Blues All Around My Head
By Benj DeMott
Word of Buddy Guy's Kennedy Center honor reminds me of Scott Spencer's story about going to see Guy and Jr. Wells at a Chicago blues club in 1965 (which he told in his First review of Gregg Allman’s CD Low Country Blueshttp://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2012/04/low_country_blu.html). Spencer's tale of this 60s trip to Theresa’s evokes the moment of its moment and, in turn, brings to mind a pair of more wannabe canonical blues shows—a performance by Muddy Waters and friends, including Wells, Guy and various Rolling Stones from 1981 (released this year on DVD/CD as Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones Live at the Checkerboard Lounge, Chicago 1981) and the 2012 White House “tribute” to the blues featuring, among others, Guy and Mick Jagger (broadcast live on PBS as Red White and Blues). At risk of giving readers (and listeners) the benchmark blues, I’m going to reflect on race matters in these shows. Bottom line: it…gets better (though the music’s worse).
Back to Theresa’s. To hear how good Wells and Guy sounded that night in 1965, Spencer rightly steers you to their Hoodoo Man Blues album. But his good taste isn’t the only take-away from his trip report. Before the band came on at Theresa’s, Jr. Wells confronted Spencer and friends who were sitting at one of the best tables in the house, thanks to the club’s owner who’d figured these white boys might be a rock and roll band of celebs:
Wells 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…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.
Wells hadn’t lost his edge in 1981 as the new DVD of that Muddy Water & Friends gig proves. Though there’s no hint in the breezy liner notes, the original tape was probably suppressed for decades because a performer named Lefty Dizz, with a little help from Wells, took over the stage, implicitly dissing Waters’ famous white guests from the Rolling Stones. (Dizz hung on longer than Wells, persisting until powers-that-were shut off his sound.) For what it’s worth, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sang and played well with Muddy Waters and his tight band. (About Ron Wood, whose name Waters couldn’t recall in a display of unmeant critical acumen, the less heard the better.) But the Glimmer Twins carried themselves with a Stoney arrogance that might have gotten under your skin even if you hadn’t had a history of being played by white guys. When it was time for Richards to roll on stage, for example, he booted to it not up the aisle but over table tops.
There was much less racial tension (and, on the real side, less creative tension) evident at the 2012 White House blues show. It was both a spectacle of integration—there were many white performers—and a respectful gesture to the truly deserving as per Buddy Guy’s back-stage commentary:
You know I was born on a farm in Louisiana and my Daddy was a share cropper. I picked cotton by hand, not by machine. And you couldn’t even dream of this, because my mother had a stroke when I was about sixteen. And that was like the end of my education and I’m like saying: this is it. You know, and all of us said you go to sleep and wake up, and you are invited to play music at the White House. Self-taught, never learned anything from a book. And so it’s a dream come true for me.
Mick Jagger got too much action during Red, White and Blues. But in that one night stand at the White House he came on with a humility beyond him in 1981. He seemed about 400 years away from Keith Richards’ phony bum’s rush at Checkerboard Lounge, especially when he quoted in self-deprecation Sonny Boy Williamson’s 60s line on Brits “who want to play the blues real bad and that’s the way they play ‘em…real bad.” Jagger’s changes hint he’s learned a bit about how to face up to a past that’s hurtful as well as useable.
The faces of Michelle Obama and her mother looking on from the front row with a sort of quizzical kindness as Jagger danced for them flashed me back to a mid-90s Rolling Stones concert at the Meadowlands where there were, say, a dozen black people in the crowd of 60,000. In that very white house, in the midst of “Monkey Man,” a winded Jagger faded out and an African-American backup singer, Lisa Fischer, moved to the front of the stage (wearing the hell out of a red sequined mini-skirt). “I’m a monkey,” she screamed. “Nothing but a monkey.” The song Fischer sang was originally a Jagger answer record to a Beatles track on The White Album, but Fischer’s “Be Black Baby” turn reduced its meaning. She wouldn’t stop savaging herself – “I’m a MONKEY! YAHOO! NOTHING BUT A MONKEY!” Her loony-tune animal act punctuated a racist card played by the Stones in an earlier song, “Honky Tonk Woman,” which sound-tracked a video featuring film clips of white Hollywood stars (and bathing beauties) that cut out black women except for three brown Betty Boop cartoon figures.
Mrs. Obama and her mother didn’t stand on their dignity at that White House show, and neither did Jagger, but nobody was clowning themselves. While I wouldn’t bet Jagger and the Stones have stopped playing race cards forever, an act of integration at last Saturday’s Barclay Center show beat the hell out of their '90s take on “Monkey Man.” Singer Mary J Blige (who’s no joke) did her Sisterly thing in Brooklyn, taking the Mary Clayton part on “Gimme Shelter" as Jagger urged her into the storm, not as a boss-man but as a grateful partner. Mary J's voice is too low to go where Mary Clayton got in 1969, but their duet still sounded like progress.
Mick Jagger isn't the only performer who’s done some growing up in public in the Age of Obama. Take Al Sharpton. I was put back for a second when Eugene Goodheart characterized Sharpton as a “roaring black” in his post here. While it’s true Sharpton is amped up way too much on his own MSNBC show, he’s been a more subtle and astute presence on the network’s campaign event panels. (The guy can give a speech so it shouldn’t be a shock he’s a pretty good judge of one.) It’s strange for me to see Sharpton holding forth on national tv. I recall when he’d stop by the Christmas party for staff and freelancers at the office of The City Sun, a black nationalist paper in Brooklyn, where he cultivated editors who were something close to press agents for him back in the 80s and 90s. (That local history came up during a MSNBC discussion of GOP’s racist dog whistles during the campaign when Chris Mathews, who’s done some learning too lately though he seems fated to be a blowhard forever, gave Sharpton a jealous dig by invoking “interlopers”—a term linked with one of the uglier moments in Sharpton’s history as a community agitator for black solidarity. Sharpton’s face betrayed a flicker of awareness his un-collegial respondent had slightingly turned tables on him, but he wasn’t going to be defined by meaner moments in his past. (Let alone let Chris—more money more—Mathews make him sweat.)
Sharpton’s cool then reminds me of his mentor James Brown’s stated ambitions. Brown once wondered at anti-war protestors who headed for Canada in the 60s—they wanted out of the U.S.; J.B. wanted in.
Brown’s distance from those flying doves comes to mind when I try to think through leftists’ anti-Obamaism. Right around the time of Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, I got into an online discussion with a clever critic/editor known for his “epic disdain of Obama” (to quote an admiring colleague’s phrase). Given the Court decision, which meant Obama was close to winning his bet to provide universal health insurance for Americans, I thought things might be looking up even to my discussant. But he was down even lower than usual, verging on a state of clinical depression (by his own account). Maybe his blues were personal not political. But, on this front at least, he never walks alone. Every day Obama haters on the left write the book: “The Audacity of Despair.” Such uninspired sorts are so far gone from African American strivers.
Not that the President has always given that part of his base reason to go all in for him. Shirley Sherrod has a new book out, The Courage to Hope, that details her shameful treatment by the Obama administration. She recalls how she’d hoped the President could provide that “critical bridge” that would help America complete the “leap” from an era of segregation to a “unified society.” But she never laid all the responsibility on him (“if we’d let him”). And that’s one reason why her evidence against the president has such weight. “You should read my book,” Obama told Sherrod when he called to make up to her after her wrongful firing. She reads him instead, expressing her earned contempt for the Administration’s cowardice (“where was my ‘audacious’ President”). But at least the episode gave her a chance to tell her own life story and that of her husband, Charles Sherrod, who was one of SNCC’s key organizers. Their journey in struggle against murderous Southern sheriffs, racist clerks at the Farm Bureau, and that virtual brute Breitbart brings home a point she made to the President in their phone call: he’s got more learning to do. While he may be in a position to lead Mick Jagger and Al Sharpton and most of the rest of us from behind, he’s still got to catch up with vets of the Civil Rights movement. They can help him dare to be greater. Though their virtues aren’t always transparent. Hear how Charles Sherrod’s voice enables resistance to politically pointless and/or dangerous catharsis, speaking to the twinned need for historical awareness and irreducible, incommunicable private truth:
We are a confused bunch because of the way we’ve been brought up. We are messed up. All of us. I can’t forget all the things that have happened to me. I forgive. I can forgive. I can say I’m not holding this in my heart against anybody. I wouldn’t hurt anybody because of the wrong that they’ve done me all my life. But. I’ve got to accept that there’s something wrong inside me that hurts—that’s suffering, that begs for release. But I’m not going to have it released in front of you to hurt you.Some of these things I’ve got to deal with for the rest of my life. Things that white people have done to me. Things they’ve said to me face to face, the beatings that I’ve taken, the jailings I’ve taken in five states. All of this is inside me. I can’t just put it aside, but I can decide who I want to be. Despite all the hurt I have, I’m not going to hurt another brother.
Shirley Sherrod showed forbearance—and acted on her family’s instinct for privacy—when The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehishi Coates interviewed her during the campaign. She didn’t cover up what was in her book, but insisted Coates make sure nothing she said to him would hurt their president.
After Obama gave his acceptance speech on election night, I heard from a number of folks who wished he’d thanked Bill Clinton. And God knows he owes Big Dog for breaking it all down so clearly during the campaign. In my dreams, though, Obama would’ve found a way to nod to the Sherrods.
From December, 2012
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