Tag Archives: blues

How the Blues Conquered Tokyo

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I couldn’t quite figure out why Japanese listeners had come to appreciate and savor the blues in the way that they seemed to—lavishly, devotedly. Blues is still an outlier genre in Japan, but it’s revered, topical, present. I’d spent my first couple of days in Tokyo hungrily trawling the city’s many excellent record stores, marveling at the stock. I had shuffled into the nine-story Tower Records in Shibuya (NO MUSIC NO LIFE, a giant sign on its exterior read), past a K-pop band called CLC, an abbreviation for Crystal Clear—seven very-young-looking women in matching outfits, limply performing a synchronized dance, waving their slender arms back and forth before a hypnotized crowd—and ridden an elevator to a floor housing more shrink-wrapped blues CDs than I have ever seen gathered in a single place of retail. I had been to a tiny, quiet bar—JBS, or Jazz, Blues, and Soul—with floor-to-ceiling shelves housing owner Kobayashi Kazuhiro’s eleven thousand LPs, from which he studiously selected each evening’s soundtrack. I had seen more than one person wearing a Sonny Boy Williamson t-shirt. I had heard about audiophiles installing their own utility poles to get “more electricity” straight from the grid to power elaborate sound systems. What I didn’t know was what about this music made sense in Japan—how and why it had come to occupy the collective imagination, what it could offer.

– In Oxford American, journalist Amanda Petrusich listens to a Mississippi Blues musician perform in a Tokyo club and tries to figure out why American Blues has a particular resonance with for so many in Japan.

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January 18, 2017
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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Remembering the Female Voice of the Blues

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In the 21st century, if “the blues” has any face, it’s Robert Johnson’s, or, more typically, a Johnson-esque silhouette, dark and downtrodden: slumped, itinerant, devastated, male. He has usurped all the torture and torment, a fantastical incarnation of a fantasy. That, in the 1920s and ’30s, commercial artists like Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith were the dominant figures of the genre has become irrelevant to the myth of the blues as it’s been written by collectors and critics. Smith was phenomenally successful—a stout, outspoken black woman in a fur coat and pearls, stuffing theaters—and her success so directly contradicts a more romantic saga (the-blues-as-marginalized-cry) that she’s been nearly excised from its telling.

—Amanda Petrusich, writing in the Oxford American magazine about blues singer Bessie Smith, one of the most popular blues musicians of all time, an architect of the musical form, and the first to appear on Columbia Records’ “race series” in 1924. Petrusich’s piece ran in December, 2013.

December 4, 2015
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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Buddy Guy and the Inequity of Musical Fame

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Guy heads into his living room and points out some of his favorite memorabilia collected over his 60 years in the business: a photo of him grinning onstage with Clapton at the Royal Albert Hall in 1990; a thank-you note from Mick Jagger for appearing in Shine a Light. There’s a photo of Guy with his family and the president and first lady from the first of four times Guy was invited to the Obama White House. “He’s from Chicago, so he knows,” Guy says of Obama. “As soon as he put his arm around me, I said, ‘Mr. President, it’s a long way from picking cotton to picking the guitar in the White House.’ And we laughed.”

Guy points out a painting of Hendrix, and tells the story of the day Hendrix brought a reel-to-reel recorder to tape Guy’s guitar workshop at Newport. “Everyone was saying, ‘Hendrix is here,'” Guy says. “I’m like, ‘Who?’ We went back to the hotel and played until the sun rose. He was so damn good, so creative.”

Next to that is a painting of Stevie Ray Vaughan, playing his guitar behind his back — a trick he learned from Guy. “That one’s priceless,” he says. Vaughan had been a fan ever since he heard Guy singing and playing alongside Wolf and Waters on the 1963 American Folk Festival of the Blues LP as a kid. Whenever Guy played Antone’s nightclub in Austin, he invited Vaughan and his older brother Jimmie onstage. “He became like a big brother to us,” says Jimmie. “It was such a trip.” Guy played with Stevie Ray at Wisconsin’s Alpine Valley in 1990 — Guy took a different helicopter back to Chicago; Vaughan’s helicopter crashed, killing him and four others.

—Patrick Doyle, writing in Rolling Stone about the life of trailblazing bluesman Buddy Guy, a brilliant guitarist and longtime Chicago club manager whose influence is as sweeping as Howlin’ Wolf’s, B.B. King’s and Sonny Boy Williamson’s, but whose name isn’t as recognizable.

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November 13, 2015
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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Surveying Sin in American Music

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What a blast! But there’s danger in the air─someone on the dark floor’s got a gun, and everyone “does his best to act just right, ’cause it’s gonna be a funeral if you start a fight.” In [Billy] Hughes’s terms, folks “struggle and they shuffle” until the sun comes up, delicate diction for a Saturday of screwing and fighting. “Tennessee Saturday Night” hit number one on March 19, 1949, and remained on the Billboard country charts for nearly three months.

“Gonna push the clouds away, let the music have its way, let it steal my heart away, and you know I’m-a-goin’.” On Saturday nights, the journey is as jubilant as the destination. So affirms John Fogerty in “Almost Saturday Night, from his self-titled album, released on Asylum in September of 1975. This narrative is fractured, too: there’s a train bringing the rodeo to town, or is it bringing the singer home? A radio is playing outside the window (a bedroom? a train compartment?), but it competes with the bells at the train crossing, or from an imagined Gibson in the hands of a Chuck Berry wannabe. The story is embodied in the singing, exultant melody, and arrangement that praise and make passionate contact with the expectations of a long-awaited weekend night. Six years after Fogerty released the song, Welshman Dave Edmunds issued his own rollicking version (on his album Twangin), its joy elevating the song’s hopes and promises in the universal, trans-oceanic desire: bye bye tomorrow. The most powerful word in the song is “almost.” The taste of a Saturday night’s recklessness and exhilaration is more rousing at the brink of maybe, when anticipated, when prayed for.

—Joe Bonomo, writing in The Normal School about the role sex, drinking, violence and catharsis play in American music, particularly country, blues and rock and roll, and the ways people sing about blowing off steam. Bonomo’s essay ran in Spring 2014.

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November 9, 2015
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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Seeing Robert Johnson’s Face for the Third Time

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In 2008, Vanity Fair published a story about a guitar salesman named Steven Schein, who found a photograph of Robert Johnson, the world’s most influential Bluesman, for sale on eBay for $25. The photo was mislabeled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???”. Only two photos of Johnson had been publicly released. The article is about Schein’s experience buying and identifying Johnson’s face, and the issues it raised about who gets to control and profit from the music and images of one of the world’s most influential musicians, and one of Columbia Records’ big sellers, who happened to be a black man:

With the eBay photo still on his computer monitor, Schein dug up his copy of the Johnson boxed set and took another look. Not only was he more confident than ever that he had found a photo of Robert Johnson, he had a hunch who the other man in the photo was, too: Johnny Shines, a respected Delta-blues artist in his own right, and one of the handful of musicians who, in the early 1930s and again in the months before Johnson’s death, had traveled with him from town to town to look for gigs or stand on busy street corners and engage in a competitive practice known as “cuttin’ heads,” whereby one blues musician tries to draw away the crowd (and their money) gathered around another musician by standing on a nearby corner and outplaying him.

Shines had died in 1992. His picture was included in the boxed-set booklet, and Schein saw a resemblance; if both of his hunches were right, then the photo was even more of a find. At that point, Schein became possessed of two thoughts: One was “to hold the photo in my hands,” he says. The other was “to protect it.”

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September 2, 2015
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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Lightnin’ Hopkins Gets Your Head Tore Up

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In the summer of 1960, Dallas, Texas journalist Grover Lewis went to Houston’s Third Ward in search of Bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lewis found him in an old ’54 Dodge. The resulting essay, published in the Village Voice in 1968, is a small masterpiece of personal music writing, offering a snapshot of artistic endurance, 1960s race relations, and the daily life of one of the pivotal figures in the ’60s Blues revival. It’s also a shining example of how to blend first-person interiority with reporting in a way that shows the effect music can have on our lives. Lewis isn’t as well known as his New Journalism counterparts Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, but he’s just as good. You can read the essay in the book Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover Lewis Reader:

The head-tearing up process, which was enacted in a succession of piss-smelling little beer parlors, wore on for days, at the end of which I knew considerably more about sour mash whiskey than I had counted on. But in the end, I also knew considerably more about myself, and the South (and that knowledge ultimately freed me to leave it forever), and my own forebears, who, like Hopkins in his young manhood, had been sharecroppers Somewhere along in there, too, in those feverish, rushing days and nights of sweet, raw whiskey fumes and mournful guitar cadenzas ─ even as we shyly began to feel each other out over the clattering racket of the Dodge’s hoarse engine ─ I realized with a dawning sense of wonder that the quest I’d initiated in looking for Lightnin’ had begun long before.

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June 18, 2015
Categories: Nonfiction, Quotes
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