Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Now Congress has declared 2003 the Year of the Blues, and at a “Salute to the Blues” concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York, the music achieved something approaching the recognition it deserves. In a head-spinning collaboration on Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House,” Buddy Guy and Vernon Reid transported the blues to outer space and back to the Delta. The peerless Mavis Staples found all the modesty and spiritual desire in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” And Chuck D of Public Enemy transformed John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” into a blistering, anti-war rant.

  Willie Dixon, smiling through the tears

  The show movingly dramatized the resilience of a music whose origins in the grimmest oppression could not have been less auspicious. But the reality of the music of “everyday life,” as Buddy Guy put it, is that its triumphs occur at all times in the hidden moments of millions of private lives. Every year, then, is the year of the blues, and every day is the day you meet that music and all it means. My journey was no doubt different from yours, but, finally, down that road every traveler must go, always getting closer, always just two steps from the blues.

  THE BLUES IS THE BLOOD

  BY DAVID RITZ

  The deeper the wisdom, the deeper the paradox. And what music is more paradoxical and deeper than the blues? What form is simpler, what content more complex, what message more mysterious? Sometimes cloudy, sometimes clear, the blues brews up a concoction of feelings, a stew of hurt and healing that excites our imagination even as it relaxes our heart. Happy, sad, fast, slow, up, down, mellow, and manic, the blues expand and contract in all directions.

  That sense of contradiction was revealed early in my career of pursuing blues people with blues stories. I was a college kid in Austin, Texas, when I met Lightnin’ Hopkins and followed him home to Houston. “The blues don’t lie,” he told me in a Dowling Street barbershop. “The blues is wise.”

  “What’s its wisdom?” I wanted to know. He winked, took a drink, and played a song about a boy like me, a stutterer who stopped stuttering when he started singing. My question was never answered, or maybe it was.

  That summer in Dallas I went to see Jimmy Reed, whose string of Top Ten R&B hits convinced my analytical mind that he couldn’t be singing blues. Besides, the structure of his songs defied the traditional twelve-bar form that music books insisted defined blues. Yet his howling harmonica and plaintive voice were bluer than any blues I’d ever heard. After the show, speeding down the Fort Worth Turnpike in the back of his limo with him and his girlfriend, I felt like Superman’s sidekick, Jimmy Olsen, mild-mannered reporter. “What are the blues, Mr. Reed?” I asked. Busy fighting with his lady, he never heard the question. She accused him of having

  a wandering eye. He accused her of squandering his money. She cursed him. He flashed his razor and slashed her arm. The driver sped to a hospital, where I sat with the great bluesman while, in the next room, a doctor attended to the wound. I stayed stone silent.

  A lifetime later—it was the seventies, and I was in my thirties—I had two long years to ask Ray Charles every question imaginable about the blues. I was ghostwriting his autobiography, Brother Ray. We met at his midcity L.A. studio in the midnight hour. The lights of his recording console flickered as he ran his fingers over the controls. A huge ring of keys hung from his belt. To Ray, control was everything—control of his money, his women, his music. He saw the blues the same way.

  “The blues was the first link in letting me control my musical life,” he said. “I was brought up in the backwoods, so I heard country blues early on—Tampa Red, Washboard Sam. Man, I related. I felt what they were feeling. Later I liked Charles Brown, whose keyboard technique was tremendous, and saw that Charles, under all his sophistication, was a bluesman. You could say the same thing for Charlie Parker. Bebop is built on blues. It all is. My own style changed, and I went from imitating Nat Cole into my own thing. That’s when I heard how the blues gave my voice the edge that let you know it was me. I also saw I didn’t have to sing blues. Singing Hank Snow’s ‘I’m Movin’ On’ or Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia on My Mind,’ it was all blues. Billie Holiday could be singing Gershwin, or Oscar Peterson playing Cole Porter, but it’s still blues. Once the blues is in your blood, it stays. Fact of the matter, the blues is the blood.”

  Marvin Gaye, who never sang traditional blues, was as touched by blues as anyone in the history of American music. His sources of blues wisdom were the dreamy doo-wop of Clyde McPhatter and the blues ballads of Little Jimmy Scott. “The flexibility of the blues is something incredible,” he mused while I was interviewing him for Divided Soul, my biography that came out a year after he was murdered by his father. “It’s a primitive form that shaped every aspect of our music. Bluesmen like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters led to rhythm & blues that led to rock & roll. Count Basie and Duke Ellington created fabulous swing bands based on the blues. Soul music of the sixties—my contemporaries like Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, David Ruffin, and Bobby Womack—are really reinvented blues singers. Even the gospel singers, who might reject the blues, are influenced by the blues. The truth is, Thomas A. Dorsey invented modern gospel behind blues feelings. His ‘Precious Lord’ is full of blues.”

  Aretha Franklin, whose gospel roots shape every note she sings, agreed with Marvin. While we were collaborating on her memoir, From These Roots, she lovingly described the appreciation that her famous father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, a brilliant student of African-American culture, expressed for blues. He not only frequented nightclubs to hear bluesmen Jimmy Witherspoon and B.B. King; he invited them into his Detroit home, where they played in his living room. “My dad revered these men as poets,” said Aretha. “He understood how they laid the foundation. He never saw blues as the ‘devil’s music’ His vision was bigger than that. He saw the grand plan of our culture that began with the blues.”

  “The only difference between a gospel career and a blues career,” explained B.B. King when we wrote his life story, Blues All Around Me, “was money. When I sang gospel on the street corners of those

  little towns in the Mississippi Delta, I got a pat on the head. When I sang blues, I got a dime. The blues represented economic progress, pure and simple. It meant getting off the farm into the city. Modern blues also meant the electric guitar of T-Bone Walker. I thought of myself as a modern bluesman until, sometime in the sixties, I was opening a show for Jackie Wilson when the audience—a black audience—booed me for being a relic of the past. I hurt so bad I cried. Then I played my heart out until the boos turned to cheers. I won them over that night, but I’ve never gotten over the fact that bluesmen like Muddy Waters and myself were championed by Englishmen like John Lennon and Eric Clapton. They’re the reason we crossed over to the real money. The black audience can be fickle. They’re looking for the new thing. They don’t want to look at the past. The past is pain. Well, the blues is pain, but it’s pain that brings joy.”

  B.B.’s blues philosophy embraced the essential paradox of his life as an artist. “The blues are a simple music,” he said, “and I’m a simple man. But the blues aren’t a science, the blues can’t be broken down like mathematics. The blues are a mystery, and mysteries are never as simple as they look.”

  “I didn’t want to look like a blues singer,” Etta James told me when we began on her book, Rage to Survive. “I wanted to look like all the ultracool jazz divas. Funny, though, but when I got out and started touring as a kid, the biggest influence on my singing was a cat called Johnny “Guitar” Watson. Johnny was a genius—genius guitarist, genius writer, genius singer. The source of his genius, he showed me, was the blues. He’d take the corniest ballad and paint it the prettiest shade of blue you can imagine. So I copied Johnny. I didn’t set out to sing blues, but Johnny showed me how to use the blues to improve every song I sang.”

  Aretha Franklin shares an intimate moment with her father, Reverend C.L. Franklin in 1968.

  Art Neville, eldest of the Neville Brothers of Ne
w Orleans, is a fountainhead of Louisiana music. When I began researching his family’s biography, I was overwhelmed by the complexity of Crescent City culture. The confluence of Caribbean, European, African, and Native American sounds had my head spinning. A hellacious keyboardist, Art set me straight. “The professors of piano,” he explained, “took whatever was in the air—rumbas and boogies, mambos and waltzes, ragtime and calypso—and wove them together with the same fabric. Sounds crazy, sounds like it shouldn’t make sense, but it does. The blues makes sense of it all. Smiley Lewis, Fats Domino, James Booker, Professor Longhair, Earl King—these were the deans schooled in blues.

  Blues, you see, is the magic fabric. It never tears. It stretches. The more you stretch it, the further it goes. The more you wear it, the better it feels. The older it gets, the newer it looks.”

  Listening to the blues people, I learned that blues paradoxes lead to blues lives. Blues lives, like the music they reflect, are wholly spontaneous and wildly unpredictable, floating above and below a continuum of ecstasy and pain. They survive as testimonies to the transformational nature of the blues. The life that has moved me most is that of Little Jimmy Scott, the seventy-eight-year-old jazz vocalist afflicted with Kallmann’s Syndrome, a hormonal deficiency that left him with grave physical and emotional challenges. With abnormally small genitalia and an unnaturally high voice, Scott moved through the blues world with both uncertainty and grace. That world embraced him. His friends and supporters were Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker—artists who were viewed as oddities themselves. Bedeviled by drink, motivated by love, blessed with uncanny talent, Jimmy has led the blues life since he was a teenager. Time and again, the world has shot him down. Time and again, he has shot himself down. Time and again, he has risen from the ashes of humiliating defeat. His signature song—”Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”—is a heartbreaking metaphor that, at once, confirms and denies that defeat.

  “The blues,” said Jimmy, “has lasted because the blues is about reality. Life is blue. Life ends. Sorrow is certain. Pain can’t be avoided. The blues lays it out. But as you sing the blues, and as you listen to the blues, something happens to you. In the middle of songs that have some of the saddest stories ever told, you feel more alive than ever. That’s the strength of the blues. That’s the miracle—watching the blues chase the blues away.”

  Afterword

  Blues: The Footprint of Popular Music By Chuck D

  Being a so-called veteran of the genre labeled hip-hop and rap music, you can’t help being a musicologist, or at least a student of music, by default. Quite simply put, the basis of rap music from its humble beginnings happens to be the application of the rap vocal on top of records. It’s no secret by now that today’s rock cats are still doing steroid-laden blues-guitar riffs spawned from the Mississippi Delta, but what might still be tucked away, what people don’t realize, is that much of the timing and rhythm of rap harkens back to those elements as well.

  As original American musics, both blues and rap are laced with attitude and coded double entendre. One can easily find comparisons in the lives of both Tupac Shakur and Little Walter; a turntablist like DJ Babu of the Dilated Peoples and the behind-the-head playing style of Texas great T-Bone Walker; the throaty rawness of DMX and Howlin’ Wolf—even in the way record companies then and now hustle the sounds from “the hood” back to the hood, and even abroad. Labels like Chess, Sun, Cobra to Sugarhill, Tommy Boy and Def Jam. The similarities are baffling.

  The fact that most of today’s MTV crowd cannot draw the comparisons because they don’t even know the legendary artists’ and labels’ names—eventually this affects all music today and tomorrow. The seemingly mass rejection of the blues by the black community in the 1960s came on top of an academic and media agenda that detached blacks from their contributions in the past and in the present. It was no surprise that in a music so connected to that “cat” Jim Crow, folks looked ahead to the future of music, called R&B, and its more

  favored cousin, rock & roll. Still, the British, in their quest for world culture to fill in the gaps left by the collapse of their dominant, one-sided monarch drill, became some of the best record collectors on the planet. (This is still the case today.) This foundation is parallel to the original beat digger DJs of hip-hop: It was imperative for the Brit bands of the late fifties and early sixties to lace their skiffle and americopied rock & roll riffs with the pure elements of the great bluesmiths.

  Artillery for the now-famous British Invasion set precedent for those U.K. artists who questionably became more legendary than the root of their muse. The real story of the blues carried the history of black people alongside it by default. Their migration into northern cities offered this soundtrack of life to the world played through these musicians. Brothers carried their guitars and riffs with them, sketching a picture of the roads traveled up and down the land. Some cats claimed it was the antithesis of the black gospel movement—god and the devil squaring off.

  A look back tells us it was just a difference of some words, ideologies, and the opinions of the time, running on the same tracks—one dealing with getting to the heaven of the unknown, the other dealing with the hell of now. Still, some brothers continued the tradition of taking the music alongside the road of a troubled and traveled past. Jimi Hendrix was that aberration, mixing religion in his lyrics and putting his blues on a modern primal scream path to heavy metal.

  The blues is as much a story about the meshing of people as it is a tale of their mass movement. Marshall Chess has often said that the immigrants

  from Europe (like his father and uncle, who founded Chess Records) and the migrants from the South (like many Chess recording artists) were of similar breed, servicing each others’ needs by arranging and adapting culture to the recorded twentieth century: to escape the brutal hard-working conditions of before by aligning new duties alongside new stories sung, played, and spoken on new technology. This was major, and it rang volumes, transmitting new blues across the world as the first massive doses did in the 1920s. The creation of the transistor radio helped jump the blues into faster tempos, ushering in the era of rhythm & blues as named by Atlantic Records mogul Jerry Wexler—and thus ushering in rock & roll in the process.

  All to say that everything has its starting point, and we must find ways to draw that line to its origins. I was sparked about the blues as a beat digger coming across an album of immense layers and well-played sounds. This record was Electric Mud by Muddy Waters, recorded in 1968 and produced by Marshall Chess. Myself and my co-producer Gary G-Whiz fell in love with the record, a psychedelic trip replaying and singing Muddy’s classics of the past. Who knew he’d recorded these songs before? Not me. This record made me understand the concept of the blues. It was no surprise why I couldn’t find a decent review of the album. It wasn’t meant for the purists who panned it; it was for the people who got turned on by being introduced to a whole new world. Thus the line leading to the blues was drawn for a cat like me, showing there’s ways that it can be drawn to and from the oft-sampled and riff duped sounds of blues recordings.

  Chuck D performing his version of “Boom Boom” at the Salute to the Blues concert, 2003

  The great blues writer and producer Willie Dixon was an ambassador for all of us to follow. He helped us to explain whatever music we might be a part of, simply by making understanding the blues so easy.

  By understanding the blues, you’re understanding life. You are spitting everything that’s been built up in your soul and mind out into the world for ears and souls to attach themselves to, as simple as that. That’s the essence of making records for yourself and the people as opposed to merely a contractual agreement to a company, sponsored and co-signed by “the hood” as a reminder of where we came from. The seed sprouted into the modern financial backbone of corporate entities overseeing various music styles presently bought and downloaded. One could’ve never guessed that a porch riff strummed on a sleepy Mississippi fall afternoon wo
uld be America’s main signature to the world of music as we know it today. The footprint of where sound walks tomorrow.

  Attributions and Sources

  A CENTURY OF THE BLUES: “Stones in My Passway” written by Robert Johnson© 1990 Lehsem [I, LLC/Claud L. Johnson; “Dream Boogie” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes © by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; “You Know I Love You” by Lou Willie Turner Administered by Warner Chappell. Used by permission. All rights reserved. “Prisoner’s Talking Blues” written by Robert Pete Williams © 1971 (re: 1999) Tradition Music (BMI)/Administered by BUG. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

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