King Biscuit Time Magazine - Road Kill Column

Wednesday April 26th, 2006 @ 9:09 PM

Filed under: Everything, Publications

Never Picked No Cotton Blues

Could a Mormon Eagle Scout living in Montpelier, Idaho, who gets straight A’s and belongs to the chess club, and whose mother looks like either of the wives of the two Presidents Bush, play the blues?

Can a person who uses proper grammar play blues? How about if they read books by Wayne Dwyer? What if their middle name is their mom’s maiden name, like Effingham? Can a virgin play the blues? How about a guy with freckles and red hair? If a person really digs William F. Buckley Jr., could he still play the blues?

Can a guy be a true blues man if he’s never been divorced? Would he have to get beat up real bad before he could play the blues? Or lose money gambling? Or grow up picking cotton? What if you never had your car repossessed or your wife stolen by another man-a man you particularly can’t stand?

What if a guy has all his teeth and they don’t have any cavities and are straight? Does this indicate that his life hasn’t been down and out enough to play the blues? How down does a person have to be to qualify?

A few years ago it was the rage to be agog over the latest youth who could supposedly play blues. First it was seventeen-year-olds, then thirteen, then eleven. It even got down to a three-year-old on one talk show I was watching.

I don’t know. Maybe there is a point beyond which we shouldn’t go with this. There’s something about a guy whose mommy is still unzipping his pants and aiming his wee-wee that doesn’t strike me as bluesy. Actually, teen-agers lamenting in song about working five long years for one woman who had the nerve to throw me out, isn’t lighting the bulb on the truth meter either.

But that’s just me. I’m seeking some truth here in this article and there is a rather ambiguous set of standards that limns into view when blues music is analyzed. It is based on the hypothesis that blues came out of slavery as the dark side of Negro spirituals and therefore was born out of pain and suffering.

Now many of the first real blues folk performed music for money to avoid pain and suffering, and so they wouldn’t have to pick cotton, drive tractors, and work for the company store. More than a few of them were rascals who drank and partied, hanky-panked with good men’s wives, and sneaked out of town. But be that as it may some atavistic white men decided somewhere along the line that real blues could only be genuinely performed by certain stereotypes of their designing. No one really knows who these guys were for sure, and by whose authority they made this declaration, but they have inspired legions of priests whose task it is to preserve the stereotypes and to administer judgement upon the blues sinners who by deduction are pretenders and charlatans.

George Carlin, the famous comedian, is one of those priests and said in an HBO special that only black people have the right to sing the blues and all the bald headed, pot-bellied white guys with a fedora should shut the blank up and get off the stage. To this he got much laughter and a round of applause.
Now, either George is wrong, or I’m a fraud and a hypocrite, and so are a lot of other people. I’m mostly Swedish, yet retained freckles from my mom’s Scotch-Irish blood. I grew up at seven thousand feet in elevation in Wyoming so the closest thing I saw to cotton was sheep’s wool. I was never a slave and I had a Tinker Toy set with six hundred pieces when I was a kid. For a blues man, I guess that constitutes a handicapped beginning.

My dad had a statue of Beethoven on his piano. He told me Blues was devil’s music. I was a confused kid because though I feared the devil something awful, I really dug his music.

Of course we since learned that real Devil’s music was played by the Charlie Daniels band with a violin, but how was my dad to know that back in the fifties?

The first blues men played whatever kind of music it took to get paid. You could get Turkey in the Straw and She’ll be Comin’ Around the Mountain out of them just as easily as a rudimentary twelve bar. Some of them could really play and others were just awful. That is still true today.

Not all old guys from Mississippi who claim to be blues men can play. Some can, some can’t. The point is: fitting one of the stereotypes doesn’t necessarily produce good blues.

I met one well-hyped blues man at four in the morning in Arkansas a few years ago. We talked blues for a few minutes, exchanged CDs, filled up our cars with gas, and went our separate ways. This guy was in demand at blues festivals, had some good reviews in magazines, and had been given a few meritorious blues awards here and there. I listened to his CD. It was worse than awful. Awful to me means that it has enough semblance of musical form to still be recognized as an attempt at music-at least enough to label it awful. This pathetic man would have sounded better recording his stomach growling or his dog howling or his wife bonking him on the head. I am not making this up.

It was then that I fully realized how influenced people are by stereotypes and that they are prepared to throw out all natural judgement and wisdom once the premise is accepted. I’ll give you a guideline here that you can apply to all blues music: If it sounds like crap to you, it probably is.

Three years ago I went to a concert performed by some highly promoted dork who I immediately dubbed Mr. B, for boring. All around me people were fighting sleep. This guy brought with him his own field of gravity. He was a white guy who had somehow gotten the official stamp of the blues police, and he was square as a Rubik’s cube. Square in musical terms is a bad thing. It means predictable and without style or phrasing. He had the personality of a lizard sunning on a rock. Yet some aficionados were enthusiastically applauding after his songs and looking at their “expert” buddies and nodding with self-righteous satisfaction-that knowing smirk that elevates them above us: the poor dumb proletariat.

One little girl a few seats over from me tugged on her mother’s dress and declared, “Let’s go, mommy, this guy sucks.” Guess what? In her childhood innocence, she became the true expert.

That’s the bottom line, folks, if it moves or inspires you, or makes you not care if your neighbor sees you bouncing and jiving, then it must be working, no matter who is playing it. If you feel like you just had an outbreak of shingles seizing your skull, or you catch yourself staring at the exit sign, or you have the urge to confess crimes you didn’t do, then the little girl is right, it sucks.

I once stopped along Highway 49 down in the Delta and picked some Cotton. One bole and I got stuck and bled. Then I quit. I have a genuine nation bag, and a mojo bag. I’ve been divorced, had two cars repossessed and a truck stolen from me. I once had a tooth drilled deep with no novocaine. I have done the midnight creepin’, been the backdoor man, and woke up hung over in strange places. I’ve come a long way down the stereotypical blues trail from my tinker toy times. Did my bad days and reckless ways turn me into a blues man? I don’t think it made me anything but a jerk. Glad they’re behind me.

When all is said and done, I came to this conclusion. The best blues men are the natural storytellers. Whether told with vocals, guitar, harp, or other instruments, they have the desire and ability to convey emotion. There is an inherent verve, an intensity, a purity to their expression. Because it comes out of their culture, black people arguably have the most and the best blues storytellers, but they aren’t the only ones. I saw a Japanese blues man at BB King’s one time who brought down the house. He came complete with two cameras and a cell phone.

There’s a blues man from Oklahoma who I saw in one of his debut gigs ten years ago. He was raw as a pumpkinseed. He had an Elvis look about him and talked like a bumpkin. But as soon as he started to sing and play guitar, I knew he was the real deal. As inexperienced and amateur as he was, he had more soul than a Fijian tribal dancer at a grog festival.

I don’t think it is something that can be practiced or contrived. It can be enhanced and perfected, but the qualities are there or they are not. I think Johnny Lang is a perfect example. My band played the same festival as his last year in Tulsa. I was prepared to scoff at him and even hate him if he proved to be the marketing freak I suspected he would be. I had my mind set on not accepting this kid as a sincere blues player.

Boy, was I wrong! It was then I learned that age nor race nor origin has much to do with what works and what doesn’t. Apparently sin and degradation doesn’t really count for much either. This kid was from North Dakota for crying out loud, ranked in the bottom three non-bluesiest states, along with Wyoming and Nebraska, although Vermont seems like it would hang right in there. It doesn’t seem like a fellow could even sin in North Dakota. But this kid had soul-in every damned note he sang or played. And just as you declare him one of those rare old souls he turns around giggling and throws apples at his brother between songs. Doesn’t matter. The kid emotes.

Now don’t write me with admonitions about real bluesmen using a broken bottleneck on a broom handle wire to give voice to the sores on their backs from the whipping “massa” gave them. I know all the history, probably more than you do. I’ve read the books, been to the gravesites, traveled the roads, played the jukes. My heroes are black bluesmen-I even had Sonny Boy’s life-sized bust in my wedding lineup.

I submit that blues music is a beautiful cure for the weary soul and it can be and is shared by all God’s children. You can honor the modern Shamans who let it live and grow in them today, without dishonoring those who created it yesteryear, or polluting the genre. One way it will pollute is if it is made to stagnate.

A true test happened to me one time when I witnessed a battle of the blues bands performed anonymously behind a curtain. Neither the judges nor the audience knew who was back there-three songs each. We couldn’t tell if the players were black or white, young or old, dressed like Muddy Waters or Elwood and Jake. We didn’t know if the players were famous or garage, rich or poor, handsome or ugly. All we could judge was the music-things like phrasing, tone, melody, dynamics, ideas, intensity, and feelings of soul. At the end we simply decided whether or not we felt good or were bored. It is amazing what taking the eyes and prejudgment out of sound will do.

Bobby Rush and I are planning on doing some gigs and tours together. Guess why? To demonstrate to black and white audiences that blues music is a universal healer-born in the black culture as a gift to all human beings, to be shared, loved, and understood. We humans are confined to this little globe we ride together through the vastness of outer space. We all have forms of pain and suffering. It’s mysterious and scary if you put it in perspective. Shouldn’t we give each other all the joy and comfort we can? That’s the story blues musicians tell in their songs so that the rest of us can relate and feel that someone understands and that we are not alone.

That’s the solace I received at a festival in 1998 when I heard Charles Brown sing just before his death, Dark Night is Falling. I hear you brother, and I thank you, it will fall for me too.

Posted by Carl