Let's talk about the blues

can people still eat shrimp?
You liked the New Beats? I was expecting much more from it, but it was a good start at least. Chris Thomas King does some cool things. I think it's just like any other music, where some people are just gonna be a-holes, and some are gonna rock it real-style.

so, speaking from a position of complete ignorance, I think the importance of the earlier blues lies in its immediacy, its relation to its time/place. Trying to reproduce that today seems bound to fail.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0000085K1.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I love the blues, but I can't say there has been a lot of blues I've loved made in recent years. Maybe R.L. Burnside's completely misguided attempts to do a blues-dance fusion with It's Bad Y'All.

If we're talking old blues people, Elmore James is my favourite guitarist (if you search here, you'll find me once saying that Elmore Leonard was my favourite guitarist!), and I also love Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner and loads of others.

Oh, I also adore Junior Kimbrough but he has to be played extremely, extremely loud for proper effect.

I would like to repeat my recommendation that everyone seek out LPs by Fred McDowell, particular those on Arhoolie and Testament.

I recommend you find the CD since it has a few more tracks, which are very worthwhile.

As for Sister Rosetta Tharpe, I can recommend a box set on Proper called The Original Soul Sister--a most unfortunate title, but it's dirt cheap (about $20) and contains all the tracks on the three volumes of her "Complete Recorded Works" which came out on Document a few years back (and which I bought at a premium, stupid me). The tracks here are from the '30s and '40s.

Another outstanding gospel record with a lot of blues feeling is this one.

As to the stigma attached to listening to the blues, there always was one -- the blues was regarded as "alley music", pure and simple. Or old-fashioned. May I ask what is the stigma now?

I've had a lot of fun listening to K.C. Douglas album "Mercury Blues" for the past few weeks. Especially when I consider Macy Gray has taken it up for a Mercury Mountaineer commercial, but I still like Macy.

As for older blues women, I've heard that Mickey Champion has a new CD out "What You Want" that's getting some good response. She's a pretty well known figure in South Central L.A. since the '50s and played with Johnny Otis band for awhile (back when Esther Phillips was too young to tour).

Well you seem to be talking about a few things here. A lot of people writing about the blues in the 50s and 60s perceived that there was a pervasive bias against the blues (and bluesmen) in large swaths of black society. Jeff Todd Titon and other researchers of the 70s and 80s have called this into question, suggesting that most blacks could sustain a preference for both the blues and religious music, for example, without experiencing much in the way of scorn or censure. Perhaps the owners of record labels through WWII often had a degree of contempt towards "race music" and even their own artists, but this too is a generalization that has been called into question.

As far as old-fashioned, that just seems to be a fact. Blues wasn't really an especially important force in black culture by the 1960s-1970s, and there really haven't been too many advances in the form over the past several decades, unless you count sundry blues-rock fusions like Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, etc. Which brings me to the "stigma" I was referring to. I think it's evoked by that Onion piece about the smug upper-class white guy who "gives, enjoys blues." People like Clapton, Janis Joplin, Jonny Lang, Buddy Guy, etc. performing dessicated, almost parodic (if they were intended as such) verions of the blues--or "blooze." Blues as tourist attraction and no more. I never had a taste for that stuff but thankfully I didn't reall have to wade through it to get to Robert Johnson and Bukka White etc. etc.

I don't think we're disagreeing on anything here.

As you no doubt know but it doesn't hurt to remind other younger readers of, this stuff wasn't always nearly so accessible in such massive quantities as it is now. At the time, there certainly didn't seem to be a lot of people writing or publishing about the blues, not until the mid-sixties. That's about the same time that some record merchandisers put in their "blues" section, which was handled the same way then as now, just cram all the stuff that's available into the bins. Maybe now when all the books and records have been assembled into a collection at a museum or on a university's shelf, they show a bulk.

Seems you have summed it up all right, that there have been a lot of bad "blues", "blooze", "bluz", and now "bleus" in between then and now. So much so even blues devotees have been put off and for years.

But the good news is that now that all the good old stuff is more accessible, too, and you're absolutely correct in pointing people to it. People if they're interested should probably scarf up as much as they want. Just keep reminding them to go back a little farther or move a little farther afield than ,,, you know ,,, that list "People like Clapton et al" will just keep extending itself so it's helpful to keep mentioning the good ones, too.

Man, this stigma thing is gnawing on me.

So everyone's leery of being perceived as being clueless smug white guy/gal?

Like, "I heard field hollers coming out from his/her apartment window and that means they're snacking on scalloped oysters for dinner"???

That kind of thing? Or just clueless? Like the yuppie gal I eavesdropped on chatting up the English guitarist at a stained glass blues event.

She saying right off she'd had three beers without dinner, she was a guitar slut, and had been "singing the blues" for a few months now.
Like overdosed on raspberry lager or some other yuppie clown juice?

Like that kind of thing?

Or ... just the sight of the acres of grey and white boomer hair at blues events is off-putting? Like blues is the music of choice for old-fashioned boomers?

There was always a hint of that social stigma, too, at least when I first noticed it in the mid-'60s, if you happened to be white and middle class (even working class) and enjoyed the blues, that is.

Like, got enough extra dough to buy a records now and again? That's bad?

Can anyone tell me what are some of the elements of this stigma?

I guess there is also the fear that any of these white blues fans might at any moment start telling you how much better Clapton did it.

I must recount a tale of an old pal of mine, MG. He was an obsessive fan of blues and old R&B, and not much else. He once said to me, in an obviously ironic tone "I'm only interested if they're a) black and b) dead". Someone interrupted to say that he was being racist. MG said "So tell me who the great white blues musicians are?" The man interrupting immediately and confidently said "Phil Collins! Bryan Adams!" and we rather collapsed.

btw not liking is not the same as hating. It just doesn't inspire the rabid drooling fanboy in me. I've got some, I listen to it sometimes.

Frank Hutchison, Jimmie Davis...

Yes, there are people who will try to impugn your liberal credentials if you don't care for some black music or other. Dumb. (Though I'd be suspicious of anyone who said something like "All black music is rubbish" or some such.)

Mamie Smith
Clarence Williams/EvaTaylor
Trixie Smith
Ma Rainey
Sippie Wallace/Clarence Williams
Bessie Smith
Ida Cox
Mary Johnson
Margaret Johnson/Black and Blue Trio
Alberta Hunter
Edith Johnson/Henry Brown
Billie and Dee Dee Pierce
Billie Holiday

There are severeal volumes tho, this is just one of them.

I frequently pass this busker who plays and sings the blues, and he's "good" and everything, has it down, but god does he drive home all those blues mannerisms that I find annoying. Shouty vocals and big chompy harmonica. I do not relate. I generally walk as far away from him as possible, without completely going out of my way.

Maybe it would have been better to find a busker thread.

Here is fine.

Posted this a few times on this board before but the busker story makes me think of something my friend Mr. Fine Wine used to say: You know you're in trouble when someone tells you "I love the blues!"