Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  The blues, though, didn’t dry up and die. On the contrary: The music came to a crossroads and took a different turn. Along the way the music picked up a new audience—white people. In England in the early sixties interest in the blues and blues culture took off with young musicians absorbing every blues recording that came their way. Bands formed and dedicated themselves to replicating the blues. The early British blues advocates had also been fans of American folk music and jazz. They enjoyed skiffle, a homegrown hodgepodge of English and American folk and traditional music, with a nod toward pop. Lonnie Donegan, skiffle’s most popular recording artist, recorded Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line” in 1954 and turned it into a huge hit in England. Chris Barber and Alexis Korner collected jazz and blues records and played the music as well. It was Barber who organized the tour with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee in the U.K. and who arranged for Muddy Waters to follow shortly thereafter. Together with Cyril Davies and John Mayall, Barber and Korner laid the foundation for the sixties British blues movement, inspiring young musicians such as Eric Burdon (the Animals); Eric Clapton (the Yardbirds); Jack Bruce (Cream); Graham Bond and Long John Baldry (Blues Incorporated); Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts (the Rolling Stones); Mick Fleetwood and Peter Green (Fleetwood Mac); and many others to form blues-based bands and give the music a new path.

  The 1961 release of King of the Delta Blues Singers made Robert Johnson’s music available to blues fans and musicians. Aspiring guitarists on both sides of the Atlantic threw themselves into King of the Delta Blues Singers as if it unveiled the blues’ deepest secrets. Many tried, but few mastered Johnson’s guitar style. Eventually, the best of the young British blues players picked up enough riffs to acceptably interpret the blues. What they lacked, of course, was authenticity. Not being American, their life experiences did not have the cultural and racial underpinnings to express blues nuances. The blues evolved out of a distinctively black tradition that even many white Americans had trouble identifying with. Being British and white was a double disadvantage.

  Big Bill Broonzy found a new audience in coffeehouses in the 1950s.

  Still, bands like the Rolling Stones, who had formed around 1962, persevered. Named after “Rolling Stone,” a popular Muddy Waters song, each member of the band shared an adoration for the blues that seemed to know no bounds. An early sixties performance by the Stones might have included interpretations of such American blues gems as Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom,” Muddy Waters’ “I Want to Be Loved” and “Tiger in Your Tank,” and Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City.”

  European blues fans were fortunate that two Germans, Horst Lippman and Fritz Rau, decided to launch an American blues tour of the Continent in 1962 that featured the likes of T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, and others. First calling their endeavor the American Negro Blues Festival, the promoters later changed it to the American Folk Blues Festival and kept it going annually through 1971. Attending the festival was like going to blues college for aspiring British and European blues musicians. Dozens of major blues artists toured with the American Folk Blues Festival during its tenure, giving bluesmen and blueswomen new audiences and enabling blues fans beyond the States to experience and enjoy the music firsthand.

  The American Folk Blues Festival opened up other English and European possibilities for the blues. When Sonny Boy Williamson toured England in 1963, he wore an English bowler’s hat and a dapper pinstripe suit, and worked in front of the Yardbirds, with Eric Clapton on guitar. Williamson didn’t think much of the band or British blues audiences, but he didn’t mind the paycheck. It was considerably more than he could earn in America at the time. When bluesman Big Joe Williams received his money after the end of an English tour, he cried. It was much more than he had ever earned in his life.

  Back home, however, black audiences, particularly young ones, continued to move away from the blues and closer to soul. All but abandoned was acoustic-driven country blues, which simply summed up too many painful memories of Jim Crow, sharecropping, and lynchings. The genre was saved, however, by young white kids, many of them in college, who had grown bored with the current crop of homogenized rock & rollers, or teen idols. Bobby Rydell, Fabian, and Bobby Vee eschewed the rebellious, sexually overt sounds and styles of such pioneering rockers as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and others for a teen sound that was as dangerous—and as exciting—as white bread.

  On college campuses across America in the early sixties, folk music, with its heady lyrics and authentic sounds, attracted listeners eager for a more meaningful music experience. Country blues fit right in with the growing fascination with bluegrass, hillbilly, Cajun, and traditional music from Appalachia and the Ozarks. Suddenly, a full-fledged folk music revival was in swing in America.

  The first major folk festival of the “folk revival,” a term most folkies hated since they believed folk music never went away in the first place, was in Newport, Rhode Island—on the surface, an unlikely setting since it was a vacation community for the rich. But with a jazz festival already in place there, music impresario George Wein used its infrastructure and introduced a prototype folk festival in 1959, the weekend after the Newport Jazz Festival.

  Among other roots music artists, the Newport Folk Festival featured Robert Pete Williams, a country-blues singer from Louisiana, found at Angola Prison Farm by Dr. Harry Oster, a folklorist in the Lomax mold. Lomax was still such a powerful figure in American folk music that it was only a matter of time before others would venture off in search of undiscovered music talent in the hills, bayous, fields, and prisons of America. Oster was a certified folklorist; he had the Ph.D. to prove it. Another roots music enthusiast and aspiring musician, Ralph Rinzler, worked for the Smithsonian. But others, amateurs, really, set out to do the work of folklorists in the early and mid-sixties based on their passion for the music. Young white country-blues fans, such as Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro, Nick Perls, guitarist John Fahey, and later Chris Strachwitz, bought tape recorders, hopped into cars, and headed south for Mississippi, Tennessee, and other southern states to mine music gold. And they did. Son House was rediscovered (in Rochester, New York, of all places); so were Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Sippie Wallace, Little Brother Montgomery, Sleepy John Estes, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Mance Lipscomb, and others. Pulled from poverty and obscurity, many of them having given up performing and making records long ago, these country-blues artists were now playing the Newport festival in one of the wealthiest communities in America for northern white audiences who adored their authentic sounds. Few of these bluesmen minded, though it was obvious to them that the atmosphere was circuslike and their new fans viewed them curiously, like relics. House and James and a few others had their recording careers resuscitated by the folk revival. Many of the other blues artists who were invited to play Newport in the early sixties also found work on city concert stages and the college coffeehouse circuit, as well as the other folk festivals that were sprouting up all over the country.

  “PRISONER’S TALKING BLUES”

  By Robert Pete Williams

  [Spoken:] Lord I feel so bad sometime,

  Seem like that I’m weakenin’ every day

  You know I begin to get gray since I got here

  Well, a whole lot of worry cause that.

  But I can feel myself weakenin’,

  I don’t keep well no more

  I keeps sickly.

  I takes a lot of medicine, but it look like it don’t do no good.

  All I have to do is pray, that’s the only thing that’ll help me here,

  One foot in the grave look like

  And the other one out.

  Sometime it look like my best day

  gotta be my last day Sometime I feel like I never see my little ole kids anymore

  But if I don’t never see ‘em no more, leave ‘em in the hands of God.

  You know, my
sister, she like a mother to me

  She do all in the world that she can

  She went all the way along with me in this trouble ‘til the end.

  In a way, I was glad my poor mother had [de]ceased

  Because she suffered with heart trouble,

  And trouble behind me sho’ woulda went hard with her.

  But if she was livin’, I could call on her sometime.

  But my old father’s dead, too,

  That make me be motherless and fatherless.

  It’s six of us sisters, three boys

  Family done got smaller now, look like they’re dyin’ out fast.

  I don’t know, but God been good to us in a way,

  ‘Cause ole death have stayed away a long time.

  [Sung:] Lord, my worry sure carryin’ me down,

  Lord, my worry sure is carryin’ me down.

  Sometime I feel like, baby, committin’ suicide, [repeat]

  I got the nerve if I just had somethin’ to do it with.

  I’m goin’ down slow, somethin’ wrong with me [repeat]

  I got to make a change whilst that I’m young,

  If I don’t, I won’t never get old.

  Mississippi blues greats Skip James (left) and Son House were both rediscovered in 1964.

  Electric blues would be thrown a life preserver by whites, too. In 1960 Muddy Waters brought his band to play the Newport Jazz Festival. As Robert Gordon remarked in Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, “The terms of Muddy’s personal acquaintance with white America were established at the Newport Jazz Festival … he dropped in on the folk scene like a museum exhibit from the wild—jungle music authenticated by jungle men.” Waters and his band ripped up Newport, demonstrating that the fervor and ferociousness of electric blues remained and proving that although electric blues might have lost its luster with young blacks, the music still owned a vitality that could match that of soul or rock.

  Black Chicago didn’t abandon the blues the way other cities did; the music was just too embedded in the culture and day-to-day survival there. On the South Side, black clubs and joints like Pepper’s and Theresa’s continued to feature blues, giving older musicians a place to perform and socialize and younger players a place to learn. By the mid-sixties, the Chicago blues scene had produced a brand-new crop of musicians who guaranteed that electric blues would continue to thrive. Guitarists Buddy Guy, Freddie King, Otis Rush, Earl Hooker, and Magic Sam forged a more modern blues guitar sound. Their talent was such that, on occasion, you’d never think there was any other black music but the blues attracting young black music talent. All five guitarists cut their blues teeth in Chicago clubs, learning from the Chess blues masters, yet creating a style of their own that had little to do with country blues save the inspiration that was a given. Guy, Rush, and company were the first generation of blues players who didn’t have much memory of the pre-World War II years, when the acoustic guitar still played the dominant role in the blues. To them, the blues was best electrified.

  Oddly, the man who had inspired everyone to pick up the electric guitar, Muddy Waters, returned to his acoustic roots in the early sixties. Hoping to capitalize on the folk and country-blues revival, Waters recorded a convincing album, Folk Singer, in 1964, followed by The Real Folk Blues and More Real Folk Blues, both of which contained tracks recorded earlier in Muddy’s career. Chess released a pair of country-blues albums by Howlin’ Wolf with the same two latter titles. But live, both Wolf and Waters continued to play electric blues in Chicago clubs, prompting young white aspiring blues guitarists to begin to venture into the black ghetto to hear the masters, A few of them became all-absorbing students. Eventually, the studying began to pay off.

  Harmonica player and Chicago native Paul Butterfield built his harp style and attitude toward the blues from the firsthand inspiration he drew from Little Walter and the other blues harp players heard in the South Side blues clubs he frequented. Not all of the white kids who came looking for blues authenticity were welcomed in these all-black clubs, but Butterfield was, and he took full advantage of it. Quickly, Butterfield became the best white blues harmonica player in the city. In 1963 he formed the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The group included a young white Jewish guitar player, Mike Bloomfield, who played with the same kind of blues passion expressed by Butterfield and with at least the same amount of talent, and Elvin Bishop, a second guitarist. The group also featured a black rhythm section—Sam Lay on drums and Jerome Arnold on bass, two veterans from Howlin’ Wolf’s band—making the Butterfield band a fully integrated outfit when such a concept was rare, not just in Chicago blues but in any kind of black music. (In Memphis, Booker T. and the MGs also sported a black-white mix. Booker T. Jones on organ and Al Jackson on drums were black musicians; guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn, white.)

  The Paul Butterfield Blues Band released its first album in 1965 and proved that a mostly white band could play the blues—and play it well. Its success sparked the creation of other white blues bands and made Chicago a place to come to learn from the legends. Boz Scaggs and Steve Miller, two young guitarists who would make their mark in San Francisco later in the decade, came to Chicago hoping to hear the blues musicians they knew only from listening to records. Harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite had arrived in 1962 from Memphis and became as adept at playing his instrument as Butterfield, and equally accepted in the city’s blues community. From England came the Rolling Stones, whose dream it was to meet some of their Chicago blues heroes and to record at Chess Records, which they did.

  Paul Butterfield (left) and Michael Bloomfield played together in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

  According to Chuck D, “Hendrix was able to take the blues and put it on steroids.”

  With traditional country blues finding a new audience with young white kids in the early sixties, it was only a matter of time before electric blues had also made the shift from black audiences to white. The success of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band certainly helped, giving white blues fans a few white blues heroes of their own. But the real thrusts came from England and from San Francisco. In the former, not only was black blues, country and urban, embraced by the best young musicians in London and other cities, but experiments in blending blues with rock were becoming the most exciting sounds of the music scene there. The same interest in a blues-rock hybrid was occurring around 1966-67 in San Francisco with bands like the Steve Miller Blues Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company (which featured Janis Joplin, a rousing singer recently arrived from Austin, Texas). These groups used the blues form to engage in long, drug-laced jams that took the blues to a new psychedelic high.

  By 1968, a second influx of British bands had arrived in America, the first having occurred four years earlier with the explosion of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. In the late sixties, virtually all of the new British bands were, at least originally, blues based. Fleetwood Mac, Cream, Pink Floyd (the band took its name from American bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council), Ten Years After, Savoy Brown, Jethro Tull, and Led Zeppelin all began as British blues bands before they either became psychedelicized, drawing influence from the drug revolution going on in San Francisco rock thousands of miles away, or traveled into art-rock territory. In Texas, an albino, Johnny Winter, became the great white blues hope. Down in Georgia, the Allman Brothers Band whipped up a blues frenzy with their elongated versions of blues standards that gave the music a brand-new feel, courtesy of Gregg Allman’s wailing vocals and his brother Duane’s incredibly fluid slide guitar solos. In California, Canned Heat’s boogie blues was a welcomed sound. A black Seattle-born guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, had to go to London to be discovered, forming the Jimi Hendrix Experience, who were as bluesy as they were psychedelic.

  With blues, rock, and blues-rock bands all vying for the same white audiences in the States, England, and Europe, it wasn’t surprising that touring blues acts sought to ma
ke the transition from black clubs and festival stages to rock halls like the Fillmore Auditorium and later the Fillmore West in San Francisco, the Fillmore East in New York, and the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin. In the late sixties and early seventies, the lineups for concerts in these rock halls often included traditional black blues bands as well as white blues-rock bands. Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Howlin’ Wolf, along with Memphian Albert King, and Big Mama Thornton (who, in 1953, cut the original version of the Presley hit “Hound Dog”) all counted on playing white rock venues, making decent pay at the same time they were giving blues lessons to white kids anxious to hear the real thing. The Rolling Stones, eager to share the stage with their blues heroes, invited some to open their concerts, thus enabling Waters, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, and others to play to crowds that might otherwise have never seen them. The Stones even got Howlin’ Wolf on national television, when the band refused to perform on Shindig! unless Wolf was also on the program.

  The late sixties were a high-water mark for the blues. For more than twenty years, the music enjoyed unprecedented artistic and commercial growth. The blues was remarkably resilient; it exchanged one fan base for another without missing a beat. Its most important artists, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, Elmore James, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, Albert King, and Big Mama Thornton, among them, had paved the way for a new generation of visionaries. The blues had been an essential part of perhaps the most creative period in rock history—the sixties—and had influenced virtually every major rock artist, British and American, of that period. The music had even made it to near the top of the pop charts; in 1970 B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone” rose to Number Fifteen on the Billboard charts. In short, the future seemed big and bright for the blues.

  It wasn’t. Although rock’s late-sixties love affair with the blues carried over into the first years of the 1970s, the rock world’s interest in the blues began to wane. By 1973, the blues-rock hybrid sounded stale; many rock bands that built their sound on the blues either broke up or moved on. Cream crashed after only a couple of studio albums. Quicksilver Messenger Service faded out. Steve Miller and Fleetwood Mac went in a pop direction. Led Zeppelin delved into heavy metal, as did a number of other sixties blues-rock bands. Drugs and booze took some of the best blues-rock performers and advocates: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones all died too young. Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, Mike Bloomfield, and Paul Butterfield also battled drug demons. Clapton and Winter survived; Bloomfield and Butterfield did not.