Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  The fascination for blues finally spread into the conventional worlds of academia and governmental institutions. Beginning in the late 1920s and continuing through much of the Depression era, John Lomax, with eventual help from his son, Alan, collected American folk music, mostly for the Library of Congress. For the Lomaxes, music was the pathway into the soul of America. Together they traveled throughout the South, driving the back roads with a tape recorder, searching for songs that told stories and revealed something about the national character. Churches, fields, back porches, even prisons were all places they visited in search of American music.

  At the Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana they discovered a convicted murderer, Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, who could play guitar and sing songs that reflected African-American culture precisely the way the Lomaxes thought they should. In 1934 Lead Belly earned a pardon from prison after writing a song about Louisiana governor O.K. Allen, in which Lead Belly pleaded for his release. It is not certain how much influence, if any, John Lomax exerted on Allen, but upon going free, Lead Belly began a more formal association with the Lomax family, moving to New York and becoming the elder Lomax’s chauffeur. Lead Belly also began a recording career in the mid-thirties, and although his music seemed out-of-date and too “downhome” for urban blacks, the folk-blues singer struck a warm chord with white audiences, which viewed Lead Belly as an authentic black blues and folk specimen. Young left-leaning radicals in New York embraced him, and Lead Belly gave them back the kind of music that often attacked the bourgeois.

  Interest in authentic black music was best represented in 1938 and ‘39 by John Hammond’s From Spirituals to Swing concerts at Carnegie Hall, which brought together black artists from all walks of sacred and secular music. One of the artists he sought most was Robert Johnson; Hammond was fascinated with the sides that Johnson had cut for producer Don Law and hoped to present this mysterious Mississippi bluesman to New York’s urbane music audience, much like an anthropologist might share artifacts from an exotic culture. Hammond, however, was too late. The first concert was slated for December 1938; Johnson had been murdered a few months earlier.

  Despite his disappointment in not featuring Johnson, Hammond presented a number of amazing black artists in his From Spirituals to Swing event, which was a great critical success, prompting Hammond to stage a second show the following year. But 1939 would be more remembered as the start of World War II. And even though Germany’s aggression in Poland and later the Low Countries occurred thousands of miles away from the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta, east Texas, and the Carolinas, blacks, and the blues, would be seriously impacted by the events. The world grew darker with each passing month, as war spread through Europe and the threat of war grew stronger in Asia. America was on the sidelines in this brewing epic battle between democracy and fascism, but not for long. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, forcing the U.S. to declare war on Japan. Two days later, America also went to war with Germany and Italy. The world would never be the same, and neither would the blues.

  The story of the blues in the 1940s is the story of a people and a music on the move. The war years created opportunities for African-Americans that had never been presented before, and thousands were eager to take advantage. Beginning in 1940, black sharecroppers, farm hands, and laborers, often with their entire families in tow, left the South for northern cities where work in war factories was plentiful—and profitable. Nearly three million blacks left the South between 1940 and 1960. The migration was one of the largest shifts of people in twentieth-century America, and cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, Gary, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Newark, and New York saw a dramatic rise in their black population. Out west, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Seattle saw similar changes.

  This wasn’t the first black exodus from the South, just the largest. During World War I factories up North were faced with a shrinking work force as young white males joined the armed services to fight in Europe. Northern black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier persuaded black workers to leave the fields for factories. Thousands came, despite the hardships that went with the journey north, including cases of discrimination that were nearly as bad as those they had fled. The onset of the Depression dampened the prospects for economic opportunities up North, but still a steady stream of black workers made the trek anyway.

  World War II quickly put an end to the last vestiges of the Depression. Trains bound for Chicago were filled with young blacks looking for a chance to break out of the poverty that prevailed back home. They brought with them their music—the blues. And as black workers settled into a new, urban life, they relied on their music to see them through. Listening to the old country-blues sounds was a way to cure—or bring on—homesickness. But eventually, country blues began to sound out of place in the big city. For the blues to remain an important part of black culture, it had to absorb new ideas, new sounds, new ways of delivering the emotional highs and lows of black country folk in the big city. And that’s exactly what happened.

  The quest for volume resulted in one of the biggest changes in the blues. An acoustic guitar and accompanying voice sounded plenty loud in a juke joint or on a back porch in Mississippi. But up North, the acoustic guitar and vocals were frequently overwhelmed by the din of a nightclub and the busy sounds of a street corner. Beginning in the mid-1930s, some jazz guitarists began experimenting with the electric guitar, transforming the instrument from one that was full-strumming and rhythmic to one on which single-string solos could be played and heard. The electric guitar also broadened the possibilities for new tones and textures.

  One of the earliest blues musicians to make a musical statement using an electric guitar was Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, who began playing the instrument in the late 1930s. Walker’s sound was smooth, richly complex, and very jazzlike. Little of what he played had hard connections to country blues. Electrifying country blues so they could survive in an urban setting fell to a young Mississippi transplant to Chicago by the name of McKinley Morganfield, whose friends called him Muddy Waters. In the process of modernizing country blues, Waters created a sound that was bigger, louder, and hotter than practically anything that had come before it.

  The roots of the early electric blues that Waters played came out of the country-blues sounds of Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson. In 1941, just a couple of years before Waters moved to Chicago, Alan Lomax had come across him in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, where Lomax recorded the young bluesman for the Library of Congress. Waters sang and played as if he were the natural descendant of Johnson and the rest of the early blues greats. He carried this classic country-blues sound, with its slashing slide guitar and raw chords, to Chicago. Once there, Waters began to adapt the blues and his delivery of the music to what he heard around him.

  Waters wouldn’t have made the impact he did without the means to get his music out. Fortunately, two brothers, Phil and Leonard Chess, Polish Jews who had gone into the nightclub business in Chicago, decided to broaden their reach. Believing bigger money was possible in the making and selling of records, the Chess brothers bought into the nascent Aristocrat label in 1947, which had been issuing jazz discs, and began looking for blues talent to record. The Chess brothers hit pay dirt when they brought Waters into the recording studio to cut “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and “I Feel Like Going Home,” with bass accompaniment by Big Crawford in 1948. It wasn’t the first time that Waters recorded in Chicago. In 1946, two years after he had begun using an electric guitar, Waters recorded for Lester Melrose, but his performance was less than convincing. In February 1948, Waters first recorded for Leonard Chess, but Chess was not impressed, either. Nonetheless, Chess brought Waters back into the studio in April of that year. The session began with a couple songs that included Sunnyland Slim on piano and Crawford on bass. There was little magic. Unfazed, Waters decided to play a pair of songs that he had recorded for Lomax back in Mississippi.
But there were differences: Waters was seven years older and more mature as a bluesman, and where he once recorded the songs with an acoustic guitar, this time it was with an electric, an instrument that now felt right at home in Waters’ rugged hands.

  Waters’ sound was steeped in country blues, which would appeal to those blacks just up from Mississippi and homesick. “I Feel Like Going Home” was all about longing for a familiar place. But when the song was performed on the electric guitar, Waters gave it a new vitality. It sounded like it was recorded in Chicago, even though it had been written in Mississippi. It was old and new, country and urban. As for the A side, “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” Waters sang and played it with an urgency and a vigor that smacked of sexual frustration. It was a one-two punch, and although Leonard Chess had not yet understood what made for a great blues performance—he was irritated by his inability to understand what Waters sang—he reluctantly agreed to put out the record and see what happened.

  What happened was that nearly all three thousand copies of the song sold in one day. Waters’ success caused a number of things to happen. First, it put him on a path to blues stardom and solidified his career as a recording artist. Second, it began the transformation of Aristocrat from a jazz to a blues label. Third, it regained for Chicago the attention of the blues fans; the city now shared the spotlight with Memphis, at a time when equally exciting things were happening blueswise in that city. And fourth, it announced that a new blues sound and a new blues era were dawning. Muddy’s record had an effect that would continue to resonate unlike any blues recording of its era.

  Despite the success of his first record, Waters continued to search for a richer and fuller sound. Waters had begun to play black clubs and beer joints on the South Side of Chicago with a band that included Little Walter Jacobs, a harmonica player; drummer Elgin Evans; and another guitarist, Jimmy Rodgers. Amplification wasn’t just an asset with Waters. Little Walter deftly played his harmonica into the microphone, which he used as an extension of his instrument rather than merely as a means to increase its volume. And when Evans punctuated this new blues sound with a steady backbeat, dance floors got crowded—and fast. Soon other blues bands began forming in Chicago, permanently transforming the music and its place in American history.

  Blues bands were reshaping the music in Memphis, too. In addition to its Delta connection and Beale Street, Memphis also had WDIA, the nation’s first all-black-format radio station that hired upstarts like a young Riley King to spin blues records and plug Pepticon, a cure-all tonic. A guitar player and aspiring bluesman, King had moved from Mississippi to Memphis, where he met Sonny Boy Williamson, a blues singer and harmonica player who understood the value of radio.

  In 1941, Williamson and guitarist Robert “Junior” Lockwood (who had been taught to play by Robert Johnson when Johnson was living with Lockwood’s mother) approached KFFA, a station in Helena, Arkansas, about doing a live blues show on the air. The manager agreed, sensing the opportunity for the duo to push King Biscuit Flour to black listeners. Each day at noon the group, which would eventually include Peck Curtis on drums and Dudlow Taylor on piano, played for fifteen minutes on the KFFA King Biscuit Flour Time, with the Interstate Grocer Company as its sponsor.

  King Biscuit Flour Time was a big success; sales soared and Sonny Boy and his blues buddies grew more popular than they’d ever been in the Delta, since the station blanketed the region. The show eventually also featured Sonny Payne, a white announcer and friend of Lockwood’s, who gave the show stability when Williamson got the itch to wander—which, after 1944, was often. After cutting a series of seminal sides for the Jackson, Mississippi-based Trumpet label that proved Williamson’s talent not only as a harmonica player but also as a singer, songwriter, and bandleader, Williamson left another mark in Chicago in the 1950s, cutting sides for Chess and rivaling Little Walter as the city’s most innovative blues harp player.

  “Of all the blues artists that we love, our favorites would probably be Son House, Blind Willie McTell, and Skip James—but it’s Robert Johnson who inspired and influenced us most. He was a full-ranged, truly beautiful singer; good and evil are equally present in his songs. A tagalong to Charley Patton, Son House, and Willie Brown, Johnson in most ways surpassed them all. He outsang, outplayed, and outperformed all of the greats of his time in that area of Mississippi, even though he wasn’t as popular as them.”

  —Jack White, The White Stripes

  Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy (from left) cut some sides in the Chess studio, 1964.

  Riley King, who on the air in Memphis was known as “Blues Boy” or “B.B.” King, used his time at WDIA to build a reputation in the blues community and to study the many records he had at his disposal. King might have been a cotton picker and tractor driver in Mississippi, but his taste in music was very cultured, and he preferred jazz as much as he did downhome blues. King was struck by the elaborate guitar musings of Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker and loved a lush big-band blues sound that a hot horn section could provide.

  King also admired Louis Jordan, one of the most popular black recording artists of the day. Jordan had scaled down the big-band idea to a more economical “combo” in the years after World War II, when black America seemed to be searching for a fresher sound that was a bit different from the swing bands. Using fewer musicians and insisting on driving dance rhythms with bluesy strains, Jordan created a new “jump” blues sound that would fall under the banner of rhythm & blues in the late 1940s. Jordan also had a knack for spicing up his songs with humor and jive, thus giving “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens,” “Is You Is, or Is You Ain’t (My Baby),” “Five Guys Named Moe,” and “Caldonia” an irresistible charm.

  Jump blues replaced swing as the music of choice in black nightclubs, and there were dozens of black bands, singers, and musicians creating the sounds. Jump blues bands featured “honking” saxophones and “shouting” singers. At times the music was rowdy and raw, but the insistence was always that the blues “jump.” This was feel-good music: The war was over, the nation’s economic footing was firmer than ever, and there existed hope that the gains made by African-Americans in the 1940s would not only stick but enable still more progress to be made in eliminating racial prejudice in America. So the feeling up North and on the West Coast, where jump blues was particularly popular, was best summed up by Jordan when he sang, “Let the good times roll!”

  B.B. King took what he learned from Charlie Christian, T-Bone Walker, and Jordan, fused it with his experiences gained by playing and hanging with other Memphis blues musicians like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Rosco Gordon, and Johnny Ace (known loosely as the Beale Streeters), and turned it all into a sound that made a big impact in the blues community. King began his recording career in 1949; two years later he had a Number One hit on the fledgling rhythm & blues charts with “Three O’Clock Blues.” King was as good a singer as he was a guitarist, always stressing a gospel influence. And with his penchant to get the most out of his band, King and company crisscrossed the country in a bus playing one-night stands in nightclubs and roadhouses, becoming one of the most popular blues bands in 1950s America.

  Despite the popularity of the music in the postwar years, the business of the blues was shaky, shady, exploitative, and driven almost entirely by the chance to make a quick buck at the expense of naive musicians. More times than not, blues musicians received a single payment for a recording session; royalties were unheard of in the blues world. Similarly, songwriters were paid a fee for their songs and often had to share credit for composing the music with a producer or record company owner. By the late 1940s, most of the major record companies had lost interest in the blues. This gave a chance for a slew of small, independent record labels like Chess, RPM, Modern, Bullet, and others to gain control of the blues market.

  B.B. King (far left) and his band spent endless days and nights on the road beginning in the late 1940s.

  “YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU”

  By
Lou Willie Turner (As sung by Big Joe Turner)

  I know you love me, baby

  But you never tell me so

  I know you love me, baby, but you never tell me so

  If you don’t tell me that you love me

  I’m gonna pack my rags and go

  I live across the street from a juke joint, baby

  And all night long they play the blues

  I live across the street from a juke joint, baby

  And all night long they play the blues

  Every time they spin the record

  Honey it makes me think of you

  There’s one record in particular, baby

  Always sticks in my mind

  Yeah, there’s one little song in particular

  Always sticks in my mind

  Every time they play it, baby,

  I start right in to crying

  Baby, please don’t leave me

  Play the blues for me

  Please play the blues for me

  [sung over sax solo]

  Now I’m gonna fall across my bed, baby

  Cry myself to sleep

  I’m gonna fall across my bed baby

  And cry myself to sleep

  And in my dreams I can hear you saying, “Lover, please come back to me”

  A Memphis recording service owned by Sam Phillips, conveniently called the Memphis Recording Service, cut tracks by a number of blues artists, including B.B. King, James Cotton, Walter Horton, Little Junior Parker, and a big strapping hulk of a bluesman known as Howlin’ Wolf, who had arrived in West Memphis in 1948, leaving behind the life of a Mississippi sharecropper. Phillips understood black music, wasn’t afraid to record it (even though Memphis was one of the mid-South’s most segregated cities), and believed the blues was an important American music form, though at the time it was made by black artists for black audiences. Phillips’ outfit leased blues recordings for release by other small labels, eventually releasing some on his own label, Sun, until a young white singer named Elvis Presley showed up one day in 1954. With Phillips’ encouragement, Presley revolutionized popular music by taking a blues song, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” hyping its rhythm with a nervous, youthful energy, and singing it like no one had sung a blues song before. Unknowingly, Presley created a brand-new hybrid sound: rock & roll.