Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Frustrated with the American record industry, King moved to Europe, first living in England, then finally finding a refuge for his music and artistic conception in Copenhagen, Denmark. When he returned to the United States, Chris Thomas changed his name to Chris Thomas King, and his

  musical vision of contemporary blues was justified on the groundbreaking 21st Century Blues, which finally came out in 1995. In recent years, he has been releasing albums on his own 21st Century Blues label. Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues (2002) is the fullest realization of his vision, an absolute triumph that incorporates his roots with the music of his father, who sings on “Da Thrill Is Gone From Here,” a reworking of B.B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone.” It also features King’s traditional acoustic-blues work on “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” and “Southern Chicks”; showcases his hard hip-hop-blues fusion on tracks such as “Welcome to Da Jungle,” “Mississippi KKKrossroads,” and “N Word Rap”; and demonstrates his ability to write softer, inspirational blues material including “Gonna Take a Miracle,” which follows the instrumental “9/11 Interlude.”

  “Blues come from such a deep place of sorrow, a deep place of a miserable existence—where you question how could God let this happen, where you don’t really understand exactly what’s going on, but there’s this little glimmer of hope that it isn’t always gonna be this way, in time it’s gonna get better,”says King. “There’s always that glimmer of hope. A lot of hip-hop, hard-core music, that glimmer of hope isn’t there most times… What’s beautiful about the blues is that there’s that touch of spirituality to it that says, I’m not in this alone. It’s not always gonna be this way. If I can just endure, if I can just make it another day, it just might be a little bit better. Sometimes people need that glimmer of hope. ‘It’s Gonna Take a Miracle’ is a ballad. The lyrics are ‘What the world needs now is some kind of miracle, some kind of sign to light the way.’ The world needs a hero in these unsure times.”

  When it comes to the blues, Chris Thomas King certainly qualifies as that hero.

  SHEMEKIA COPELAND ON HER MELTING-POT BLUES

  The twenty-four-year-old daughter of the late Texas bluesman Johnny Copeland, vocalist Shemekia Copeland has been performing since she was a teenager. Having spent time on the road with her father and absorbed a panoply of sounds since childhood, she makes powerful blues recordings that reflect her wide range of influences. While respecting the blues of the past, she’s put her own stamp on the sound—leading the way for the music’s future.

  My earliest musical memories are of my dad, just sitting around playing acoustic guitar around the house. I was singing when I was three, around the house with my dad, and listening to him play records. He used to listen to everything—he was never limited: gospel, soul music, African music. I got to listen to all of that. Now it’s just a part of me, because that’s what I did my whole life.

  I grew up in the hip-hop era. All those rappers who were big back then were coming up in my neighborhood in Harlem; in the late seventies, early eighties, it was huge. That was what was going on around me. I got a chance to listen to everything.

  My daddy took me to see lady blues singers when I was young, too. I used to go see a Chicago lady named Big Time Sarah. I saw Koko Taylor and Ruth Brown. My dad was good friends with all those ladies.

  My dad was a really great singer, but he was never interested in singing. That was a much later thing. He was more interested in playing guitar. He talked about teaching yourself, not having any kind of training—and when I think about it, I never had any vocal training. The stuff comes so natural to me.

  Shemekia Copeland belts it out at the Salute to the Blues Concert, New York City, February 7, 2003.

  I think I’ve got a melting pot of everything in my style. I’ve got all my daddy’s guitars and videos and all sorts of things to remember him by. His music keeps me really close to him. I feel like he’s around all the time.

  MY JOURNEY TO THE BLUES

  BY ANTHONY DECURTIS

  Recently, as I sat in Madison Square Garden waiting for the Rolling Stones to take the stage, I listened with more than usual care to the preshow music the band had chosen to be played through the arena’s sound system. It was all blues—Slim Harpo, Elmore James, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters were among the artists I recognized, but I didn’t recognize all of them. And if it wasn’t just the usual suspects, it also wasn’t just their most familiar material. I couldn’t identify a number of the songs I heard.

  People who don’t like the blues complain that the music “all sounds the same,” but what struck me as I listened that night was how individual and idiosyncratic each performance was. Every vocal, guitar part, and arrangement had its own distinctive element—it was as if nobody else would have, or could have, done that song in exactly that way. At a time when even much good music is highly formulaic, in which all the tricks seem not only to have been learned but memorized, digitized, and sonically exploited in every conceivable way, the ease and originality of the songs I heard that night were striking.

  I was reminded of how even the best versions of Robert Johnson’s songs—for example, the Stones’ “Love in Vain” and “Stop Breaking Down,” or the weary version of “Ramblin’ on My Mind” Eric Clapton sang with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers—never quite get everything that he put into them. His performances are at once complex and irreducible, immediately accessible and absolutely elusive. Other artists’ renditions often focus Johnson’s power, lift the choruses, embellish the verses, and, ultimately,

  simplify his mastery. As with all the greatest music, listening to his songs is an endless process of discovery.

  I know it’s easy to romanticize the blues. With radio still a local medium and travel an infinitely more complicated endeavor than it is today—not to mention the isolating effects of segregation—it was nearly unavoidable that musicians would create a deeply personal sound. The price they paid for that privilege was high, which, of course, only enhances their achievement.

  That night at the Stones show made me think about my own blues journey. I can’t recall the first time I realized that there was a specific style of music called the blues. During my childhood in New York in the fifties, I may well have heard the term while listening to the standards programs—focusing on Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, and the like—that my father always played on the radio. That would have been a far more stylized version of the music than anything that would ever interest me, but it might still have brought something called “the blues” into my ken.

  Like so many people my age, I really began to engage the blues at the time of the British Invasion. I was twelve when the Beatles arrived in the United States in February 1964—and when they mentioned Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters at their airport press conference. But the real breakthrough occurred a few months later with the release of the first Stones album. I had heard Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness” and Rufus Thomas’ “Walking the Dog,” both of which the Stones covered on that album, but I had never made a distinction between those songs and any other pop music. Now I began to understand that they were related to something called rhythm & blues that the Stones professed to be interested in. The notes on the alburn’s back cover by the band’s manager/producer, Andrew Loog Oldham, expressly trumpeted the Stones’ “raw, exciting basic approach to Rhythm and Blues.”

  There were other wonders on that album, as well—versions of Muddy Waters’ “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee,” Jimmy Reed’s “Honest I Do,” among them. I had no idea who any of those artists were, and nothing on the album even hinted at their existence. But, again, right on the back cover there were writing credits—Dixon, Moore—that would eventually lead me to Willie Dixon and James Moore, which was Slim Harpo’s given name.

  Along with the information and terminology, needless to say, came the music itself, which was more demanding than anything I’d heard to that point. It had
elements that flat-out confused me. I’d never associated harmonicas with anything cool, but the first time I ever saw the Stones perform—on Hollywood Palace, a Saturday-night variety show hosted by Dean Martin—there was Brian Jones playing harmonica on “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Martin’s now-infamous drunken insults to the band didn’t faze me—he was part of the musical world my father loved and, therefore, an embarrassment by definition. But Brian Jones—Brian Jones! The coolest guy in the band—playing harmonica. What could that possibly mean? I decided to suspend judgment until I knew enough to decide how I felt about that. And I just won’t tell you how long it took me to figure out that a harp wasn’t necessarily a large stringed instrument.

  “If it wasn’t for the British musicians, a lot of us black musicians in America would stili be catchin’ the hell that we caught long before. So thanks to them, thanks to all you guys. You opened doors that I don’t think would have been opened in my lifetime. When white America started paying attention to the blues—it started opening a lot of doors that had been closed to us.”—B.B. King

  The Stones, happily, were not my only guide into the underworld of the blues. Others, like the Yardbirds, the Animals, the Blues Project, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, emerged, and each in their own way provided more clues to the secrets of this music. A cool record store opened on the north side of Bleecker Street between Jones and Cornelia Streets in Greenwich Village, four or five blocks from where I lived. Even though I rarely had the money to buy albums there, I could at least see what John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, and Sonny Boy Williamson (whose very identity presented another set of vexing problems) looked like and learn which songs were on which records.

  But less obvious sources also proved a treasure trove. Along with a version of “Hoochie Coochie Man,” The Manfred Mann Album, which came out in 1964, provided my introduction to Howlin’ Wolf by way of a gripping rendition of “Smokestack Lightnin’.” While no match for the incomparable original, Manfred Mann still managed to channel the bizarre, abstract terror of that eminently strange song. When I saw Manfred Mann perform live that year at the old Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street, Paul Jones, the group’s lead singer, delivered a performance that, like Mick Jagger’s at the time, combined the sexual bravado of the blues with the androgynous teasing just beginning to become prevalent in the still not fully formed counterculture.

  So, it seemed for a time, the blues were liable to pop up anywhere. Peter and Gordon, one of the opening acts at the Manfred Mann show, performed Little Walter’s “My Babe.” The Zombies, of all bands, did “I’ve Got My Mojo Working” on their American debut album. And, most incredibly, Herman’s Hermits played that same song in a matinee show I saw them do one Saturday at the Academy of Music. Even at thirteen, I was flabbergasted to hear that tune alongside “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am.” Sorting out which group was a blues band and which wasn’t could be trickier than it might seem.

  Needless to say, I didn’t have the slightest idea what a mojo was. So that became my other pressing blues project—unraveling the folklore and culture behind the music. Black-cat bones and special riders, diving ducks and backdoor men, gypsy women and High John the Conqueror, red roosters lording it over the barnyard and mules kicking in their stalls—all of that couldn’t have been more foreign to a working-class, Italian kid who had rarely ventured beyond the confines of New York City’s five boroughs. It helped that the Catholic faith in which I was raised was itself a hotbed of fetishes and superstition, that my mother would tell me stories that her mother had told her about the gypsy fortune-tellers in Italy, and that the English poetry I was beginning to read in school was as dense with rural imagery as any blues lyric. Words could mean exactly what they said and also mean far more—that lesson, as important as any I’ve learned in my life, was coming to me from a variety of directions.

  “The time when I was with John Mayall, I was asked to play with Muddy and Otis Spann when they came into London—that was unbelievable—they were in their heyday and they had these big silk suits on. I was just gobsmacked—I could hardly move.”—Eric Clapton

  The next phase of my blues journey was hearing the music performed live by the legendary artists themselves, not their white translators. A passing comment by Eric Clapton in a Rolling Stone interview led me to B.B. King, whom I saw at a free concert in Central Park. Those beautiful round notes dripped from his guitar like wax from a burning candle. I saw a flashy and stylish Buddy Guy prowl the aisles of Fillmore East, firing off explosive lead lines. I saw Albert King stand dignified in the dark in that same hall, crooning a promise that also sounded like a fated life sentence, “I’ll Play the Blues for You.”

  Most unforgettably, I saw Muddy Waters at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park on June 6, 1968. Three times in my life I’ve seen opening acts who made it impossible for me to sit through the headliner: Jimi Hendrix opening for the Young Rascals, Led Zeppelin opening for Iron Butterfly, and, on this date, the Muddy Waters Band, featuring Otis Spann, opening for Moby Grape.

  It was an outdoor show in the daytime, and it may well have been free or only a dollar or two. Muddy was indomitable, simultaneously fierce and rigorously disciplined. His band’s taut playing mesmerized the crowd as if the venue were a smoky late-night club, not an ice-skating rink with rows of portable chairs set up. The show’s MC was Jonathan Schwartz, an eminent New York disc jockey, and the performance clearly blew him away. “McKinley Morganfield!” he exuded, using Muddy Waters’ given name. “Wasn’t that something?” He could barely muster the energy to introduce Moby Grape, and, after the majesty of Muddy’s set, the band, through no fault of its own, just sounded silly.

  As time went on, my understanding of the blues deepened, and my appreciation for the heroism of its greatest practitioners became a point that I felt I had to communicate whenever I wrote about the music. To produce art as monumental as those musicians did would be a wonder, even if they had grown up in privileged circumstances. That they overcame the direst poverty and racist brutality of segregation is an accomplishment so extraordinary that it is almost impossible to convey. I also found blues outside the Delta-Chicago tradition, like the scarifying trance music of Junior Kimbrough from the north Mississippi hill country, that moved me as powerfully as any music ever has.

  Eventually I got to meet and interview John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, and Willie Dixon, and to speak with Albert King, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and Bo Diddley. Keith Richards once mentioned to me how impressed he always was by what gentlemen the blues giants were, and I found my encounters with them to be similar—surprising modesty, good humor, and little bitterness.

  I can still recall my joy at going to interview Willie Dixon and finding him in a plush suite at the Parker Meridien hotel in midtown Manhattan. “Finally,” I thought, “somebody in one of these places who deserves to be there.” I actually got to ask the man who wrote “I ain’t superstitious/But a black cat crossed my trail” about those mojos and black-cat bones. “You see, all those things have been superstitions for people through generations,” he told me. “Even back in Biblical days, even in astrology.

  “My mother might have believed in some of that,” he continued, “but my old man wouldn’t let none of it go on around him. He’d have a fit, man: ‘Didn’t you learn no better sense than that?’ He’d go into raising hell, man, and nobody could rest for a month. If somebody started talking to him about bad luck, he’d say, ‘The only bad luck you had was when your poor parents got off the boat here. They took your country, they took your language, they took your religion, they took your culture, they took your god—and they turned you against yourself.’“

  Asked for a definition of the blues, Buddy Guy once told me, “We write according to the facts of life, everyday life. If you live and die here, you got a part of the blues in you. Something you have to get up to do, it don’t work, that’s what blues is all about. I think a person will have the blues
as long as he lives, but some people just don’t want to bring it out like we do.”

  That ability to articulate and address life’s deepest traumas is ultimately what has sustained the music’s hold on me. I remember when I was in graduate school and had separated from my wife because I was having an affair with another woman. Both relationships were unraveling. I was living in a boarding house, and I had been diagnosed with walking pneumonia. I had to get up to teach an 8 a.m. remedial writing class every morning during one of the coldest winters in Indiana history.

  One dark morning, the clock radio came on, and as I lay in bed, I heard, “Woke up this morning/And the blues, they walked like a man/Woke up this morning/And the blues, they walked like a man/I said, Good morning blues/Let me shake your right hand.” That notion of your troubles as a kind of companion floored me, and to this day, every time I wake up with that feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, I think, “Good morning, blues.”

  Even more profoundly, when a friend of mine was dying from leukemia a few years back, I’m ashamed to say that I found myself avoiding her because I simply didn’t know what to say when we spoke. One day I was listening to Skip James, and I heard “Sick Bed Blues” in a way I never had before. Chronicling his own battle with cancer, James sings in one climactic verse, “Mmm, mmm, I ain’t gonna cry no more/Because down this road every traveler got to go.” That simple statement about our common mortality made me realize that I had been experiencing my friend’s condition as somehow different from my own, when it really wasn’t. We were both heading down the same road to the same place, it just seemed like she was going to get there a little sooner than I would. Once I understood that, it seemed that I had plenty I could say to her. We spoke regularly about the most meaningful and the most trivial things in the weeks before she died.