Escaping the Delta (29 page)

There are people who will argue that some of the songs on this list are not blues, but in a way that is my point. We are so used to accepting modern categories that we forget how little they meant at the time. It is easy to say that Muddy Waters was a bluesman, Ruth Brown was R&B, the Coasters were rock 'n' roll, and Ray Charles was the inventor of soul music. The fact is that “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Waters's biggest hit, crossed all those lines: The old folks would have called it blues—some particularly clueless white people might even have said “jazz”—a young black record buyer would have called it Rhythm and Blues, and a white kid would have been more likely to say rock 'n' roll. Whatever the name, it was obviously a hip, funny song, and all three of the above artists shortly had their own comedy hits using the same arrangement: Charles was on the charts a month after Waters with “It Should Have Been Me,” Brown had “I Can't Hear a Word You Say,” and the Coasters (then called the Robins) did “Riot in Cell Block Number Nine.”

Which is to say when Waters and Hooker were at the peak of their success in the black pop world, the people buying their records thought of them as exciting and up-to-date. There was a “down-home” audience that was particularly drawn to rootsy, Southern-sounding artists, but I suspect that very few of the original supporters of the electric style we now call Chicago blues considered it old-fashioned. On the contrary, when Marshall Chess (co-owner of Chess Records) was asked what made Waters so successful, his answer was one that
could be applied to pop stars from Frank Sinatra to Ricky Martin: “It was sex. If you had ever seen Muddy then, the effect he had on the women! Because blues has always been a women's market. On Saturday night they'd line up ten deep.”
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Listening in the twenty-first century, it is easy to hear Waters and his peers as essentially electrified Delta bluesmen, one step away from Son House and Robert Johnson, and to emphasize their roots rather than their urban stardom. As the
Chicago Defender
piece I have quoted demonstrates, there were intellectuals in the black community as well as the white who would have made that case even at the time. But that ignores the other side, the showmanship and hipness that attracted the screaming crowds of fans and late-night radio listeners across the country. Like Johnson himself—or Sinatra, Presley, James Brown, the Beatles—they were rooted in older sounds, but were creating something very much of their time. Waters appeared not only in smoky ghetto clubs, but also on rock package shows alongside acts like the Clovers, Bill Haley, Fats Domino, Charles Brown, and even Sarah Vaughan. These were not always perfect matches—James Cotton would recall the Waters band being booed when they opened for Vaughan at Washington's Howard Theater—but at the rowdier rock 'n' roll shows, Waters did just fine.
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This was a time when Wolfman Jack was broadcasting from the Mexican border, and one of his typical segments would segue from Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans singing “Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah” to Jerry Lee Lewis's “Great Balls of Fire,” then into a rap that would go something like: “Here's Elmore James and his
funky
-funky slide guitar. Makes me want to get naked every time I hear it, baby…and I wantcha to reach over to that radio, darlin', right now, and grab my knobs!”
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It is hard for us to understand this today, not only because the world has changed but because we can never see these artists as they appeared in their prime. By the time Muddy Waters was caught on film, he was already working for a white revivalist audience, and we tend to see him sitting in a chair, his guitar in his lap, stolidly singing his down-home blues. We do not see him striding the stage of a Chicago club, sweating from every pore and driving the women crazy.

For me, the revelation in this respect came when I finally saw some
film of Howlin' Wolf. Wolf was the rawest of the down-home stars, and his voice blasts out of my speakers today with a growl that reaches back to Charley Patton and beyond into some terrifying, prehistoric past. The quotations from his peers and fans suggest the same primeval power: Johnny Shines said, “I was afraid of Wolf. Just like you would be of some kind of beast or something.”
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Sam Phillips, who recorded Wolf for his Sun Records, still considers him the greatest raw talent he ever met, and famously described his sound in otherworldly terms, as “where the soul of man never dies.” And yet, this is the same Wolf who, comparing himself to the other blues singers who moved north to Chicago, said, “I had a four thousand dollar car and $3,900 in my pocket. I'm the onliest one drove out of the South like a gentleman.”
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The only extended Wolf footage I have seen was filmed in 1966, at the Newport Folk Festival, in a reconstruction of a rural Mississippi juke joint. (As with Big Bill Broonzy's being presented to white audiences as an Arkansas sharecropper, it is worth pausing a moment to consider how appropriate this setting was for a man who had already been a star of the Chicago club scene for over a dozen years.) Wolf sits in a chair and plays four songs, sounding as gruff and untamed as on his records. But, in contrast to the ferocity of his sound, he is funny. Broadly, ridiculously funny. He pops his eyes and lasciviously licks his harmonicas and his guitar neck. To introduce “Meet Me in the Bottom,” he mimes the comic fear of an adulterer caught in the act and forced to hastily jump out a window: “This is the blues here—this here's when you're in devilment and ain't got no business
in
there! And then when you get scared and break and go to running, then you're gonna send, call back to some of your friends and say, ‘Joe, bring me my running shoes, please, because I'm barefooted…'”

He wags his finger like a scolding parent, mugging and breaking into a broad smile as he introduces “Dust My Broom.” Blues experts have explained ad infinitum that this title phrase was a slang expression for leaving town, but Wolf explores the possibilities of another comic scenario: “You know, when you've got a lazy woman, then you hate to come in and tell her, say, ‘Why don't you sweep up the house?' And she'll jump up and say, ‘Sweep it up yourself!'” The guitar plays
an introductory riff, and he is singing, “I'm gonna get up in the morning, I believe I'll dust my broom….”

In this performance, Wolf did not proceed to roll around the floor with a broom between his legs, but old fans recall others in which he did. He could be one of the most outrageous performers in blues, crawling across the stage like his namesake, or climbing theater curtains à la King Kong. The man was an entertainer. Like Charley Patton or Leadbelly or Robert Johnson. Like Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway or James Brown. Like Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger or Eminem. He was also a great musician, a deeper and more vital artist than most on that list. There is no contradiction there. One can be a great artist and at the same time a pop star, a comedian, and a sex symbol. Indeed, on the blues scene as on most other popular music scenes, that was often a necessity. The pop audience, black or white, is one of the most demanding on earth. At times it will accept artists whom the intellectuals and critics consider mediocre, but it will not stand for being bored—something the intellectuals and critics are often all too willing to do. And when Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, Bessie Smith, or Charley Patton were in their prime they made music that sounds great on record, but they also paid attention to current trends, polished bits of eye-catching stage business, dressed their best, and put on a show that had plenty of humor and sex appeal mixed in with the deep soul and expert musicianship.

Which brings us back to Marshall Chess's comment on Muddy Waters: “Blues has always been a women's market.” That was also true in the Delta in 1930, according to everything I have heard or read. It was usually women who had a little disposable income and were at home when the record salesmen dropped by. It was female record buyers who made Bessie Smith into a star for telling their stories, and Leroy Carr into a star for seducing them with his sweet poetry. Not women alone, obviously. Men bought too. But Chess's point would be echoed by pretty much everybody in the blues business, as long as they were selling to a largely black public. “I think my audience is more women than men,” Little Milton told me in 1994. “And I tell you what, see, that really makes me feel good—because basically for every woman that comes, you can figure that she's going to have at least
three men to follow that one woman. You're laughing, but from experience and observation, it's true. So then I know if I get two or three hundred women, then I'm going to like double that with men. So I just love the ladies.”

There is another fact that went along with that. Blues was singers' music. It spawned great guitarists, great pianists, and a complete reinvention of the harmonica, but blues was not about fancy instrumental work. Like country and western—and blues singers have made that comparison over and over—it was about telling stories that reflected people's day-to-day experiences, sharing their troubles and celebrating their pleasures.

Hence the fact that the most popular blues singer of the 1960s, at least as measured by the R&B charts, was Bobby “Blue” Bland—today the only blues star of that generation who still regularly fills clubs in black communities. When Joel Whitburn compiled his list of the Top 500 R&B Artists of all time—an admittedly somewhat bogus list, based on applying an arcane mathematical formula to the
Billboard
charts from 1942 to 1995—B. B. King came in at number 11 and Bland at number 13. The only other artists in the top 100 who are generally considered blues singers are Etta James, Amos Milburn, and Joe Turner, all down in the 90s. (As for the down-home singers, Muddy Waters is at 205 and John Lee Hooker at 334.) As with my list of top recording figures of the prewar era, this list is flawed but indicative, and once again what it indicates is that the more sophisticated and urban-sounding performers generally had the biggest sales and most enduring careers in the African-American market.

Not that Bland was exactly a smooth balladeer. Born just outside Memphis in 1930, he entered the music business as King's chauffeur and valet. Having watched King become the biggest hard-blues hit maker of the early 1950s, he set off on his own and stormed his way to number one with 1957's “Farther Up the Road.” Bland and King were a sort of middle ground between the down-home players and the café bluesmen. They were influenced by the Carr crooning tradition, in that they could sing soft and pretty when they cared to, but what was most striking in their work was the infusion of hard gospel inflections. This meant that, along with capturing the urbane, post–T-Bone
Walker crowd, they had a grit and rootsiness that appealed to the same older and Southern audiences that bought Muddy Waters.

Bland was the last major black hit-maker to be classed as a blues singer, and it is symptomatic of the differing tastes of black and white blues fans that, despite being the biggest-selling bluesman at what is generally considered to have been the height of the blues revival, he has never had much of a white following. Between 1960 and 1974, he put twenty-three songs in the R&B top ten and, along with King, defined the soul-blues trend that would include Little Milton, Albert King, Little Johnny Taylor, and Junior Parker. All of these artists were singers first and foremost, which has always been what counted with black blues buyers. It was only the musicians and the white fans who cared much that B. B. King played guitar and Bland did not. Both were magnificent communicators, with a screaming, emotional delivery that provoked an ecstatic response, drawing obvious comparisons to gospel preaching. Both were also hip, contemporary stars. They paid tribute to the down-home sound but, despite their geographical roots in Mississippi and Memphis, would never be confused with old Delta bluesmen. Today, though rarely receiving his due in books and on revival albums, Bland is still going strong, and still draws his biggest crowds in black neighborhoods.

A couple of down-home players did get chart action in the 1960s, and one could argue that they provide the only example of obvious nostalgia in the history of the African-American pop scene. Jimmy Reed was a startlingly old-fashioned player, his guitar rocking along in the solid boogie shuffle that Robert Johnson had pioneered, while his harmonica whined and his relaxed, sly drawl sounded as if he was just singing to a few friends on his back porch. He might wear sharp zebra-patterned jackets, but where Waters, Wolf, or Hooker had an awesome, frightening power that made them sound tougher than the hardest rockers, Reed sounded like a laid-back country boy. His chart success was a startling anomaly, but he hung on into the mid-1960s, when he was joined by another harmonica-guitar drawler, Slim Harpo, a Louisiana swamp bluesman who went to number one in 1966 with the seductively lazy “Baby Scratch my Back.” It is worth mentioning, though, that although Reed sold as an R&B artist, he recalled his
audiences outside of Chicago as always including more white faces than black. “It'd be either some Indians, some Polacks, or some white folks, or somethin' like that. Just now and then there'd be some colored people…”
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And that pretty much finishes the story of blues as black pop music. The soul revolution had deep Southern roots, and it was no surprise to find Aretha Franklin or Otis Redding singing a twelve-bar blues on occasion, but it was hard to hear many echoes of the blues era in disco (though, bizarrely, there were several disco-ragtime hits). As I said at the beginning of this chapter, it is all a matter of definition, and one could easily make the argument that James Brown was simply a new kind of blues singer and follow this logic through to Snoop Dogg. Having decided to let the musicians themselves do the defining as much as possible, however, I am struck by how insistent Brown, for one, has been on killing that argument. Born in Georgia, Brown grew up hearing his father sing Blind Boy Fuller numbers, and even had a few guitar lessons from Tampa Red. He modeled himself on figures like Louis Jordan and Little Willie John, both of whom recorded fine blues tracks. And yet, he maintains that while he loved everything from gospel music to Count Basie to Frank Sinatra, he always hated blues. “I don't remember whether I sang them, but I know I never liked them…I still don't like the blues. Never have.”
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