Lessons From History
One thing that the blues teaches you is history. If you check out magazines like “Blues Review” or “Living Blues” you’ll see lots of fuzzy, often damaged, black and white photos of the greats - guitar or harmonica in hand or sitting on a sharecropper’s porch.
As blues musicians we’re supposed to feel a kinship with those earlier voices. Trouble with a bad woman, not enough money and double-dealing friends are universal, but the truth is there’s still a lot of road between them and us. I never picked cotton, chucked steel or ploughed a field with a mule. Yeah, I’ve seen sharecroppers’ shacks firsthand and I’ve worked the land sun-up to sun-down. It put food on the table and wood in the stove but my dad also had a paycheck, our clothes were store-bought and we could all read and write. Times were hard, but nothing like the segregationist South.
The back pages of those magazines always have an obits page - a simple necessity for a style of music that produced its first audio recordings over 100 years ago. Many bemoan the loss of the blues every time one of the greats passes, but something struck me as I looked at the names listed in recent months: Ike Turner (who kick started rock and roll with “Rocket 88”), Boston’s own “Weepin’” Willie Robinson, and Bobby Byrd (who shared vocals on several crucial James Brown tracks).
These guys are as different from each other as I am from any of them. The music evolved from homemade banjos and guitars, marching band instruments and washboards to big bands, then to electric guitars and basses. The beat changed from the Delta and Piedmont to swing, shuffles, to funkier sounds.
While we can miss those who’ve fallen we shouldn’t forget that there is new stuff out there - and there are a lot of flavors. There’s the straight-ahead blues from Mike Welsh and Debbie Davis; Roomful of Blues with jump and swing; Sharon Jones and Lee Fields updating old-school soul; jazzier stuff by Ronnie Earl and Duke Robillard; The Nevilles and the Budos Band getting funky; flat-out rockers like Omar and the Howlers or Poppa Chubby.
When you listen only to one genre of music (or worse, only one style within that genre) then you miss a lot of great stuff. You begin to think that there’s only one way to sound. That’s the lesson that many blues fans forget. Yes, all the greats die but the music has to adapt, evolve, move forward. Putting a glass case around the music does nothing to keep the blues alive - in fact it does quite the opposite.