I'm working my way through Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta, and I think I owe the author an apology of sorts.
Still the book is frustrating--written from the perspective of an anti-pop, blues fetishist presumably for others of his ilk. Wald assumes that his intended readership shares his perspective.
"We love the music as a heartfelt, handmade alternative to the plastic products of the pop scene...." he writes at one point. Or, "Hard as it is for modern blues fans to accept, the artists we most admire often shared the mass tastes we despise, and dreamed not of enduring artistic reputations but of contemporary pop stardom."
Why would that be hard to accept? Why does one who loves pre-War blues have to despise pop? I remember coming across a similar attitude years ago in a reggae fanzine. An interviewer asked Peter Tosh what music he listened to and Tosh replied "The Commodores." The interviewer was taken aback and even disgusted. How can you, Mr. "authentic" Rastaman, listen to "Brickhouse?" he wondered.
I don't know anyone for whom it would be hard to accept that a working musician, even a blues musician of the 1930s, would aspire to mass popularity instead of cult status. I suspect that few of Wald's potential readers share this snobbish, collector's aesthetic. I thought the Beatles had allowed the world to dispense with the false dichotomy between art music and pop music, between high culture and low. Apparently not.
Furthermore, no one that I know who has any interest in music as something other that aural wallpaper listens only to any one genre of music while disparaging others as phony or plastic. (Although I've never met anyone who actually likes or respects Kenny G. Who buys his records?) In fact, many people I know have little difficulty going from Robert Johnson to No Doubt to Rogers and Hart to Jay-Z to John Coltrane to Waylon Jennings to Beethoven. Yes, because I am the parent of a 13-year-old-girl I do know a number of teenage girls who merely flip on Z100 and leave it at that. But people who are potential readers of Wald's book, people involved enough in popular music to want to read about it's aspects and history, don't typically fall into Wald's fetishistic camp.
Wald tells a revealing story about playing Johnson's comic, double entendre song "Terraplane Blues" in Mississippi at a ceremonial unveiling of Johnson's grave marker.
....the audience's reaction was a revelation for me. While the white record executives were nodding in appreciation at the authenticity of Kenny's sound, the local black congregation was treating us as entertainment, cracking up at lines like "when I mash down on your little starter, then your spark plug will give me fire."
It is unfathomable to me that Wald, a professional musician, would be shocked to find out his audience viewed his performance as entertainment! Did he not intend top entertain? What else is pop music performance if not entertainment? The story reveals more about Wald--and by extension the handful of blues obsessives Wald appears to be addressing in the book--then it reveals about Johnson or anything else.
I still deeply dispute Wald's contention that Johnson was of no influential consequence because his influence occurred only after 1961, and I lean again on the Moby Dick argument to support that, although I think it is fair to say that Johnson was not a figure like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, James Brown (who Wald doesn't mention) or Bob Dylan--popular artists of enormous consequence who changed the direction of music forever during their working careers. Blues music has no such figure, not even Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith.
But I do maintain that Johnson had an influence in his time among Delta blues guitarists, an influence that would flower more fully in the rock era 20 years later. Johnny Shines, a guitarist and singer who traveled and gigged extensively with Johnson in the 1930s, told writer Peter Guaralnick:
"Some of the things that Robert did with the guitar affected the way everybody played. In the early thirties, boogie was rare on the guitar, something to be heard. Because of Robert, people learned to complement theirselves, carrying their own bass as well as their own lead with the one instrument."
The addition of a steady, shuffle bass part, the boogie woogie guitar vamp that would form the back bone of Chuck Berry's records, is most clearly audible when comparing Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago" to it's predecessor Kokomo Arnold's "Old Original Kokomo Blues" (found on the book's excellent companion CD Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson).
In the book Wald criticized "Chicago" as Johnson at his worst, "as musically ordinary as his work gets," while praising Arnold's excellent, flashy, rhythmically complex performance.
In this comparison we have, I think, the Johnson conundrum in a nutshell. While I wouldn't argue that "Chicago" is Johnson's best work, Wald praises Arnold saying his "unpredictable slide work slices and stabs around the comic arithmetic of the lyric, and Johnson's version sounds stolid and flat by comparison." Arnold's performance is brilliant to be sure. It's better than Johnson's for all the reasons Wald enumerates. But what was it about Johnson's version that made it the enduring classic? Wald seems to suggest that it was the bullshit mythologizing of Johnson by later white fans. But I don't think so. I think the answer is in the music. Arnold's blues is idiosyncratic, asymmetrical, typical of much of the delta blues and exciting for that. Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago" is more regular, more controlled, more professional. (Johnson's guitar was always in tune for his sessions where Arnold's--like that of most of the delta bluesmen--is not). The regularity of the shuffle rhythm on the Johnson cut gives the song a 4-square forward momentum that became the rock beat where Arnold's hot rhythm is a two-beat jump type, more tied to ragtime. Johnson's version looks forward. Arnold's looks back. Which you like better is a matter of taste. (I say both are great.) But it is no wonder why Johnson today is more influential, because, as Wald points out in his book, he's more polished, more pop, less raw, less country.
The one thing on which Wald and I agree is that what made Johnson different was his obvious self-conscious professionalism, his ability to take Delta blues materials and fashion a body of work that is diverse in mood and tempo (where Leroy Carr's or Skip James' work was monotonous), replete with carefully structured arrangements, thoroughly maintained (most of the time) lyrical themes, and enlivened with an almost effortless instrumental virtuosity. Plus Johnson's had begun to develop a language and use of imagery that was unique in songs like "Cross Road Blues" and "Hell Hound on my Trail" which rockers picked up and extended.
I think it is fair to say that Johnson was not a figure like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, James Brown (who Wald doesn't mention) or Bob Dylan--popular artists of enormous consequence who changed the direction of music forever during their working careers. Blues music has no such figure, not even Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith.
What about Muddy Waters? Seems to me his decision to go electric had as much impact as anyone's this side of Bob Dylan, maybe even more than Dylan. Doesn't he deserve to be mentioned with the folks you cite for the way he revealed the potential of electrification to expand the blues vocabulary? Which, of course, influenced Chuck Berry, the Beatles, the Stones and countless others.
Posted by: Houndcat | January 06, 2005 at 09:10 PM
Houndcat
I love Muddy Waters, was darn glad I had a chance to see him play. Grew up enthralled by the sound of his piano player Otis Spann. He was a profound influence on the rock generation.
But he was hardly the first blues player to go electric or to lead an electric band. T-Bone Walker, Lonnie Johnson, both played electric blues guitar in the 40s. Carl Hogan played some great, prominent electric stuff on the Louis Jordan hits in the 40s. Heck Bob McNett played some wicked electic blues shuffle guitar on Hank Williams huge 1948 hit "Move It On Over," and everybody black and white listened to the Opry.
At the same time, in 1951, when Muddy began having hits w/ a band recording for Chess, Howlin Wolf--a contemporary of Patton's--recorded those sides in Memphis for Sam Phillips that were licensed to Chess with all that outrageous rollicking Willie Johnson guitar, BB King had those T-Bone derived R&B hits with the full band and the wailing guitar. That's just the obvious stuff that comes to mind off the top of my head.
Muddy's 50s band clearly influenced the sound of first gen. rock. Before the Beatles created a new paradigm for rock band guitar arrangements, Muddy's band sound was the paradigm (and continued to be a thread through the sound of Dylan's mid-60s records in particular--Highway 61, I'm thinking of, where instead of arrangements there's a kind of clanging, go for your own, beautiful tumult on changes). But I don't think the fact that Muddy Waters had a band and played electric guitar in the early 50s was remarkable in the slightest or anything resembling a transforming moment. The music was remarkable. The fact that it was electric wasn't.
Also, I don't think it's accurate to say that Muddy "went electric" the way Dylan did. He went professional in Chicago at a time when that meant having a rollicking band or not getting gigs. No one wanted to hear that old country string band stuff and I'm sure Muddy wanted to get away from playing that as well--most new immigrants from the south were anxious to become hip, urban, sophiticated, to brush the country dust off their clothes. So a loud band is what he got together. I don't know that it was a self-conscious artistic choice, it was just the obvious, natural thing to do. You had to have a band and he had the best. His acoustic recordings for Lomax are the semi-pro music of a man who was making his living not as a musician but as a sharecropper. I doubt that playing acoustic was an artistic choice then. It was the only option. He was living in a one room shack without electricity!
Posted by: chervokas | January 07, 2005 at 12:36 AM