R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: Low Country Blues & The Artist
By Scott Spencer
In 1965, three friends and I walked into a Chicago bar dressed in jeans and work shirts, sporting the hairdos of the time — the kind you had to pat into place because no comb can make its way through. We were going to a legendary blues bar at 47th and Indiana, in a solidly African-American section of the city; it was late and the street was mostly shuttered for the night — maybe a check-cashing place and a chicken shack were open, besides our destination, Theresa’s, the dimly-lit club where Junior Wells and Buddy Guy were appearing.
The four of us were mad for the blues in general and these guys in particular — coming from Chicago gave you a bit of a head start in certain matters — and we were the only college age people there that night, and the only whites. The other patrons viewed us with indifference, but the manager really rolled out the welcome mat. His broad smile and gracious manners were probably a lot more complex than we realized at the time; as he ushered us to a four-top near the bandstand, I thought I detected something embedded in the tilt of his head and the voila sweep of his arm, a kind of old-fashioned theatricality and deference, as though we were the artists, not the audience.
Only in retrospect do I understand this was surely a case of mistaken identity: four lads in wide bell bottoms, laboring along under their hairdos…it was possible these were rock and rolls stars, celebrities who would be good for the club’s reputation and for the careers of the two (real) artists backstage. The manager’s professional courtesy extended to not carding us and then to what seemed like quietly informing the musicians that we were in their midst. Buddy was only half paying attention as the manager spoke with them — he was tuning his guitar and also carrying on a conversation with a middle-aged guy still in his mailman uniform. But Junior Wells, with his trembling pompadour and his skinny sharkskin suit, was shaking his head and looking at the four of us with enormous skepticism. To anyone but the optimistic manager, we would have looked more like four camp counselors than a rock and roll band, and eventually Wells marched over and slapped a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen in front of us, and asked each of us to write down our name and address. While we complied, he stood there with arms folded, radiating suspicion.
You can imagine that to him it was a no-win — either we were camp-counselor buzz-kills at a front-and-center table, or we were rock and roll pirates who had steered onto his shore to plunder licks and lyrics, like countless other white performers had done. Rounding off the edges, whiting it up, transforming music that was barely supporting even its most heralded practitioners into a gold mine for performers like George Gershwin and Elvis Presley. If that’s what we were there for, then Junior Wells wanted a record of it; not a record like an LP, of course, but a legal record of sorts — handwritten proof that these four boys heard this music played on this night at Theresa’s in 1965.
Check out Hoodoo Man Blues, their early Delmark recording, for a close approximation of what we heard that night. They knew what they had, and they didn’t want it to be assimilated, diluted, transformed. At least until they were done with it.
Nearly fifty years later I wonder if it can still be said that white artists who cover blues songs are stealing from black culture, any more than you can be said to steal a sofa that a family redecorating their house has set out on the curbside. At this point, the main audience for blues is not African-American; even the Chicago Blues Festival, which draws considerable numbers, and features many of the leading contemporary blues performers, has a palpable haze of nostalgia hanging over it, the faces of the audience suggesting a kind of mass séance, in which the lives and old records of uncles and grandmothers are being conjured. The blues, like jazz and opera, once owned by their originators, has become an international form and an exercise in ancestor worship. The artists are continually talking about their debt to the great blues recording artists of the past, and doing their best to recapture that (smokestack) lightning in a bottle.
Often these attempts to pay homage to the great blues recordings of the twentieth century lead to a somewhat paradoxical explosion of unbridled musical egotism disguised as blistering guitar runs, pounding pianos, a kind of musical bacchanal, as if the blues were a Dionysian form, an invitation to let it all hang out, as we said back in 1965. For all their love and knowledge of blues and R&B, John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd as the Blues Brothers were unintentionally emblematic of the white butchering of the blues. The irony is that even as they burned the blues into a kind of college dorm revue, they also shone limelight on and provided employment for their musical heroes. Ackroyd’s co-ownership of the House of Blues chain continues to do so. Nonetheless, one has to wonder if they’d had the audacity to give faux-blues concerts if the blues were not in a semi-moribund state, the great artists either already gone or in decline.
But now, against all odds and expectations, a great – truly great – blues record has been released this year. “Low Country Blues” was recorded by sixty-something southern rocker Gregg Allman, famous for his long tour with the Allman Brothers Band and for his short tour of Cher’s matrimonial bed. Made in the months during which Allman, staggered by the ravages of Hepatitis C, was waiting for a liver transplant, Low Country Blues includes one original composition and eleven blues classics by such stalwarts of the Delta canon as Sleepy John Estes, Skip James, Muddy Waters, and Junior Wells.
Unlike other rockers who have come bounding into the blues hell-bent for soul, Allman allows the power of these songs to do their share of the work. In the same way that Lester Young’s infectious and unerring rhythmic sense was largely a matter of evading the obviousness of the beat and lithely escaping bar-by-bar the timekeeping regularities of the rhythm section, Allman does not allow himself any of the melodrama so many contemporary singers bring to blues; his brilliance is as much in what he evades as what he embraces.
In his rendition of “Floating Bridge,” a Sleepy John Estes song about a near-death experience after a bridge collapses, Allman’s singing is urgent, with his voice as full of heat and flavor as a pot full of boiling crayfish, but he never descends into pyrotechnics or self-display. The restraint and dignity of Allman’s delivery — aided here by the savvy producer, T-Bone Burnett, whose signature sound is full of echo and reverb, haunted and melancholy — brings the listener back over and over to the song. Even when compared to the original version by Sleepy John Estes, Allman’s interpretation is undiminished. If anything, it is more harrowing, and more darkly beautiful.
Rather than falling prey to the self-consciousness that has brought many a white bluesman to the edge of minstrelsy, Allman’s approach to the classic numbers of Low Country is casual, precise, and above all, natural. These are not only songs he seems to have been singing his whole life, but they are the songs he was meant to perform. In stepping away from his persona as an Allman Brother and a southern rocker, he may have made the record of his life, the one future generations will know him by.
In the first week I listened to Allman’s Low Country I also happened upon this year’s Academy Award winning film, The Artist, in which Michel Hazanavicius attempts to pay tribute to the silent film era. I say attempts because it seemed to me the cinematic equivalent of a Blues Brothers show — full of homage, yes, but also a kind of ersatz reverence that serves as a springboard for some pretty broad posturing.
Under the guise of creating a valentine to the heroes of the silent era — the visionary producers and directors, the astonishing actors who were able to move people to laughter, horror, and tears without benefit of sound — Hazanavicius creates a kind of spoof, in which the characters are stock, the actors are mugging, the psychological complexity is nonexistent. The characters behave in ways that would be completely ludicrous in a talking picture, actions which are offered up as somehow believable, since they take place in the fairyland of silence.
Michael Hazanavicius may love silent movies, but in The Artist, he has succeed only in reminding us — as have countless bad blues records — that love is not enough. You need to have respect, too.
From April, 2012
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