book reviews, Volume 6 number 8, August 2004 Juke Joint Heroes Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues Moanin’ at Midnight:The Life and Times of Howlin’ Wolf When bluesman Screamin’ Jay Hawkins recorded a comeback album in 1991, he wryly titled it Black Music for White People. It’s no secret that the blues, once so heavily associated with African Americans, now plays to an almost completely white audience. And unlike most African Americans today, that audience looks back with awe to the music’s formative period when lone black guitarists wandered the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s and ’30s playing jukes and making occasional recordings, changing the world along the way. But what if that history is itself skewed by the imaginations of white fans? Were such luminaries as Charley Patton and Son House really the music’s progenitors or merely the era’s equivalent of today’s bar bands, regional stars capable of entertaining a crowd with covers of current hits while occasionally slipping in a composition of their own? Such is the argument forwarded by Elijah Wald in Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. In Wald’s estimation, the blues arose less from the lonely wails of sharecroppers as from the stages of traveling vaudeville shows. By the time solo performers like Blind Lemon Jefferson appeared the blues were already quite popular:
Wald is taking issue with the myth of the Delta bluesman held so dear by modern blues fans. The label of blues, he explains, was a catchall term that record companies used to sell records to black music consumers. In the early decades of the twentieth century it implied a modern form of music, much as the term hip-hop would today. Wald claims, “If someone had suggested to the major blues stars that they were old-fashioned folk musicians carrying on a culture handed down from slavery times, most would probably have been insulted.” Meanwhile, the Delta at the time was still something of a frontier, having only been settled around 1900. The population was fairly transient and economic opportunities were so bleak for most blacks that they got out whenever the opportunity presented itself, hardly a fertile ground for sowing the seeds of a music steeped in tradition. This leads Wald to Robert Johnson, the shadowy guitarist who made only a few recordings before being murdered in 1938. A couple of sides were minor hits, but, says Wald, “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little of what happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note.” It was white fans who discovered Johnson on the eve of the blues revival in the 1960s and who designated him the greatest bluesman of his era and perhaps all time. Casual black fans of the blues likely had never heard of him. And the blues revival itself passed by the smoother stars of prewar blues who had been popular with black audiences in favor of the likes of House, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt, none of whom had been major artists. Black blues fans in the sixties were perplexed, wondering why anyone would want to listen to such old music. But then, they had reason not to want to hear it. The aging bluesmen were singing about the Mississippi Delta of the twenties and thirties. White college students might have pined for the time with a sense of romanticism, but for African Americans it was hardly an era to look back on fondly. During the peak of the blues boom of the sixties, black audiences turned out for the slick, urban sounds of Bobby “Blue” Bland, not the rustic meditations of Fred McDowell. But it was white fans who wrote the history, and in this context Johnson became the most revered bluesman of the early era. Wald doesn’t deny that Johnson, from what little recorded evidence exists, was apparently a truly remarkable performer. He had a tremendous impact on rock music (virtually all of his songs have been covered by some rock band), but Wald discounts the idea that Johnson was an originator of the music. The middle section of this book is an extended critique of all of Johnson’s recorded works. Wald pays particular attention to Johnson’s influences, which display an awareness and appreciation for a broad spectrum of popular blues of the time. Wald has a deep respect for Johnson; indeed, he considers him one of the greatest American musicians. But he wants Johnson heard in the proper context, and that is what black audiences were listening to at the time. They may have gone to jukes on Saturday nights to hear whichever musician might be wandering through town, but the music they listened to on the radio was more professional and more polished. And Johnson, in Wald’s view, was reaching for this sound, particularly in his second (and final) recording session which displays a professionalism clearly missing from the first. Johnson was less a tortured artist than he was a young man with dreams of becoming a star. Johnson’s music didn’t resonate with a large audience. He drew local crowds and influenced other up and coming bluesmen he encountered. But he only became famous decades after his death when white fans scooped up the Complete Recordings, released in 1990, driving it up the charts. The subtitle of this book, which refers to “the invention of the blues,” is apt because Wald is insisting that the music was developed in the world of professional traveling entertainers and was only later picked up by vagabond guitarists. He’s quite likely correct to at least some degree, but he pushes too hard to separate the Delta pickers from the evolution of black music. The blues that took hold in Chicago in the forties and fifties were largely played by men who, if they weren’t born in Mississippi, at least had strong connections to that region. And they were deeply influenced by the prewar solo artists. Muddy Waters, for instance, was a student of Son House. And he and the other Chicago greats played to almost exclusively black audiences for years before being discovered by middle class whites. Another Mississippi native whose roots ran deep and who struck it big out of Chicago was Chester Arthur Burnett, better known as Howlin’ Wolf. Born in rural poverty, the Wolf spent his childhood in abusive homes, working the fields. Functionally illiterate well into adulthood, he nonetheless was an astute businessman who recognized early on that he possessed a voice which no one could hope to imitate. In Moanin’ at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin’ Wolf, James Segrest and Mark Hoffman offer the first comprehensive biography of the most influential bluesman of the 1950s and early sixties. Howlin’ Wolf got his start playing street corners and jukes in the South before relocating to West Memphis, Arkansas where he was discovered and first recorded by the legendary Sam Phillips. Here he forged the lowdown sound which he took to Chicago where he fiercely competed with Muddy Waters to be the city’s top bluesman. He spent the fifties cutting a series of incendiary recordings and building a following in the Windy City and the Deep South. A physical giant with a voice to match, the Wolf influenced countless rockers. Many of his songs from the period became staples of classic rock when they were covered by hotshot young bands, including the Rolling Stones who scored in England with “Little Red Rooster,” and who invited the Wolf to appear with them on national television in the US (this was his first such exposure, and the Wolf was grateful to the Stones for the rest of his life). Sadly, his own influence is still insufficiently understood by listeners who are quite familiar with the heavy rock covers of such Wolf standards as “Spoonful,” “Back Door Man,” and “Smokestack Lightning,” but who have never heard the Wolf’s infinitely superior original takes. If you count yourself among this group, a good place to begin reeducating yourself is with his first two albums, Howlin’ Wolf and Moanin’ in the Midnight, which gathered up the best of the Wolf’s early sides recorded for Chess Records and which are now available together on one CD, issued by MCA/Chess. The performances are virtually flawless. It’s here that you can begin to understand why the blues wound up becoming “black music for white people.” Most of what white people were recording at the time can’t touch it. A couple of corrections regarding last month’s review of Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations, by John Diamond: The paragraph which begins “You may believe that…” was a direct quotation from the author and not my writing. It was intended to be bracketed by the paragraphs before and after it, but somehow this didn’t get conveyed by me to the editor. [Actually, it was conveyed quite clearly, but said editor was once again up too late doing her proofreading and layout, and wasn’t paying enough attention, so it is in fact I who owe this apology, to both the author and the reader. Erk. —Ed.] Also, I referred to Richard Dawkins as a biologist. Actually he’s a zoologist. My apologies to the connoisseurs of this fine publication, the late Mr. Diamond, and Professor Dawkins, who undoubtedly reads each issue of The Ester Republic from cover to cover.
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