CREEM ONLINE: Blues Power

2000 Blues (Thank you Billy Gibbons wherever you are)

2003 was declared the year of the blues, by no less a force than the U.S. Congress. White Stripes’ Uncky Jack White has been channelin’ Son House since the second album. The thing is, Eric and Keef have been dropping Robert Johnson’s name way before li’l Jackie was born. CREEM’s forefathers were knee-deep into the blues way back in ’69, even sponsoring the once-brilliant Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival. Tell me how this couldn’t have influenced what was going around the scene, the original Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin like the Stones and Cream before them, all made pilgrimages to Chicago and Memphis. Hell, even our beloved Faces knew the blues well. I know Ronnie Wood put time in with the very same Son House, just listen to "Around The Plynth" or "That’s All You Need." Robert Plant went to the "Crossroads" as late as the ’80s to see what he could find. What was in the water? Where do you find "John the Conqueror root?" Get yourself a Mojo, start working. John Lee Hooker didn’t stop when he came up from the Delta, bypassing Memphis and Chi-town, heading east down Michigan Ave. and not stopping until he found Modern Records in Detroit. He brought his boogie with him and it still lives there today. The Stooges and MC5 heard it and found their very own psychedelic blues. Oh brother, I digress…

Alan Lomax: Popluar Songbook
Various Artists
Rounder Select

Music has become a commodity. Nowadays, a half-second of your life doesn’t pass by without some kind of slick, studio-styled sound byte hitting your ears. On top of that, music I actually like is getting grossly overexposed…I mean, if I can’t watch the baseball playoffs without hearing "Seven Nation Army," I really have no refuge.

The Alan Lomax: Popular Songbook collection goes back to a time when music was more special. To hear music during the Depression was a treat, whether by a still-shiny, highly coveted 78 or in some smoky sin-filled juke joint down on a dusty road. Lomax understood this, and in turn, documented some of the most important pieces of American culture.

The songs on the disc are of pure motivation— singers singing to tell a story, to teach a lesson, to orally pass on history. Whether a church congregation or a lonely Angola prisoner, the songs hold an honesty that makes the majority of modern music seem vacuous.

The collection does an incomparable job of compiling early versions of modern standards. While the versions of "Stagolee," "Goodnight Irene," "Sloop John B," "Gallows Pole," and "House of the Rising Sun" aren’t the earliest performances, they help complete the picture of what modern artists like the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and the Animals were drawing from.

There’s just something about listening to a 1933 no-fidelity recording of a group of prisoners singing "Black Betty" with gut-twisting precision that makes you feel kinda wrong—that I shouldn’t be making music, that so much has already been down so well and so long ago. But deep beneath my guilt lies the inspiration.

Popular Songbook inspires me to create something heartfelt. It inspires me to create something honest. It inspires me in the first place, which such a scant percentage of current music is capable of doing. This album should be given to children when they receive their immunization shots. If properly administered, it can easily keep children immune from such diseases as P. Diddy and Limp Bizkit.

—Ben Blackwell
October 2003

The blues have been much celebrated in the last few years starting with Dylan’s Songs of Jimmie Rodgers (white boy railroad blues) and Clinch Mountain Country (Appalachian hillbilly blues) and last year’s American Roots, the Grammy award winning Charlie Patton boxset from Revenant and of course the recent American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966 volumes one and two DVD collections and of course the much talked about PBS Martin Scrocsese Presents The Blues series.

Now we have all the fine by-products for those who can’t enough of the legends in their daily life. That’s right the fabulous Classic Blues Artwork From The 1920’s in the ever popular calendar format for 2004, even comes with a "bonus" CD of, you guessed it, the blues. Compiled by John Tefteller, the calendar is actually reproductions of newly discovered posters and artwork. Hardly nostalgic since most of this stuff hasn’t been seen in years. Boy Howdy’s daddy R.Crumb sums it up best; "These old blues ads are among the best music-related graphics ever produced, fabulous graphics for great music—a powerful combination! I have often and shamelessly used these old ads as a source for lettering and layouts in my own work, they’re so doggone charming! Steal from the best, I always say!" We surely do agree.

Is it a surprise then that America’s purest of art forms that we speak of would be stripped to the bone and collected as a volume of poetry? Collected lyrics of Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson and Ma Rainey. No surprise, it’s powerful stuff, Blues Poems from Everyman’s Library Pocket Books… presented in a beautifully hard bound collection. Blues influenced and inflected poems by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Cornelius Eady (where’s our main man John Sinclair?). You’ve heard it all before, the blues originated in the cotton fields (just like the Rutles originated there, but that’s another story all together). Slave songs, field hollers, spirituals, race records, whatever… the blues had a baby and they called it rock ’n’ roll.

—Dr. Robert
October 2003

Hallelujah, the real deep blues seem to be making a comeback. After so many years of being marginalized, bastardized and exploited, it seems like there’s an increasing amount of attention being paid to the lions of the genre.

As the stories in this update will attest, there’s a breathtaking amount of high-quality blues product hitting the streets these days.

Near the top of the list is the American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966, volumes one and two (the DVDs are sold separately, and there’s a companion audio CD compilation drawn from the two).

The festival was an annual event that brought a group of American blues masters to Europe every year from 1962-1966. The two volumes are compiled from a German television show. Collectively, the discs feature 36 previously unseen live performances from the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon, T-Bone Walker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Memphis Slim, Big Mama Thornton, Matt "Guitar" Murphy, Victoria Spivy, and the list goes on.

The black-and-white footage is of extremely high quality (it was shot by Michael Ballhaus, who went on to become an award-winning cinematographer on films like Gangs of New York and Goodfellas. The sound is likewise gorgeous, remastered by Eddie Kramer

The American Folk Blues Festival shows hold a big place in music. In England, many young budding musicians were exposed to these shows and were inspired. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Jimmy Page attended. These folks, like Bill Wyman (who contributes liner notes), went on to form bands of their own.

Now, you can't fault the Rolling Stones or Yardbirds (or any of their descendents) for having the good taste to enjoy this music. But you sure as hell can fault the American listening public for not reckoning with where that music came from. These two DVDs are a good place to begin that reckoning.

A good place to continue that reckoning Blues in the Mississippi Night, a new release in the Alan Lomax collection. After listening to this expanded reissue, you'll find it hard to listen to Robert Plant sing the blues with a straight face again.

This disc a reissue of a recording that first was released in 1959. It was recorded in 1947 and features Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim and Sonny Boy Williamson, playing songs and talking about the blues. In frank language, they talk about the brutality of Southern culture in which black lives were worth less than a mule.

The original version gave such a raw look at the shameful racist American culture of the time that the artists were frightened to have it released. In fact, they were so terrified that the recordings were initially released under pseudonyms.

It’s such a powerful statement that it will alter your view of so much of American culture (a phenomenon John Sinclair calls "Fattening Frogs for Snakes"). Thankfully Lomax was able to document it for our education.

—Brian J. Bowe
October 2003

Photo of Son House by Dick Waterman