...The narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ’n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumers to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s ''Woman Woman Blues,'' his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, ''She got coal-black curly hair.'' Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.'' It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological thinking; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor-white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the kind of people who don’t stop to wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves.From Unknown Bards: The blues becomes apparent to itself by one John Jeremiah Sullivan. I came across it while browsing Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives. For Sullivan, that album was American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 - 1939), which is my favorite CD of the year. Which came out in 2005 while I just got around to buying it this year. Foolish me. It is a piece of art in itself in every respect--all CDs should have such production values.
...decades ago it was a lodging house run by the Williamsburg branch of the YMCA, and it was here, in a single room on the uppermost floor one unknowable day in the mid-1950s, that the Delta blues was born.Oh, and for what it's worth, the title Unknown Bards comes from the James Weldon Johnson poem O Black and Unknown Bards.
Born, that is, in the imagination of one of the YMCA’s long-term residents, a record collector named James McKune. A journalist turned postal worker, reclusive, homosexual and alcoholic, McKune conducted his life as a long downward spiral: moving into the Y around 1940, losing job after job as his drinking intensified, and eventually ending up on the streets, where he died at the hands of a violent stranger in 1971. Yet during his years at the Y he scavenged junk shops and used record stores to build up an extraordinary collection of blues 78s. In time that collection became the driving force behind the 1960s blues revival, when white Americans and Europeans discovered - one might say invented - a tradition that they called the Delta blues, constructed out of scraps of old recordings that African-Americans had long left behind.
“The serious blues people are less than ten,” one who contributed to Pre-War Revenants told me. “Country, seven. Jazz, maybe fifteen. Most are to one degree or another sociopathic.” Mainly what they do is nurse decades-old grudges. A terrifically complicated bunch of people, but, for reasons perhaps not totally scrutable even to themselves, they have protected this music from time and indifference.-- and for that, we owe them, despite all their quirks and vanities.
Sister Mary has a beauTurning someone on to I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape was high on my agenda and right now, I standing on the podium on the USS Abraham Lincoln, with a big banner behind me reading Mission Accomplished. Those lyrics, that quirky harmony, their gospel fervor and that stately turn of the 19th century parlor piano--oh, the whole is so much greater than the sum of the parts. Simply sublime.
Says he's crazy, loves her so
Buys a Nugrape every day
Know he's bound to win that way
I got your ice-cold Nugrape
Marybeth Hamilton, in her not unsympathetic autopsy of James McKune’s mania, comes dangerously close to suggesting that McKune was the first person to hear Skip James as we hear him, as a profound artist. But Skip James was the first person to hear Skip James that way. The anonymous African-American people described in Wald’s book, sitting on the floor of a house in Tennessee and weeping while Robert Johnson sang “Come On in My Kitchen”— they were the first people to hear the country blues that way. White men “rediscovered” the blues, fine. We’re talking about the complications of that at last. Let’s not go crazy and say they invented it, or accidentally credit their “visions” with too much power. That would be counterproductive, a final insult even.You come in to refute the concept you invented--that white people created the music as it happened and its history, somehow, when what Hamilton is talking about is how the canon of what is good and bad, what is high or low art in the genre called blues, that that was a complex social construct created by a small group of record collectors that people later listening received without question about from where the concepts came. People like you, for instance. You seem to be arguing that blues is a music of suffering transmuted into art. I think that a hoary cliche ilike that is 9s an example of a white perosn receiving an opinion about the blues as the music of cultural suffering and political struggle. While I feel that all connected to the word blues is an endlessly fascinating complex subject that can not be reduced to oversimplifications about records and railroads. You may have a point but in your sweepig refutations of straw man arguments you put into the mute mouths of folks by which you evidently did not read a word written, it seemed more about making yourself right by making me wrong.
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If you like Escaping the Delta, you might also enjoy Wald's How The Beatles Destroyed Rock & Roll.
posted by box at 11:14 AM on August 6, 2009