I’m planning a relatively short series, of relatively short posts, a half to maybe a dozen, each discussing, say, one to three examples.
Before plunging in we need to get a sense of what the blues is. First, it is a mood, a feeling, a sensibility: Feeling blue? Second, it is a musical form, existing on its own, but also as a form within jazz. The latter is what this series is going to be about, the blues as it functions within the evolving context of jazz. Third, the blues is an object of wonder, fascination, and mystery. That’s what this post is about.
Back in the middle of the 20th century some curious well-meaning white folks went looking for the blues. Marybeth Hamilton wrote a book about it, In Search of the Blues:
Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Charley Patton-we are all familiar with the story of the Delta blues. Fierce, raw voices; tormented drifters; deals with the devil at the crossroads at midnight.
In this extraordinary reconstruction of the origins of the Delta blues, historian Marybeth Hamilton demonstrates that the story as we know it is largely a myth. The idea of something called Delta blues only emerged in the mid-twentieth century, the culmination of a longstanding white fascination with the exotic mysteries of black music.
Hamilton shows that the Delta blues was effectively invented by white pilgrims, seekers, and propagandists who headed deep into America's south in search of an authentic black voice of rage and redemption. In their quest, and in the immense popularity of the music they championed, we confront America's ongoing love affair with racial difference.
That’s from the publisher’s blub. It sounds about right, though I should say that I’ve not read the book myself. But I’ve read other books and I know a thing or two.
In 1966 a man named Charlie Keil published Urban Blues. It blew the doors off that myth, and then some. He wasn’t investigating blues as performed by often decrepit old men on battered acoustic guitars in the rural South. His bluesman played electric guitars, in cities, and often wore sharply tailored suits. Musicians like Muddy Waters, Bobby “Blue” Bland, B.B. King and even Saints help us and preserve us! James Brown, self-professed “hardest working man in show business.” Amen. And yet it was the real blues, as authentic as sweet potato pie.
But it’s not just white folks who were buffaloed by the blues. In 1963 Amiri Baraka, then writing as Leroi Jones, published Blues People: Negro Music in White America. It wasn’t just about the blues (in either the second or third sense I laid out above), though it was that as well. It was about black music in general. And it is very much about racial difference, as its subtitle indicates. It’s a good book, but a bit fanciful in parts.
Albert Murray’s 1976 Stomping Blues also reads the blues as pivotal to understanding black-in-white America. Murray, like Baraka, is black, but is of a more moderated political persuasion. His book is less fanciful, but it does have a mythic dimension. Whatever the blues is, it is more than just the music, the people, and the performances. It is, well, you know, damn near everything!
I was certainly after a bit of that when I first heard blues tunes in my early teens. I forget just what tunes those were, nor does it much matter. I liked them, a lot. I tried to play them, to learn how they work: 12 bars, I-IV-I-V-I, call and response, microtones on 3, 4/5, and 7 – that’s the form, more or less. As I became a better musician, the mythography receded.
But I don’t want to go into that now. We can get to that latter. Let’s end with a piece of music, two of them in fact. This is “The Real Folk Blues” by sublime Yoko Kanno. It is emphatically not a blues by any stretch of the formal musicological imagination. It is thus one of those many tunes that has “blue” or “blues” in its title, but is not the blues. It’s the closing theme from Cowboy Bebop, one of my favorite anime series. If you look closely you can see a blond trumpeter. That’s Eric Miyashiro. He’s from Hawaii, toured with Buddy Rich, and now lives in Japan.
Here's another non-blues tune with “blues” the title: “How the Blues was Born.” The constant call-and-response between Sinatra and Armstrong is, however, a feature of blues performances. Notice Sinatra’s folksy misspelling.
Lester Bowie and Brass Fantasy offers their own account of "How the Blues was Born."
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I’ve written a bit about the blues and collected those posts under that label, blues. A number of those posts are about my early musical interests and have several recordings in them; one or three of them will be blues. Back in 2003 Martin Scorsese did PBS series on the blues. It was a very mixed kettle of fish. I reviewed three of them in this post: Three White Men Look for the Blues: Wenders, Scorsese, and Pierce. One of Them Finds It. Both Scorsese and Wenders wander deep into mythology and don’t make it back. Richard Pearce follows three musicians as they work their way toward the W.C. Handy awards in Memphis; B.B. King is one of them. It is excellent. I reviewed two others (the series had seven segments in all): More Blues: The British Get Invaded and Uncle Clint Talks Piano. Mike Figgis tells a story about how the blues made its way to England in the 1950s and 1960s while Clint Eastwood, himself a good jazz pianist, looks at blues piano. Both of these are very good.
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