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Country Blues

The insistent African beat was imported into the USA along with the captured Blacks destined for a life of slavery in the cotton fields of the Deep South, especially the plantations of the Mississippi Delta which was particularly productive.

African slaves were prevented from carrying on their native traditions and forced to adopt the dress, housing, language, religion and attitudes of their ‘masters’. In particular the use of drums was prohibited. The plantation owners were terrified of an insurrection. They thought that the black slaves could communicate though drumming. They might seek to get organised. However, music was encouraged. It was seen as a harmless recreational outlet. It had its uses in the workplace. Work chants in the field and ‘Shouts’, with songs such as where the song ‘Pick a bale of cotton’ was derived, were useful to promote productiveness. Black musicians even provided entertainment for white plantation owners. It raised morale. The black musicians were introduced to western style instruments – including such instruments as banjos, guitars, harmonicas, pianos, and mandolins – and western style music including hymns, folk songs, country reels and popular ballads. It all went into the mix.

The mix fermented for a hundred years or so before coming together as a distinctive style of music around the turn of the 20^th century. It was inevitable. The black musicians had taught themselves the rudiments of western instruments and in so doing had introduced the African beat and rhythms of their African heritage. When this was applied to hymns the end result was Gospel. With Blues it was a little more complicated. The Blues was a name given to a musical form that had a great deal of variety. It evolved differently in different parts of the country. It incorporated the various prevailing musical influences from the black slaves’ environment and distilled it into a new musical style. These influences included Gospel, traditional Folk, Hillbilly country music and popular ballads. When these musical forms amalgamated with the intrinsic African rhythm the result was the 12-bar blues.

In some forms the Blues was seeped in emotion, agonising and soulful, as it attempted to communicate the trials and tribulations of being an oppressed people living in extreme hardship in a tough environment. In this form it often acted as a catharsis for the pent-up frustrations resulting from ill-use and mistreatment. In other forms it told the story of stolen pleasures, of women, violence and drinking that were also part of black man’s everyday life and part of the hardship within which he lived. But the Blues was not always sad. In other forms it was fast and beaty, used as dance music at the country barbeques known as ‘Jukes’. These songs were happy and carefree and reflected the good times when people would get together to eat, drink, dance and have a good time. These ‘Jukes’ would have people playing solo or in little combos known as ‘Jug Bands’. A whole genre of Blues was concerned with risqué songs based on double entendres that were well beyond the normal scope of white music. The Blues was also incorporated into the Spirituals, Gospel and Work songs of the era. A lot of these itinerant musicians would move around, tailoring their repertoire to the occasion or audience. It was not unusual for them to perform a range of Blues styles as well as popular songs and ballads. What was recorded was not always what being played.

The times were hard and musicians tended to choose instruments that were fairly cheap to buy. When they couldn’t afford an instrument they improvised – creating Diddley Bo’s out of nails and piano wire or the side of their wooden shacks, or commandeering washboards, thimbles, spoons or bottles. An early Jug Band, such as Bo Carter’s Mississippi Sheiks or Sleepy John Estes Jug Band, might consist of guitar, mandolin, washboard, jug, harmonica and spoons.

Many of the early Country Blues performers were blind or crippled. There was no welfare. If you couldn’t work the fields you would starve to death. The way out was to become a musician and play the ‘Hollers’ and ‘Shouts’ to accompany the workers in the field, to busk on street corners or play the dives and Jukes. This was how Peg-leg Howell, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Sonny Terry and Blind Snooks Eaglin made a living. Others, like Blind Jimmy Johnson augmented their playing by being preachers. It was play or starve.

If you were busking you had to capture an audience. This led to the whole tradition of showmanship that culminated in some of the wild acts of Chicago Blues and Rock ‘n’ Roll and persisted through to Rock Music of today. Tommy Johnson was famous for doing handstands while he played his guitar. Later T-Bone Walker would play his guitar behind his head while doing the splits or walk his guitar round the sage playing it with one hand. It was the sort of stuff that led into Chuck Berry’s duck-walking, Bo Diddley’s square guitars and Screaming Jay Hawkin’s macabre voodoo act.

Unlike most of the sophisticated popular white music of the 30s and 40s, with its ditties and crooning, the Blues was real. It did not try to couch reality in candy or look at the world through rose-tinted view of the world. It spoke of real feelings that hadn’t been sentimentalised and the realities of life bringing, drink, sex and even death out from under the carpet. It was precisely because of this earthiness that contemporary white bourgeoisie audiences found it primitive, vulgar and crude. They saw it with the eyes and ears of their day. It was the decadent music of a primitive race. They condemned it as immoral and of no musical worth. Those same characteristics were what attracted white British youth in the 60s. They saw it as real music.

This music had limited commercial viability though it was recorded, like all music, for profit and not love. It was recorded in tiny converted rooms at the back of record stores and released on small independent ‘Race’ labels that catered for the black population.

This was the age of segregation.

The black population might be poor but they knew how to have a good time and they liked to let their hair down. They had their drinking holes, brothels and even their own radio stations like WKAI in Memphis. Beale street in Memphis and Bourbon Street in New Orleans, like many other black areas were jumping and jiving with Blues and Jazz. The radio stations played ‘The Devil’s Music’ and featured shows hosted by Blues Singers who acted as DJs such as BB King, Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf. These shows were usually sponsored by commercial businesses who wanted to advertise their goods to the large black market.

There was a wide range of different styles ranging from the barrel-house Boogie Woogie that emanated from the New Orleans brothels, to the finger picking blues runs of the Texas Blues troubadours to the searing slide-guitar style of the Mississippi delta.

In the 1930s the Delta style often used a National Steel Guitar in order to gain volume when playing in the open air without the use of a P.A. It was open chorded and fretted with a slide on the third finger or a penknife or lighter. The slide was sometimes a length of copper tube but often the neck of a bottle – hence the term Bottle-neck guitar. Sliding the bottle up and down the frets created a shrill oscillating note or chord and was perfected by many of the early musicians such as Charlie Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson. This style was to prove extremely successful when amplified by City Blues musicians such as Elmore James and Muddy Waters.

In the 1930s the Country Blues reflected the life of the southern black share-cropper. It dealt with their struggles, pleasures, pains, fears and preoccupations. The Blues, as described by the great Bessie Smith (an early Jazz/Blues singer who frequented the vaudeville circuit), may have been nothing but a ‘low down dirty feelin’ but even when expressed in the most abject hopelessness there was still an underlying strength to it that suggested that just around the corner ‘the sun was gonna shine someday’.

The fact that the Blues rarely expressed any political content or hatred towards their white oppressors was not because it was not there. It was probably because it was extremely dangerous for black people to express those kind of views. The Klu-Klux-Klan was rampant and ‘justice’ was summary and violent. Any blacks who crossed the line were likely to find themselves burnt, raped, hung or castrated. It was no wonder that it was rare to find those sentiments expressed. There were probably many examples of more radical song-writing but they were reserved for private audiences and rarely found themselves preserved on record.

The recorded heritage of Country Blues is the result of numerous sessions in makeshift studios in the back of hotel rooms, shops and even in the open field on very primitive portable recording equipment that often recorded directly on to vinyl. The output of many major artists, such as Blind Willie McTell, is limited to a few sessions and many early recordings and artists were only preserved due to the efforts of an enlightened white man by the name of Alan Lomax. He toured the South hunting out the relatively unknown artists and recording them on his portable equipment. He followed up rumour and tracked them down discovering new talent on the way. Many artists, including Muddy Waters and Son House, have their early recordings and future careers due to Alan Lomax. He preserved their art for posterity.

Many of these brilliant artists died or faded into obscurity before they could ever come to the attention of white audiences but in the 60s many found themselves rediscovered and their careers resurrected. They were suddenly popular on the white college circuit, in Greenwich Village, the Newport Folk Festival and were rapturously received in Europe. Artists like Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie McTell, Bukka White, Son House, Muddy Waters, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, James Cotton and a host of others were brought over to Europe on Blues packages. I’m glad they were. It meant I got to see them play at the Hammersmith Odeon. They were old men but they still played with vigour and dynamism. Son House had us all standing on our seats and yelling. Many of these were performing in front of white audiences for the first time and sadly were soon dead. But they had delved back into their repertoires to dig out those gems from the 1930s and 40s and brought them to life. They filled many gaps in our understanding of the Country Blues. It is just a great shame that greats like Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Memphis Minnie and Elmore James didn’t live to see that day when they were lauded by white audiences and treated like the talented men and women they were.

Through the limited recording output of these Blues singers we are able to trace the development of this style through the 1920s with artists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Texas Alexander, Blind Willie Johnson, and Charlie Patton through to the thirties with Son House, Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Blind Willie McTell, and on to the 1940s with Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin’ Hopkins before amplification kicked in after the war.

In the 1940s it provided the rhythmical structure that gave rise to many forms of Rhythm & Blues such as Boogie Woogie, City Blues, and Doo-Wop. These were the seminal force behind Rock ‘n’ Roll. In that sense it is possible to view these early exponents of Country Blues, and in particular men like Arthur Big Boy Crudup, Robert Johnson, and Son House as being the founding fathers of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Where would we be without them?

Rock Routes: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781514873090: Books