Escaping the Delta (33 page)

Of course, many trad fans despised the “childish” rock 'n' roll tunes, but the British scene was small enough that some overlap was inevitable. Barber and his cohorts were sponsoring tours not only by Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson, and McGhee and Terry, but also by Muddy Waters and his full electric band. Alexis Korner, who replaced
Donegan in Barber's group, was soon leading an electric outfit called Blues Incorporated, which had fellow jazzman Charlie Watts on drums and featured occasional vocals by a teenager named Mick Jagger. Korner was also providing sleeping quarters for another teenager, Brian Jones, who had started out playing saxophone in suburban trad bands, but now had turned to electric slide guitar and renamed himself Elmo Lewis in honor of Elmore James.
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With the addition of a bass player named Bill Wyman, and Keith Richards, who had cast off an early infatuation with Roy Rogers in favor of the hillbilly rock licks of Berry and Scotty Moore, the Rolling Stones were born and soon supplanted Korner as leaders of a British blues boom. But I am getting ahead of the story.

Over in the States, Leadbelly, Broonzy, and McGhee and Terry were more likely to be considered folk than jazz, and less likely to be filed alongside any group that used electric instruments or even piano. This became even more true in the 1950s, when the entertainment world was riven by the anti-Communist Red Scare, and one no longer found Dizzy Gillespie and Pete Seeger appearing at the same left-wing summer camps. The climate of Red-baiting destroyed the old folk scene, forcing Alan Lomax into self-imposed exile in Europe and artists like Seeger out of nightclubs, radio, and television. Nonetheless, Seeger and the Weavers had put Leadbelly's “Goodnight Irene” on the pop charts, and their success inspired a wave of clean-cut guitar pickers. Folk music was presented as a wholesome antidote to rock 'n' roll, with Harry Belafonte as the reigning star, joined by groups like the Tarriers, the Limelighters, and the awesomely popular Kingston Trio. Blues was only a minor part of this trend, though Belafonte would occasionally pay homage to Leadbelly's chain-gang work-song tradition, and college folkies gave a warm welcome to acoustic players like Josh White and McGhee and Terry. Some of the same audience was buying Elvis, but would be less likely to admit the fact to teachers and parents. Throughout the revival, folk was associated with a collegiate image, as contrasted with the delinquent idiocy and jungle beat of rock 'n' roll.
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In Bohemian enclaves like Greenwich Village and the jazz coffeehouses of Harvard Square, things were somewhat different. There,
another sort of folksinger began sharing stages with the jazz modernists and beat poets. Dave Van Ronk, a founding leader of this crew, would later refer to them as the “neo-ethnics,” and they were out to rescue “real” folk music from the pasteurized and homogenized style of the Weavers clones. Van Ronk himself came from a trad jazz background, and had discovered rural blues while searching for records of old New Orleans music. He became king of the Village blues singers, and along with Eric Von Schmidt, a painter who was his opposite number in Cambridge, set out to capture the sound and feel of the older black guitar and vocal styles, adopting all the roughness and immediacy of the blind street performers who had recorded in the 1920s.

The neo-ethnic movement was nourished by a spate of LP reissues that for the first time made it possible to find hillbilly and country blues recordings in white, middle-class, urban stores. The bible was Harry Smith's
Anthology of American Folk Music
, a pioneering six-LP set that included three Blind Lemon Jefferson cuts along with songs from Charley Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, and Sleepy John Estes (plus plenty of hillbilly, Cajun, and religious music). Smith was specifically interested in the oldest and most rural-sounding styles, and set a pattern for future folk-blues reissue projects by intentionally avoiding any artist who seemed consciously modern or commercial. Thus he eschewed Leroy Carr and the piano bluesmen in favor of Jefferson, and the “blue yodels” of Jimmie Rodgers in favor of the more archaic-sounding Carter Family.

Far from balancing this taste, the other record collectors tended to be even more conservative. Much as they loved the music, they were also driven by the same mania for rarity that drives collectors of old stamps or coins, and many turned up their noses at Jefferson or the Carters, since those records were common. To such men, the perfect blues artist was someone like Son House or Skip James, an unrecognized genius whose 78s had sold so badly that at most one or two copies survived. Since the collectors were the only people with access to the original records or any broad knowledge of the field, they functioned to a great extent as gatekeepers of the past and had a profound influence on what the broader audience heard. By emphasizing obscurity as a virtue unto itself, they essentially turned the hierarchy of
blues stardom upside-down: The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.

This fit nicely with the beat aesthetic, and indeed with the whole mythology of modern art. While Shakespeare had been a favorite playwright of the Elizabethan court, and Rembrandt had been portraitist to wealthy Amsterdam, the more recent idols were celebrated for their rejections: Van Gogh had barely sold a painting in his lifetime,
The Rite of Spring
had caused a riot, Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
had been turned down by a long string of publishers. Where jazz had once been regarded as a popular style, a new generation of fans applauded Miles Davis for turning his back on the audience and insisting that his music speak for itself, while deriding Louis Armstrong as a grinning Uncle Tom. On the folk-blues scene, Van Ronk and his peers regarded anything that smacked of showmanship as a betrayal of the true tradition, a lapse into the crowd-pleasing fakery of the Weavers and Josh White. As he would later recall with some amusement, “If you weren't staring into the sound-hole of your instrument, we thought you should at least have the decency and self-respect to stare at your shoes.”

As in John Hammond's Carnegie Hall, art was opposed to entertainment. And, as in the 1930s, this meant that the blues Van Ronk and his friends were reviving had to be clearly differentiated from the blues that Elvis Presley was turning into the first global pop craze. A major figure in this redefinition was Samuel Charters, a writer and occasional trumpet player who was Van Ronk's close friend and sometime bandmate. Charters had produced a couple of sessions for Folkways Records—including one reuniting some of the older Memphis players, which in honor of Lonnie Donegan's success was titled
Skiffle Bands
—and in 1959 he came out with a book and record, both titled
The Country Blues
. The book was a broad survey of prewar blues, with a nod to more recent players like Muddy Waters, and though further scholarship turned up some factual inaccuracies, it gives a remarkably clear-sighted picture of the scene. However, Charters's title maintained the central myth of the Hammond and Lomax approaches: that older blues was fundamentally rural music. (He also joined them in singling out Robert Johnson. A three-page chapter argued Johnson's unique artistic importance—though emphasizing his
obscurity within the black blues market—and the accompanying album included the first reissue of a Johnson song, once again “Preachin' Blues.”) Charters was not a hard-core purist, and his album included cuts by urban stars like Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson, but this subtlety was lost on all but the cognoscenti, and his work established the term “country blues” to describe all prewar Race recordings that did not feature women or jazz bands. (The cognoscenti were profoundly irritated, and a group of them rushed out a release called
Really! The Country Blues
, which included no urban stars.)
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In keeping with the folk revivalist aesthetic, Carr was the only pianist included on Charters's collection, and the next few years would cement a new prejudice in favor of guitars—and to a lesser extent harmonicas—as the defining blues instruments. As the revival picked up steam, and young white fans scoured the South in search of the surviving exponents of the prewar boom, the hallowed “rediscoveries” would be Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Booker White, Son House, and Sleepy John Estes, along with previously unrecorded figures like Mance Lipscomb and Robert Pete Williams.
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By historical standards, Roosevelt Sykes and Little Brother Montgomery should have been equally celebrated, since they had helped invent the deep Mississippi style and had been significant influences on James, in particular—and in the 1960s they were playing and singing better than a lot of the guitarists—but their choice of instrument banned them from the coffeehouse circuit and most folk festivals, and they remained a minority taste, more celebrated by the trad-jazz wing of blues fandom.

In Europe, things were generally a bit looser. With less American music to go around, audiences were forced to be more broad-minded, and pianists like Memphis Slim, Champion Jack Dupree, and Eddie Boyd shortly relocated to the continent. Lonnie Johnson, who refused to be turned into a walking museum of his youth, also found the Europeans more welcoming than folks back home. Stateside fans were horrified that he wanted to play electric guitar and mix his blues numbers with Tin Pan Alley torch songs like “How Deep Is the Ocean” and current hits like “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
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In the United States, down-home artists like John Lee Hooker and Lightnin' Hop
kins, who on their home turf had built enduring careers as aggressive electric players, were urged to play acoustic instruments and perform their most archaic-sounding repertoire.
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Thus, it was in Europe that the folk-blues scene crossed the line into blues-rock. In 1962, the first of a series of German-sponsored Folk Blues Festival tours featured Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee along with ex-Basie vocalist Helen Humes, Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, and Willie Dixon leading a tough Chicago rhythm section. To a lot of people, this music sounded very close to rock 'n' roll, even though the presenters worked hard to maintain the distinction between art and pop. Producer Horst Lippmann would later explain that he had to coach the artists on how to be less flashy, saying he had particular difficulty with T-Bone Walker, whose dynamic stage antics had made him the prototypic lead guitar hero:

A lot of younger Europeans did not choose to fit Lippmann's stereotype. By this time, Bo Diddley and Little Richard were touring England, and their hopped-up versions of Chicago blues and boogie-woogie piano were inspiring purist groups like the Rolling Stones—who at first had sat onstage, carefully recycling licks off their favorite American records—to loosen up a bit. “Watching [them] was the way we were drawn into the whole pop thing,” Keith Richards would later explain. “We didn't feel we were selling out, because we were learning a lot by going into this side of the scene.”
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The barriers were coming down, and despite its serious concert atmosphere, even that first Folk Blues Festival tour spawned a hit single, a romping John
Lee Hooker boogie called “Shake It Baby,” which shot up the French pop charts. Over the next two years, the festival would bring Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson (along with Lightnin' Hopkins, Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Sleepy John Estes, Victoria Spivey—playing a ukulele—and Chess Records' new soul star, Sugar Pie DeSanto), and during the 1963 tour Williamson met up with the Yardbirds, a bunch of young English blues players that included a guitarist named Eric Clapton.

Clapton and the Stones were the first pop stars ever to insist that they were playing blues. Even Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, deep-dyed as they were in the Delta tradition, were happy to be considered R&B singers, and if their records had crossed over to pop they would not have argued genre definitions.
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They had no interest in being purists, they just sounded like they sounded. When “Hoochie Coochie Man” hit, Waters put aside his guitar and belted out this more rocking, funnier music, and he would not bother to record any more Delta slide licks until the white kids started demanding them. With the English players, it was different. They heard something in blues that spoke to their deepest needs and desires, and they made themselves into apostles of that sound. They would mix it with rock, especially rock recorded on Chess records, but they knew that Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley—bright and entertaining as they might be—were still the real thing, coming from the same place as Muddy and Wolf. And that was the sound they loved: no horns, no string sections, no girls going “oo-wah”—just slashing guitar and wailing harmonica.

Then the English kids flew across the Atlantic, bringing the gospel home. And they did something unprecedented: Unlike the hundreds of white blues singers before them, all the peers of Jimmie Rodgers, of Elvis Presley, of—forgive me, but history is history—Georgia Gibbs, they took it upon themselves to educate their audience. “Our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters,” Keith Richards would later say. “We were carrying flags, idealistic teenage sort of shit: ‘There's no way we think anybody is really going to seriously listen to us. As long as we can get a few people interested in listening to the shit we think they ought to listen to….' That was our aim, to turn people on to the
blues. If we could turn them on to Muddy and Jimmy Reed and Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then our job was done.”
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