Escaping the Delta (34 page)

The English musicians were shocked to find that the adoring throngs who met their planes were unaware of the giants who strode Chicago's South Side. “Muddy Waters? Where's that?” one reporter asked an incredulous Paul McCartney, who responded, “Don't you know who your own famous people are here?”
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The Stones, using their newfound power to further their evangelical aims, brought Howlin' Wolf along for their 1965 appearance on the teenage pop show
Shindig!
and sat admiringly at his feet as he sang “How Many More Years.”
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That year and the next were the high-water mark for the blues revival. Clapton was declared God by a horde of white kids on both sides of the Atlantic—most of whom had never heard of his idol, Freddie King—hitting first as the guitarist for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and then with Cream. Meanwhile, inspired by the success of the English bands, American record labels began paying attention to the young white blues disciples on their home turf. Paul Butterfield, a harmonica player who had actually grown up in Chicago and spent his teens apprenticing himself in the city's toughest clubs, made an album that made pretty much all the Brits sound like the foreigners they were. John Hammond Jr., son of the “Spirituals to Swing” producer and the most assiduous of Robert Johnson acolytes, went electric and started jamming with Duane Allman. As Muddy Waters recalled, “Before the Rolling Stones, people over here didn't know nothing and didn't
want
to know nothing about me.”
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Now, there was a whole new audience clamoring to hear his music, and Chess Records captured the spirit of the moment by repackaging his and Wolf's early singles on twin albums titled
The Real Folk Blues
. (This was, of course, immensely irritating to those who considered the electric Chicago sound the antithesis of “folk,” but such purists were fast becoming an insignificant minority.)

Meanwhile, backed by some of Butterfield's sidemen and some of Hammond's, Bob Dylan created a whole new kind of fusion, and revivalism took a sideways turn into modern art. With Dylan, it was no longer about going back to Chicago and Mississippi, it was about
creating the new sound of the 1960s, and Jimi Hendrix built on that vibe, and after a little while no one was calling it blues anymore. The Brits were hanging in the same rooms, hearing the same records, and doing the same drugs as Dylan and Hendrix (indeed, Hendrix had paid his dues with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers but developed his new style in London), and soon everyone was singing lyrics inspired by symbolist poetry or—since few except Dylan bothered to thumb through Verlaine—a potent combination of hubris and LSD.
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The Stones, Clapton, and a few others tried to keep the revivalist fires burning. As they rolled across America, hailed and damned as the prophets of youth revolution, the Stones would follow “Sympathy for the Devil” with understated, reverent acoustic versions of old songs by Robert Wilkins, Fred McDowell, and Robert Johnson. By now, though, these were staged set pieces: When the band had played Chuck Berry's “Come On” or Howlin' Wolf's “Little Red Rooster,” Jagger had sung with the same blend of self-conscious Americanisms, enthusiasm, and sarcastic humor that he used when singing “Satisfaction.” When he and Richards sat down with acoustic instruments to present “Prodigal Son” or “Love in Vain,” they were giving a demonstration of a music they loved, showing their audience how the blues used to sound in the old days, before returning to the roar and clash of the present.

As the old records became more widely available, and the young revivalists increased in technical proficiency, such demonstrations would become the standard fare. Down in the plains that surrounded the Olympus of the rock gods, acoustic players took the stages of folk clubs to perform virtuosic, note-for-note recreations of a vast repertoire of prewar blues songs, culled from the grooves of an ever-growing flood of LP reissues. A few—Spider John Koerner leaps to mind—came up with their own variations on the classic formulas, and a couple—Taj Mahal, Larry Johnson—were even black, but the dominant strain was made up of white middle-class kids who were proudly, meticulously imitative of the old masters.

As for those older bluesmen who had been lucky enough to survive the intervening decades, for some of them the 1960s really was a revival. They might be baffled by the audiences of young white kids
acclaiming them as voices from a vanished world, but the money could be very good, and it was a pleasure to have one's work treated with such seriousness and enthusiasm. Some were less pleased than others, of course, especially if they were not among the handful who became major drawing cards, and at times even the lucky few might succumb to the loneliness of being appreciated only by strangers. In one of his more meditative moments, Muddy Waters would remark: “I thinks to myself how these white kids was sitting down and thinking and playing the blues that my black kids was bypassing. That was a hell of a thing, man, to think about.”
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On the whole, though, the revival provided the older artists with a lot of paydays they could never have hoped for as black pop has-beens, and the rewards more than balanced the oddity of it all.

One thing that must have been particularly surprising to the survivors of the first blues boom was the concentration on Robert Johnson, an artist most of them had never even heard of. In 1961, spurred by the attention being given to blues reissues, Columbia Records released a full LP of Johnson recordings as part of its Thesaurus of Classic Jazz. In keeping with John Hammond's critical judgment of the 1930s—and because hyperbole has never hurt record sales—it was titled
King of the Delta Blues Singers
, and most of the new blues fans accepted this as a simple statement of fact.

Eric Clapton was one of many whose lives were changed by that record:

Like the effect of seeing Elvis Presley jumping out of the living room television in 1956, the discovery of Robert Johnson fulfilled needs that people did not even know they had. To a lot of white kids who had traveled from Elvis to Chuck Berry to Muddy Waters—or from the Weavers to Josh White to Leadbelly—Johnson defined everything that had drawn them to blues, to rock, to folk or just to want to break out of the boring, ordinary world of suburban England or Eisenhower America. His music was older, deeper, and more mysterious than anything they had heard before. The lyrics were powerful and exciting, the voice moaned, soared, and whispered, and the guitar work showed an astonishing subtlety combined with a virtuosic command of rhythm and tone. Most of all, there was the feel, a primal, visceral heart-cry that fit like a missing puzzle piece into all the James Dean/Marlon Brando dreams of pained, sensitive, brilliant, masculine rebellion. It was more than just the sound: Johnson was a dark, unknown spirit, without any history aside from his songs. There were no photographs of him, and the album cover showed only a painting of a faceless black man hunched over a guitar, contemplating his shadow. That was how we all thought of Johnson, and we could never have imagined the photo that would surface in 1990 of a handsome young man in a neat pinstripe suit, smiling confidently into the camera.
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The following year, Columbia released an LP of Leroy Carr's recordings, but no one much cared. Carr and his music did not feel like the roots of rock 'n' roll, no matter how many black R&B singers were still doing his tunes. He did not sound angry or haunted, or even play guitar. He had not the slightest connection to Mississippi, and no one who listened to him for long would picture a broken, lonely rambler. A fine writer and singer, he was pleasant enough in his way, but there was nothing dangerous or otherworldly about him.

I am not trying to sneer at the taste that hailed Johnson as a genius dead before his time while dooming Carr to obscurity, or that worshipped Muddy Waters as the greatest living bluesman while ignoring Bobby Bland. That is my world, and as a guitar player and a white male and a youthful acolyte of both folk romanticism and the rock rebel image, I remain deeply affected by the enthusiasms and prejudices of this aesthetic. I like to think that I can step outside it and regard it
with some degree of perspective, but I still thrill to many of the same sounds that first attracted me to blues, and for many of the same reasons.

Indeed, one could argue that I am simply fitting into my generational profile when I choose to end the story here, to say that blues and its iconography were set by about 1970, and have changed very little in the ensuing thirty-odd years. I saw Stevie Ray Vaughan, and admired his chops, and I am grateful to him for turning on a huge, new audience and keeping the blues clubs open for another while, but the image of the guitar god was set before Vaughan appeared on the scene. It was an invention of the 1960s, courtesy of Clapton and Michael Bloomfield, Jeff Beck, Steve Miller, and—most brilliantly if not most profitably—Hendrix. In the end, that image may well be the main addition the white audience has made to the blues genre.

That, and the idea that the greatest blues comes from someplace far outside our modern neighborhoods and ordinary lives.

And, of course, nostalgia—or, as some of us prefer to call it, history.

I
N THE END, IT IS ALL ABOUT THE AUDIENCE
. M
USICIANS ARE
hailed as geniuses and innovators, but there are always far more listeners than players, and it is they who create the world in which some performers will prosper and others will labor in obscurity. What defines a style, a genre, or a movement is the audience that supports and consumes it. If people want to dance, a band with a great rhythm section will beat out one with astonishing soloists. If teenagers want to be in rooms without anyone but other teenagers, they will seek out bands that their parents hate. Everyone listens to music as part of a larger experience, whether it is the experience of getting drunk in a honky-tonk or of putting on a tux and going to the opera, or simply of relaxing at home after a hard day's work.

The audience affects not only styles and approaches to music, but also quality. If an audience is large enough, it will support enough musicians that some of them will be wonderfully talented, and if it is demanding enough, it will push them to realize and even exceed those talents. If it is smaller, the talent pool will be less, and if it makes few demands, then mediocrity will be the norm, even when players are capable of doing better.

When the audience for blues shifted from being mostly black to being mostly white, that could not help but have a profound effect on the music. As long as blues was being created for African-American listeners, although it changed with the changing fashions, its core virtues
were entertainment, swing, and familiarity. The consumers had no patience with being bored, wanted to dance, and expected any singer to act and sound more or less like one of themselves—flashier and in fancier clothes, perhaps, but still regular folks, singing about normal life, and sharing the same aims and frustrations. The white blues audience, from the moment one appeared for black singers rather than vaudevillians and hillbilly yodelers, expected these singers to be quite unlike themselves, and to provide both a profound emotional experience and a view into another way of life. White listeners were often willing to be bored if they felt that the experience was sufficiently educational or uplifting, and they wanted a blues concert to express the singer's world and experience, without insisting or expecting that it express their own.

Obviously, I am not talking about individuals here. Plenty of black people have loved music that gave them a view into a different world, and plenty of white people have demanded music that mirrored their own lives. Maybe it would be more accurate to split the audience along class lines, and say that the shift was from a working-class audience that wanted to hear working-class music to a middle-class audience that wanted to hear working-class music. There was also a gender shift that went along with the shift in race and class: Everyone in the field agrees that as long as blues was primarily played for black audiences, the main consumers were women. The white blues audience, by contrast, is overwhelmingly male.

Different audiences, by definition, have different musical standards, and it is not necessary to say that one standard is better than another in order to see that different standards will produce different music. To leave blues for a moment, I once read a quotation from Arthur Rubinstein about Vladimir Horowitz's first tour of Europe as a young piano prodigy, saying that Horowitz was the first person to perform the Chopin
etudes
perfectly, without any mistakes or deviations from the score. This quotation has always fascinated me, because no pianist could graduate from any classical conservatory in the world today unless he or she could play Chopin as written. Technical exactitude has become the baseline, and whatever else one brings to the music, one is at least expected to be able to play it accurately. Clearly,
though, this was not true in Chopin's time, and even in the early years of the twentieth century the greatest pianists were expected to be great in ways that did not demand this sort of precision. So what were the standards then? Emotion, theatricality, individuality? And are the technically immaculate pianists of our day “better” or “worse” than those of the nineteenth century?

That last question is meaningless, unless one brings one's own taste to bear on it, and it is equally meaningless to argue about whether blues is dying, dead, or in better shape than ever. To one person, the 1980s were a new golden age, to another the rise of Stevie Ray Vaughan proved that true blues feeling was gone forever. Similar debates have been taking place for as long as there have been fans and critics who liked to argue about such things. In 1959, Alan Lomax could condemn the contemporary urban electric styles as “the blues in decadence…a picture of a violent and decadent society.”
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A decade later, critics were saying much the same thing about the Rolling Stones.

Black audience tastes shifted from year to year, long before the white audience became a factor. Indeed, African-American pop fans—like all pop fans—have often been crueler than any revivalist, discarding last year's idol as if he or she had never sung an exciting note. Still, there was a continuity in the audience itself: The mainstream of black blues fans was always relatively young, always relatively poor, and always felt a strong link to the South. And it always turned to blues as its own home sound, a musical extension of the most natural, day-today speech. (It also kept the musicians up-to-date: In the later 1950s, when Muddy Waters played in a black club, his band would warm up the audience with pop tunes like “Misty” and the latest Lloyd Price hits; in the 1960s, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy played straight blues for white fans but had to throw in James Brown and Wilson Pickett numbers for their home audience in Chicago.)

It is no criticism of the white audience to say that it applied a different standard to blues. Dreams of another world, love affairs with the exotic, aspirations to something outside one's own experience—all of these have been prime motivations for much of the greatest art, as well as centuries of exploration and technological innovation. There is
nothing wrong with a middle-class, college-educated white kid falling in love with the Delta blues, any more than there is something wrong with a poor, black Mississippi sharecropper developing a taste for Mozart. It would be odd, though, if that sharecropper made the same demands on the music as were made by listeners in the Viennese court of the late eighteenth century. The court expected Mozart to write pieces that its members could play in amateur recitals, suited to their instrumental tastes and capacities, and operas suited to the current fashion and the local company. Modern listeners, sharecroppers or not, expect something rather different.

In the same way, the modern blues audience hears Robert Johnson's music very differently from the way his peers heard it in 1935, and makes very different demands on those musicians who consider themselves his heirs. In a sense, the white audience turned blues into a sort of acting. At first, it demanded “real” blues singers, black men and women who had already established themselves as performers in their own communities. Since one of the measures of “realness” was that the music create the atmosphere of another world, that it carry the listener from Carnegie Hall or a Cambridge coffeehouse to a dilapidated porch in rural Mississippi or a barroom on the South Side of Chicago, this audience automatically gravitated toward the blues artists who made those connections most obviously. An audience of poor black Texans knew that T-Bone Walker was still one of them even though he was wearing a zoot suit and diamonds, dancing onstage and playing guitar behind his head. A white revivalist audience worried that someone that sharp and snappy was some kind of faker, adulterating the music's pure country roots.
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As the revival picked up steam and white musicians entered the blues field, these standards forced them to attempt a sort of impersonation. Especially if a singer was not from the South, an effort was necessary to sound “real,” since a London or New York accent was clearly not appropriate to true blues singing. (Mahalia Jackson sang that God had “the whole ‘woild' in his hands,” but if a Jewish guy from Brooklyn sang in that accent it would sound ridiculous.) All the older blues artists, from Mamie Smith and Leroy Carr to Lemon Jefferson and Muddy Waters, had sung with an accent and timbre that were
simply extensions of their normal speech. Like white country singers, or indeed singers of any style of vernacular music (what else would “vernacular” mean?), this was basic to what they were doing. The black pop audience had always assumed that when they heard a blues singer, that was what he or she sounded like offstage as well. The white audience liked to make the same assumption, when dealing with an older, black performer, but—except for a few caviling purists—was willing to embrace a good acting job by a white artist. Indeed, the white audience tended to give even greater rewards to white artists who sounded convincingly black than it gave to black artists. Such artists acted as a bridge, seeming more accessible both artistically and personally, and also had a more societally acceptable form of sex appeal.

As with the classical world's note-perfect conservatory students, the recreators of blues had some virtues that the older, more natural musicians did not.
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Since they were learning the music as outsiders, rather than working in their personal musical language, a single performer could present a dramatically varied range of styles. In folk clubs, it became common to hear a guitarist play arrangements by artists as unlike one another as John Hurt, the Reverend Gary Davis, and Robert Johnson in the course of a single set. This variety of themes and approaches could make for a far more interesting show than an hour of virtually indistinguishable songs by a “genuine” bluesman who was used to playing all-night dances for crowds that cared only about the rhythm. The new electric guitar heroes were similarly virtuosic, able to fire off solos in the styles of such disparate players as B. B. King, Albert King, and Freddie King—something that none of the Kings would have bothered to attempt.

With the passage of time, such recreative skills have become more and more necessary, as there are fewer and fewer unique, personal stylists working in the blues idiom. This decline in individuality is as indisputable as it was inevitable. It is startling to think that all of the evolution from the first Bessie Smith record to the first Rolling Stones record took only forty years. When Skip James and John Hurt appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, they were greeted as emissaries from an ancient, vanished world, but it was only three decades since
they had first entered a recording studio—that is, they were about as ancient as disco is to us today. No one can argue that blues has continued to show similar progress since the 1960s. (That is, unless one wants to declare rap a modern form of blues—which would be fine with me, but seems not to be the general opinion.) As a result, virtually all present-day blues artists, whether black or white, are largely recreators, acting the part of characters who came of age when blues was still black popular music. Some fans will continue to find black performers more convincing than white ones, but that is a question of verisimilitude.
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A young black man from New York or Colorado—or even from Mississippi—who is trying to sound like someone from his grandfather's time may well produce a better simulacrum than a young white man trying to do the same thing, and the quest for a personal heritage may provide links that the quest to master a foreign language does not. Nonetheless, it remains a fundamentally different effort from playing the music of one's own time and place. Which is to say no young musician who is playing anything that sounds like Robert Johnson is making an artistic decision that even vaguely resembles Johnson's.

Again, it comes back to the audience. Any musician, regardless of race, who chooses to play blues in the twenty-first century has to serve the tastes of the current blues audience. That audience extends around the world, and supports performers of everything from acoustic rural styles to post-Vaughan electric guitar-slinging, but it has certain criteria. For one thing—and here we go with the Horowitz bit again—it expects instrumental virtuosity. The Stones, the Animals, and their English peers made up the last significant wave of blues performers to feature singers over expert instrumentalists.

There was a good reason for white musicians to concentrate on instrumental rather than vocal styles. As Muddy Waters put it, “They got all these white kids now. Some of them can play
good
blues. They play so much, run a ring around you playin' guitar, but they cannot vocal like the black man.”
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One could argue that they should not have bothered trying, since the greatest white blues singers—Jimmie Rodgers, say, or Hank Williams—had always sung in their own natural voices, but that was not the kind of singing the new blues audience cared to
hear. So white singers adopted black mannerisms, and as it turned out, their audience showed little concern for any vocal deficiencies. With Clapton, searing, screaming guitar solos became the defining blues sound, and the fact that his singing was weak and perfunctory mattered only to those who did not much care for his style in the first place. (Among later blues stars, Bonnie Raitt is pretty much the only one who has continued to stress her vocals over her guitar work, and she has spawned relatively few disciples—Susan Tedeschi and her peers are a tiny minority compared to all the male guitarslingers.)

This emphasis on instrumental technique was by no means limited to the electric blues-rock world. The acoustic blues scene was also dominated by guitar fans, who routinely acted as if speed and technical proficiency were the key attributes of the genre. By the 1970s, one could find an expert writing that Kokomo Arnold and Robert Johnson had “nothing in common as musicians”
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—despite Johnson's careful study of Arnold's vocal approach and song structures—since all that counted was their guitar work. Likewise, it became commonplace for anyone performing a Johnson song to add solos in “Johnson's style,” usually meaning a flashy slide break, despite the fact that Johnson recorded only one short solo, it did not feature slide, and as a guitarist he was always more notable for his subtlety and control than for any flashy licks.