Cryin' the Blues

It is 100 years since the discovery of the blues. Charles Shaar Murray hails the legacy of WC Handy, the man who changed music
WC Handy
The great man himself: 'father of the blues', WC Handy
Charles Shaar Murray
Sun 16 Nov 2003 12.39 EST

The US Congress has officially designated 2003 as 'The Year Of The Blues', marking the centenary of an event that, at the time, passed all but unnoticed. The composer and entrepreneur William Christopher 'W.C.' Handy (1873-1958) was killing time waiting for a delayed train at the railroad station in Tutwiler, Mississippi when he encountered a guitarist also whiling away the time by playing to himself. Describing the incident in his autobiography, only slightly self-servingly entitled Father Of The Blues, Handy provided the first known account of the music we now call the blues. It has been frequently quoted, and quite rightfully so: it is perhaps the first truly significant American cultural signpost of the twentieth century.

'A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags, his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song too, struck me instantly. "Goin' to where the Southern cross the dog." The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.'

Virtually everything Handy tells us has a specific significance. First of all, he notes the guitarist's obvious signs of destitution. The travelling bluesman was the poet and entertainer of an underclass within the underclass. The people of the Mississippi Delta were considered hicks and peasants by the more educated and sophisticated blacks who had established themselves in the cities; and within those rural communities the bluesman was, in turn, frowned upon by the upwardly mobile. Specifically, he was hated and despised by the black churches, who believed his trade to be the Devil's Music, a living reminder of all that evil African stuff they were supposed to have left behind as part of their painful induction into the social mainstream. With his workshy ways, his never-ending perambulations, his bawdy, earthy songs and his fatal attraction to normally respectable women, he was an outlaw, a virtual pariah.

Then Handy describes the guitarist playing slide, fretting his instrument with a knife. Since he cites the 'Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars', we can presume that in this particular case the guitar was played flat on the lap, rather than in the conventional guitarists' position used by those who played with a glass bottleneck, or a short length of metal tube, on one left-hand finger. Nevertheless, while the technique of slide or bottleneck guitar may owe something to the touring Hawaiian ensembles so popular in the late 1880s and '90s, the substance and content was an unmistakable African retention

One traditional practice which predated the cheap mass-produced mail-order guitar - and in fact survived well into the mid-twentieth century among those for whom even an instrument costing a buck eighty-nine was an inaccessible extravagance - was the trick of nailing a length of wire to a barn wall and using a piece of glass or metal to change the pitch. Known as a 'diddley-bow', such contrivances provided a first experience of plucked-string instruments for many a wannabe guitarist, including the young John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Under the influence of the slide or the hand-bent string, the rigid, tempered European scale melted to reveal all the hidden places between the notes: the precise, chiming instrument giving forth a liquid African cry.

'In a way the blues is a constant wellspring which keeps bubbling up,' Keith Richards - who should know - told me not long ago. 'I don't think there's any music made in the West, even the most banal pop songs, that don't owe something to the blues somewhere down the line. And it all comes from African music, which is why it's so exciting. There's something primal about it which we all recognise, because we're all African. Some of us just left and turned white.'

African music and European music have always been equal in terms of melody: the crucial difference was that European music was far more sophisticated in terms of harmony while African music was far more advanced in terms of rhythm. The men and women who created the blues took the folk songs and hymns of the Anglo-Celtic settlers and filtered them through those aspects of their native musical culture of which their captors had failed to strip them, utterly reinventing them in the process. From the raw materials of work songs and field hollers, a new form emerged: African-American in the truest sense of the term. It could only have been made by Africans, and they could only have made it in America. But throughout the twentieth century it spread through clear, if surprising, veins of lineage: from Charley Patton to Son House and Robert Johnson, from House and Johnson to Muddy Waters, from Waters - via the wonders of recording and the good offices of Chess Records - to The Rolling Stones, and from the Stones to several generations of garage bands all over the world.

W.C Handy's mysterious guitarist may have altered the cultural history of the the twentieth century, but he was, most likely, just some ordinary guy who happened to play a bit of guitar, some working stiff eking out his survival on the road, someone completely unknown outside of his own community, one forgotten drifter amongst many. Whoever he was, whatever he happened to be doing in that particular station on that particular night, wherever he was going, whatever his story had been, whatever fate finally overtook him along those highways and railroads on those dark spectral Mississippi nights, he stumbled into history that night and never knew it.

Handy, however, was profoundly affected by the incident. Growing up in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama, he'd once saved his childhood pennies to buy a guitar. His preacher father, who considered the instrument to be 'the devil's plaything,' made him take it back to the store and exchange it for a dictionary. (judging by the orotund loquacity of his autobiography, Handy evidently put the dictionary to good use). But Handy did indeed become a musician, albeit a commercial bandleader playing light classical music and the popular songs of the day. As a preacher's son who'd been raised on those Anglo-Celtic hymnbooks and then gone on to study music formally, Handy was schooled in the European tradition long before his exposure to the blues. But after his Tutwiler experience, Handy began to write songs based on the blues, 'St Louis Blues' being but the best-known of his many compositions. Effectively, he brought the blues into the mainstream of American popular music, and to this day the Blues Foundation, which annually hands out the Oscars of the blues world, calls its prize the W.C. Handy Award.

The centenary of Handy's epiphany is marked in a number of ways. Probably the most spectacular is the culmination of an ambitious project helmed by Martin Scorsese and entitled 'Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey.' This consists of seven full-length films shown on America's Public Broadcasting Service and also available on DVD, directed by luminaries including Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders, Mike Figgis and Scorsese himself. The DVD package is accompanied by a hardcover coffee-table book plus a whole raft of soundtrack CDs. The films themselves are both varied and variable: Figgis adopts a classicist's documentary approach to his exposition of the history of British blues scene by mixing interview and archive footage with extracts from a specially-assembled jam session including Tom Jones, Van Morrison, Lulu and Jeff Beck, while Charles Burnett presents a dramatised autobiographical account of being sent, as a child raised in Los Angeles, to stay with his preacher uncle in Mississippi in order to be 'saved'. Instead, he is intercepted by another uncle, a disreputable blues-lover and philanderer, who initiates him into blues culture.

Marc Lewin explores Chicago blues and the history of Chess Records via the intriguing double act of rap maestro Chuck D of Public Enemy and Marshall Chess, former label boss of The Rolling Stones and proud scion of the expatriate Polish-Jewish dynasty which founded Chicago's greatest blues label. Interestingly enough, Chuck appears to have transcended the Nation Of Islam-inspired dislike and mistrust of Jews that sparked some of Public Enemy's more incendiary utterances during the late Eighties. He also renders explicit the unappreciated legacy which the blues has passed on to hip hop as the contemporary voice of the urban ghetto. 'I can easily find comparisons,' he says, 'in the lives of both Tupac Shakur and Little Walter; a turntablist like DJ Babu of the Dilated Peoples and the behind-the-head playing style of the great T-Bone Walker - even in the way record companies then and now hustle the sounds from the 'hood back to the hood.' The inclusion of hip hop in the mix via Chuck's participation is one of the few concessions the series makes to the modern world.

In 'Feel Like Going Home,' Scorsese himself accompanies singer/guitarist Corey Harris not simply to the Mississippi Delta, but all the way to Mali to meet the magisterial patriarch of the Sahara, Ali Farka Toure. Having myself crossed the Sahara with Toure at the wheel as well as travelled Highway 61 in search of the crossroads at which Robert Johnson made his notional pact with the devil, I can vouch for the keenness of eye and ear with with Scorsese captures his surroundings: I never thought I'd see the sandy boulevardes of Ali's home village of Niafunke glowing so evocatively from the screen.

'The geography of the blues,' Scorsese says, 'is both a route to a particular time and place as well as a road map to the human soul. The ability of the music to connect with universal feelings of desire, love, loss and bitter disappointment makes the music fertile soil. Bluesmen - from the griots of Mali to the itinerant poets of the Mississippi Delta - are more than musicians, they are great storytellers.' Certainly, people like to think of the great blues singers as raw, instinctive, with talent and genius flowing from their fingertips. But John Lee Hooker, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Blind Lemon Jefferson and so many other amazing talents are some of the greatest artists America has ever had. 'When you listen to them, you're moved, your heart is shaken, you're carried and inspired by its visceral energy, and its rock solid emotional truth. You go right to the heart of what it is to be human, the condition of being human. That's the blues.'

Yet all this activity detailing the history of the blues during the twentieth century obscures a few thorny questions. What has the blues done for us lately? The blues has a complex and glorious history, but does it have a future? What does the blues mean to us today? Is it an old black guy on the front porch of a Mississippi shack telling us about how he woke up this mornin'? A fiftysomething Armani-clad multi-millionaire from Surrey singing 'Oh Lawdy Lawd' from the stage of the Albert Hall? Or is it simply a bunch of off-duty geography teachers in the back room of a pub bashing away on Korean-made Stratocasters and proclaiming the joys of 'Sweet Home Chicago'?

In Chicago itself and Memphis itself it is an important cornerstone of the tourist industry. During a lean time for themed restaurants, The House Of Blues chain (whose best-known investor is Dan 'Blues Brothers' Aykroyd) has bucked the trend, drawing punters to eat, drink and boogie in a decor replicating Deep South sharecroppers' shacks, constructed from timbers and corrugated iron which once made up real Deep South sharecroppers' shacks.

The music itself is under siege, and has been since the death in 1991 of Stevie Ray Vaughan, the white Texan guitarist who, in tandem with Robert Cray, spearheaded the last major blues revival in the 1980s. Muddy Waters died in 1983, and during the past decade the blues world has lost John Lee Hooker, Albert King, Jimmy Rogers, Junior Wells and Albert Collins. The bestselling blues album of the past few years was Eric Clapton and BB King's teaming up in Riding With The King, but BB is closing in on 80 and Clapton approaching 60, so it is perhaps inevitable that the music, delightful though it is, sounds like the work of a pair of wealthy, contented old men. BB is the last of the old titans left standing (or, to be more precise in BB's case, sitting down), which leaves Buddy Guy and Taj Mahal, both in their sixties, as the most prominent black standard-bearers of blues culture. Even John Mayall, 'the father of British Blues,' recently staged his seventieth birthday concert.

In all the nostalgic celebrations, the impression is inevitably created that blues is some kind of touchstone for a simpler and more honest past: feelgood music for white people. The modern blues impulse is presented as a conservative urge based upon the replication of old music, be it that of the Chicago or Mississippi Delta pioneers, or upon the first-generation blues-rockers of the Sixties. The difference between Eric Clapton and Gary Moore, it was recently suggested, is that Clapton started out wanting to be Freddie King, but Moore started out wanting to be Clapton. Is there nothing left for the modern blues player to do except to replicate the work of illustrious forebears? Robert Cray, for one, disagrees. 'There's never going to be another BB King or Muddy Waters,' he pointedly warned recently, 'and it does blues music a disservice to recreate their kind of music over and over again.'

So where is the new blues, and what does it sound like? The younger blues players, broadly speaking, fall into three distinct camps: the folkies, the post-Vaughanists and the punks. The godfather of the folkies is the ever-ebullient Taj Mahal and the distinguishing marks of his successors tend to be broad-brimmed hats and steel-bodied National guitars. The most successful is Keb' Mo' - formerly Kevin Moore of Los Angeles - closely shadowed by Eric Bibb, Alvin 'Youngblood' Hart and the spooky, haunted Kelly Joe Phelps.

The post-Vaughanists aspire to the sombrero and poncho of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and in most cases the guitar playing is astonishing, the vocals somewhat less so and the songwriting decidedly iffy. Post-Vaughanists include some promising players in or barely out of their teens, including Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Jonny Lang (both of whom are blond and pretty enough to be distant relatives of Hanson), Monster Mike Welch and Derek Trucks, nephew of the splendidly-named Allman Brothers band drummer Butch Trucks. There are also some highly impressive female post-Vaughanists, notably Sue Foley, Susan Tedeschi, Ana Popovic, Joanna Connor and former Albert Collins sidewoman Debbie Davies.

It's the punks who are not only the most interesting, but the ones most most intimately connected to the music's roots. The pioneers were The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, whose bassless two-guitars-and-drums line-up consciously mimicked that of Hound Dog Taylor & The Houserockers, the most unself-consciously primitive of Chicago's early-Seventies barroom combos.

The inspiration for the present-day punk-blues movement came from the hill country of North Mississippi. In 1991 the late critic and producer Robert Palmer (no relation to the recently deceased British singer of the same name) documented the north Mississippi scene with a film and album both entitled Deep Blues , in which local musicians were recorded for the first time. Their blues, heavily influenced by the legacy of the late Mississippi Fred McDowell and played on cheap off-brand guitars and amplifiers, provided inspiration for the likes of The White Stripes, The Black Keys and The North Mississippi All Stars, and upcoming British bands like the 22-20s (whose debut EP contains a version of Slim Harpo's 'I'm A King Bee').

The central paradox facing the blues in the twenty-first century is this: in a sense its victory has been so complete - to paraphrase Keith Richards, its DNA is imprinted, to a greater or lesser extent, in most forms of contemporary popular music - that it is in danger of becoming invisible. To survive as a contemporary (as opposed to revivalist) form it must adapt, but the more it adapts to its surroundings and absorbs influences from rock, soul, R&B or hip hop, the more it risks simply vanishing into the wallpaper.

Nevertheless, we all have a vested interest in the continued vitality of the blues. For all its structural simplicity - 12 bars, three chords, three lines, two rhymes - its emotional complexity and richness is unmatched. From being an outgrowth of the historical situation of one people in one place and time, it has developed into the emotional conscience of the entire continuum of Western vernacular musical styles. Long may it continue to wake up this morning, and every morning.

Meanwhile, some of the roughest, rawest blues is serving as the primary inspiration for some of the roughest, rawest and most authentic rock. This much, at least, is right with the world. OMM

· The author's books include 'Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker' (Viking)