Wednesday March 10th 2010

Before we started playing, some very nice people asked me about the history of this kind of music and I tried to tell them as briefly as possible something about acoustic blues. It occurs to me that this might be something worth doing on this blog, as it’s wrong to assume that everyone who comes, or indeed everyone who plays, necessarily knows a huge amount about the subject.

Add to this the fact that it’s come to my attention since I got involved in all this after a lengthy hiatus that a number of people think that ‘blues’ automatically means formulaic electric music with lengthy loud guitar solos. So I’m going to attempt a potted history. Musicologists and ethnomusicologists need not leave comments about the yawning gaps in this, or its oversimplification. So here goes.

The music known as ‘blues’ really began in the first decade of the 20th century. People in the rural parts of a couple of southern US states, principally Mississippi, performed for the entertainment of the locals on plantations and in towns and cities. Their repertoire consisted of their own takes on various songs, including work songs and field hollers sung while working in the fields and while in prison work gangs. The songs contained elements of all sorts of what we might now call folk music, country music, ragtime and spirituals. Learned people have written books about how African influences exist in the scales and general feel of the music.

Along came recording, for the story of popular music evolves alongside the arrival of ‘gear’. In the 1920s, the newly formed record companies decided there was a market for the music these people were doing, and they sent people out into the rural areas to record them, often in hotel rooms. These records were marketed as ‘race records’ – they were cheap, available in local stores and aimed solely at black people. Through the 1920s and 1930s, the ‘great names’ of the blues recorded, often prolifically. For one reason or another, some are better known to us now than others. The Premier League of this period consists of Charley Patton (probably the first ‘bluesman’), Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Skip James, Blind Blake, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Willie McTell, Sleepy John Estes, Blind Willie Johnson and of course Robert Johnson, among others. If you don’t possess music by all of these, you need to rectify that error sharpish.

These pioneers weren’t wedded to the 12-bar pattern by any means. It evolved fairly early in proceedings, but was by no means followed rigidly by these artists. A lot of their repertoire was based around the I, IV, V three-chord menu, but there was considerable variety in how they used this, and plenty of material following the more complex patterns of ragtime.

It is worth pointing out too that none of these people were remotely famous by any serious definition of that word. They eked out a living playing on street corners or at local parties in juke joints or at fish fries. They were itinerant, roaming the area playing from place to place and living on their wits. There were no venues to hustle gigs at for this kind of musician, and nothing resembling session work. The action, and the greater fame, lay in a whole other thing known as blues at the time, which tended to involve female singers, big bands with jazz-type arrangements and something resembling hit records. The solo male bluesman, travelling around, recording for nickels and dimes, wasn’t really on the commercial register. Hardly anyone at the time had heard of the now legendary Robert Johnson. That all came later.

People left the land during the 1940s with the arrival of mechanised cotton picking. They went up north to the industrial cities, mainly Chicago. At this point comes another development in ‘gear’ – the electric guitar. The guys who were still active (some of the originals had died, others had given up) turned to the louder, beefier sound of the electric, and with that came developments in the music itself. It got more rhythm based, and it started to be played by bands rather than solos. The band set-up still standard today was first adopted by such artists as Sonny Boy Williamson I in Chicago and of course by Muddy Waters. These electric bands were playing what became known as ‘urban blues’, as opposed to the ‘rural blues’ or ‘country blues’ played by one man and his acoustic. ‘Country blues’ should not be confused with ‘country music’, the ‘country’ means rural and the term actually means ‘acoustic blues’.

The big names in the electric blues in the 1950s were in Chicago and recording for the Chess label. They include Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson II. They played in clubs, people danced. It’s worth pointing out that very little of what they did was in strict 12-bar formula, and none of it had lead guitar solos as the centre piece. They were doing songs; there were guitar and harmonica breaks, but there weren’t any guitar players wincing and pouting as they appeared to be trying to extract particularly stubborn pieces of fluff from their navels. And these guys, in the great scheme of things, weren’t really famous and certainly didn’t make a heap of money.

This electric blues morphed into rock’n’roll, which is essentially electric blues in double time and employing just one of the rhythms of blues, that irresistible chugging thing. Chuck Berry’s the man here, as he (and Bo Diddley) invented the popular rock’n’roll song. British kids growing up in the second half of the 50s and in the early 60s lapped all this up. The Stones were in the Muddy/blues camp; The Beatles were in the Elvis/rock’n’roll camp. The Stones led to rock music; The Beatles re-invented pop music. They both were, in the great scheme of things, famous, and they certainly did make a heap of money.

The ‘original’, ‘authentic’ acoustic blues was by now gone, but not forgotten. In the 1950s and early 1960s, educated white folk, usually students, started to get interested in the roots and heritage of American music. One or two influential compilation albums came out (another influence of technology – the birth of the LP). These contained recordings by the original acoustic bluesmen of the 20s and 30s, and they caused a bit of a stir. Some people then had the bright idea of trying to find these artists, who had recorded decades earlier but not been heard of since. And so it was that well-intentioned people went down South and found Son House and Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis and Skip James and a host of others. Through the 60s, these now old men were feted at festivals and on the college and coffee house circuit, and they got to end their lives with a bit of money for their unparalleled musical talents.

One unfortunate effect of the ‘rediscovery’ period was that acoustic blues became associated in the popular imagination with old men. This is nonsense and merely reflects the lack of attention these people got when they first recorded. The fact of the matter is that the music was young people’s music when they did it – they were young themselves and so were most of their not huge audience. By and large, they were performing songs in the/their 60s they had first recorded in the/their 20s. It’s just the same as if The Stones had disappeared totally in 1972 and were now being brought back to perform Honky Tonk Women.

The Stones are quite relevant to this history, for one reason because they had the only number 1 hit record of all time that was a blues standard – Little Red Rooster (by Howlin’ Wolf originally) in the mid 60s. This was around the time of what the Americans called The British Invasion and also of, over here, the British Blues Boom. The former enabled Americans to hear of people like Muddy Waters for the first time (a US interviewer at the time asked where that was). The latter featured the likes of John Mayall and Fleetwood Mac (Peter Green incarnation) but it only lasted for a very short time and quickly gave way to a whole new genre of popular music – rock.

Up until this point, there had been no white people in the story (other than on the business side, of course). They arrived in the mid 60s, as blues was swiftly elbowed aside by rock. Rock came out of blues, particularly in the shape of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. All started out playing blues, and all of them moved on from there to create ‘rock’, which was chiefly characterised by riff-based songs and lengthy instrumental passages, mostly lead guitar solos. Blues was the starting point but the outcome wasn’t anything really recognisable as blues music. Cream’s version of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads is a good example – the acoustic, one-man original is a song with some wonderful, dextrous guitar picking; the Cream version is a riff and a long guitar solo, with a bit of a song tacked on at the beginning and end. This laid the pattern for much of what was to follow under the name of blues.

The inventors of rock had been much influenced by the blues they heard on LPs in their teens. In particular, there was a double LP of Robert Johnson that had some commercial success in the 60s. John Hammond, head of CBS in America, went through the company’s archives and found the original Robert Johnson recordings from 1938. He’d tried to book him for a gig at the Carnegie Hall in 1939 only to discover that he’d died (a death witnessed, it would seem , by at least 400 other bluesmen, who told their story to gullible white folk for decades after). Johnson’s songs found a whole new audience, they were lifted out of utter obscurity to become the seminal influence on a whole lot of white boys who went on to fame and fortune with Johnson’s songs ringing in their ears.

These chaps, however, didn’t pick up acoustic guitars and attempt to play like Robert Johnson or his peers. Instead, they took some of the songs and used them in the rock music they were creating. Technology comes in here again – by the late 1960s amps were getting bigger and more powerful, making the loud lead guitar solo de rigueur. Brilliant acoustic songs such as Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues got mangled into electric rock workouts, the song itself a sort of inconvenience that had to be compressed between guitar solos. Acoustic blues went under the radar.

Well, after this, rock disappears up its own backside when the working class boys are replaced by chaps who had had piano lessons, and in the 1980s blues makes something of a reappearance in the person of Stevie Ray Vaughan (I gather, not knowing much about this). Generations of people come along thinking that all blues is loud electric music. They don’t know about the acoustic origins and probably not even of the pre-1960s electric origins. They are therefore missing out on absolutely all of the good stuff.

Technology again now. As CD making gets cheaper and more easily available in the mid 1990s, a torrent of artists can get their music out there. Among them are blues artists, both electric and acoustic. The best-seller lists for blues (a relative term) indicate that electric rock/blues form is the most popular, even though it has not changed at all since it first arrived in the mid 60s. Its fans seem to like the idea that it is something from the past. The acoustic scene, however, is more varied. Among the people to seek out in that field are Eric Bibb, Guy Davis, Steve James, Paul Rishell, Paul Geremia, Doug MacLeod, Corey Harris, Hans Theessink, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Mary Flower, Keb Mo and Rory Block. Special mention too for the great Taj Mahal, who has made great records from the 60s till now and carried the flame more or less alone through the 80s and early 90s. And you should definitely seek out Samuel James, the best young American acoustic artist. A mention too for our own Ian Siegal, Britain's best all-round blues artist, whose acoustic material more than holds its own in any company.

OK, we’re done now. Not perhaps an exactly ‘potted’ history but I have covered an entire century. Meanwhile, back at the Green Note, there we were, adding our own bit to all this history.

And it was another excellent one, with a good turnout both of audience and musicians. We had 8 different ‘acts’, in addition to me, as well as a number of instrumentalists.

I kicked off with the 12-string instrumental Primrose Hill Street Rag, and then did Long Long Way To Go, bringing in band members as the song went along. The band featured Ryan Carr on mandolin, Charles Benfield on double bass and Dave Forristal on keyboards (drummer Martin was ill). That’s the house band and we were joined by the very welcome presence of Will Greener on harp. Will set the harp-playing bar very high, as he always does. The five of us then did two more of my originals, Your Second Line and Sneakin’ Away.

Owen Houlston followed us, various house band members joining him on his distinctive versions of pre-war acoustic blues songs. Owen is dusting off some of the gems to be found in that mine and putting his own imprint on numbers from that era. This is a noble calling. He was also joined by Will on guitar, making his first appearance at the event and playing acoustic at a jam for the first time. He can now tick that challenge off the list as successfully overcome.

James Daniel on harp and vocals, with Chris on guitar, they delivered their now regular high-quality set, with Dave on piano an integral part of their sound as they do non-standard, often New Orleans based material. Another fine set followed as Simon threw himself with wild abandon into some excellent good-time stuff, starting with a solo number and then being joined by Dan Sheehan on harp, Dave on piano and Phil, making his debut at the event on his new acoustic bass. The major challenge for Phil was to get enough room on stage to play the thing, a problem caused partly by the size of the stage and the number of musicians on it, but mostly by the fact that Dave’s keyboard is of a size that would normally require planning permission.

Two newcomers came next, Paul and Chris, and very good they were too, operating as a duo (guitar/vocal and harp) and doing material that again showed what variety is possible under the umbrella of acoustic blues/roots. Phil came next, joined by Charles, Ryan and Dan on harp for a fine set of pre-war style acoustic blues, during the course of which I think I heard the name of Sleepy John Estes get mentioned, always a good sign I think.

Ryan did a couple of his own numbers next, going down as well as ever. He’s a big part of the success of these evenings. Finally, up got Barry Jackson and Will for a joint set, with Ryan on mandolin, Phil back on bass, and Dave. Barry was on excellent form and between them they cooked up a whole variety of excellent stuff, and people would have been happy to hear a whole lot more of that had time permitted. It was particularly good to see Will back and the thing is always the better for him being there.

There was just enough time for me and the band to round things off with one last number (Easy Does It). It was pretty late by now and next time I think we’ll have to say two numbers each to start off with so that we don’t overrun and cause the Green Note folk to have to stay later than is reasonable. That’ll depend of course on how many people come to play, and if we do that, we can try to get at least some people back up for another number later.

So it was another fine evening at this fine place, and now you all know how it all fits in from a historical perspective. Next time, I shall set a test on the history in this blog. The winner, as Spike Milligan used to say, will receive a free burial at sea.

The next jam is on Wednesday 14th April.

Mark Harrison

No Barry Jackson sketches or photos this time. If anyone took photos, they can send them and I’ll add them.