[Dixielandjazz] The Blues - Revisited

[Mike Durham]

Fascinating stuff, Steve - thanks. Anyone who sees the photo of Robert 
Johnson in his high-fashion, sharply-pressed pinstripe suit and snappy hat 
can see he isn't a field labourer, BUT that's exactly where he came from, as 
can be read in Alan Lomax's account of meeting with Robert's mother in his 
book "The Land Where The Blues Began". From all accounts, there were 
actually many 'worlds' of the blues, ranging from the highly sophisticated, 
professional urban performers of Chicago etc, to men who were field workers 
by day who playing guitar by night in rural Mississippi honky-tonks.... so 
perhaps ther is more than one truth to this, even after we dismiss some of 
the romantic nonsense that has been written about Johnson, the blues - and 
jazz!

Mike




>From: Stephen Barbone <barbonestreet at earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: barbonestreet at earthlink.net
>To: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
>Subject: [Dixielandjazz] The Blues - Revisited
>Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 13:17:00 -0500
>
>Well, here's another take on the legend of the blues. Is the legend of
>jazz similar?
>
>Cheers,
>Steve Barbone
>
>February 28, 2004 - NY Times
>
>Revisionists Sing New Blues History
>
>By BEN SISARIO
>
>        Robert Johnson left 29 songs and little else, but it was enough.
>Johnson has long since become the most famous blues singer of all time,
>reaching a level in the pantheon of American music occupied by figures
>like Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. The myths
>inevitably grew up around him. Most writers who have dealt with him have
>found it impossible to resist the story of his deal with the devil, or
>the image of him pursued by "hellhounds."
>
>But as Johnson's popularity has grown ? the box set of his "Complete
>Recordings" (Columbia/Legacy) has sold nearly two million copies
>worldwide ? a growing number of music scholars have begun to question
>Johnson's place in the canon, and the received wisdom about blues
>history itself.
>
>Elijah Wald's new "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention
>of the Blues" (Amistad/HarperCollins) is one of the most contentious
>yet, daring to suggest that Johnson's primacy was largely a creation of
>white fans and music critics of the 1960's.
>
>"As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an
>extremely minor figure," Mr. Wald writes, "and very little that happened
>in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had
>never played a note."
>
>With extensive research into the listening habits of the audience of the
>time, Mr. Wald describes a history of the blues that is markedly
>different from the one in accounts like Martin Scorsese's recent
>seven-part PBS series, "The Blues."
>
>In Mr. Wald's history, the principal players are not lonesome folk
>singers from dusty hamlets, but seasoned professionals riding the latest
>trends in black pop. They have names that are largely unknown today
>except among experts: Peetie Wheatstraw, Leroy Carr and Kokomo Arnold.
>And most of them were women. The kings of the blues were actually the
>queens of the blues: Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and dozens of others now
>all but forgotten, singers like Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey and Sara
>Martin.
>
>Johnson, who died in 1938, emerges in Mr. Wald's account as a regional
>player eager to copy the latest hits. And he was only marginally
>successful. Just 11 of his songs were issued in his lifetime ? the
>biggest stars recorded well over 100 songs, Mr. Wald points out ? and
>his biggest hit, "Terraplane Blues," sold about 5,000 copies.
>
>Mr. Wald and other critics argue that the discrepancy between Johnson's
>stature and his accomplishments stems from a fundamental
>misunderstanding of blues music by later, mostly white, writers.
>
>Last year Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch's "Robert Johnson: Lost
>and Found" (University of Illinois Press) traced the paper trail of the
>Johnson myth through the decades and found that white critics and
>promoters were telling tall tales about him while he was still alive.
>The authors tracked down misleading articles about him dating to 1937,
>and reconstructed the comical spread of Johnson's Faust legend ? that he
>sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in return for his
>extraordinary gifts as a guitarist ? from a single, dubious 1966
>interview with Johnson's friend and fellow blues musician Son House.
>
>Another book, Patricia R. Schroeder's "Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and
>Contemporary American Culture" (due from University of Illinois Press in
>July), traces the persistence of Johnson's image in the culture at
>large, from postage stamps to novels to plays. Johnson's myth, it
>suggests, is truly larger than his life.
>
>"This just adds to the legend of Johnson," said David Evans, a professor
>of music at the University of Memphis and a veteran blues researcher.
>"Like Elvis and Hank Williams and certain other stars, he can be all
>things to all people."
>
>Stopping for coffee at a Midtown hotel during his recent book tour, Mr.
>Wald explained that "the blues was pop music ? it simply wasn't folk
>music."
>
>He continued: "It was invented retroactively as black folk music, which
>brought a new set of standards to bear on it and created a whole new
>pantheon of heroes. Suddenly the people who were the biggest stars were
>too slick to be real."
>
>Johnson became a perfect model for the 1960's rock star. He lived hard,
>played like a man possessed and died young ? at around 27 ? in
>mysterious circumstances. No wonder he appealed to the Jim Morrison
>generation.
>
>The obsession with Johnson at the expense of almost all other blues
>singers, Mr. Wald suggests, has grossly distorted the history of the
>blues. Prewar blues musicians were much more versatile and pop oriented
>than is widely known; Mr. Wald notes that when Alan Lomax interviewed
>Muddy Waters in Mississippi in the early 1940's, he found that Waters's
>repertory included "Chattanooga Choo Choo" and seven Gene Autry songs ?
>more pop than blues. And the immediate origins of the blues, Mr. Wald
>writes, are most likely in black vaudeville, not in field hollers. The
>blues, in other words, was up-to-the-minute pop, a sign of urbanization,
>technology and sophistication, not primitivism or tradition.
>
>Not all historians agree with Mr. Wald's critique. Johnson may not have
>been a star, some say, but he had many important followers like Muddy
>Waters and Elmore James, who continued to play his songs in the decades
>after his death.
>
>And the blues queens, some argue, cannot really be considered neglected.
>John Szwed, a professor of anthropology and African-American studies at
>Yale and currently the Louis Armstrong visiting professor of jazz
>studies at Columbia, called them overvalued. "The classic women blues
>singers have always received more attention from jazz critics and
>historians, the folks who canonized the blues tradition," he said.
>
>Some critics also see a red herring in measuring importance in terms of
>raw pop appeal. "You can argue that Emily Dickinson wasn't that
>important," said Jeff Todd Titon, a professor of ethnomusicology at
>Brown. "Nobody in the 19th century was influenced by her poetry, not
>until literary critics got ahold of her."
>
>But the notion that Johnson's fortunes and the history of the blues have
>largely been decided by the white rock 'n' roll world appeals to many
>blues experts.
>
>"There are problems with the idea of the blues as a roots music," Mr.
>Titon said. "Because if so, then rock 'n' roll is the flower. It used to
>be that the flower was jazz, which is equally misleading. Blues is a
>music in and of itself."
>
>Mr. Wald has a looser definition. Blues music, as he sees it, is simply
>part of a continuum of black pop. Robert Johnson, Leroy Carr and Bessie
>Smith were not moaning field laborers. "They were Sam Cooke, they were
>Snoop Dogg, they were Aretha Franklin," he said. "That's what we've
>forgotten, and that's what a lot of white blues fans don't want them to
>be."
>
>
>
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