: Blues Classics, Blues Guitar, and Blues-Rock Songbook. Highlights include Bobby “Blue” Bland’s near-definitive version of “Stormy Monday Blues” and Buddy Guy’s engaging “My Time After Awhile.”
The Real Folk Blues (Chess/MCA)
This set features remastered albums from John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Sonny Boy Williamson, which introduced a generation of rock ‘n’ rollers to the blues when first issued in the ’60s. Among the highlights is Williamson’s “Bring It on Home,” which resonates with an authenticity not found on Led Zeppelin’s cover version; there’s also Hooker’s original rendition of “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.”
American Blues (Putumayo)
This collection takes a novel, updated approach to the venerable genre, featuring both traditionalists like Sugar Pie DeSanto and up-and-coming stars like Chris Thomas King, Susan Tedeschi, and Keb Mo’. Several songs widen the often-personal nature of the genre to express global concerns, like Solomon Burke’s “None of Us Are Free,” whose socially-aware message offers a post-civil rights, post-hip-hop perspective: None of us are free as long as some of us are chained.
