Robert Johnson SUCKS!!!

Y'know who sucks? Robert Johnson.

"Oh no he didn't!" I hear you say. And as I hear the rampaging feet of a hundreds "blues purists" brandishing pitchforks and lynch ropes coming towards me, let me deconstruct and hopefully destroy the cult of personality that is Robert Johnson.

Now, of course, the obsession with Robert Johnson is part of a greater issue I'd like to call the "Delta Blues Mystique". The Delta Blues Mystique is that element that is called upon by every indie band and post-punk band who wants to try and seem rootsy and authentic as well the element called upon by every half-assed singer/songwriter who want to sound "dark", "gritty" and "soulful". The Delta Blues Mystique is the modern conception of "the blues" which arose some time in the 60's and it is a horribly patronising and perhaps downright racist and offensive idea which was formulated by a lot of rich, educated student-types. Basically, it is the idea that old, black (ooooh, they've gotta be black) guitar-playing musicians, who are either poorly-educated or uneducated and who prelude every song they play by mumbling something incomprehensible while journalists nod on and pat them on the head for being such good boys...

I think this is the quintessential example:



Now, it is absolutely certain that the interviewer inquiring of Son House the nature and origin of "the blues" has written out his own idea of where "the blues" came from and has studying text books and musical theory and history to culminate this idea. And you know what? It's probably right! But it's probably not "authentic" whereas when Son House mumbles some cenile shite about "it's...it's...it's a feeeeeeling!" that's so freaking "authentic" that it must be worth writing down and sticking on some poxy BBC4 documentary. (Not that I'm dissing BBC4 documentaries in general - the Folk America series was really very good)

Ah, that word "authentic" which has done more harm to blues music than any other in history. It embodies The Delta Blues Mystique and signifies a hipster attitude and an artistic worth based on a supposed insight into the way poor, stupid people live - so rich bohemians can feel they're somehow in touch with a subculture that they are in no way a part of. It's not the music, it's the association/ I mean, have you ever heard anyone insult a country bluesman? Well, you're about to! Son House is crap - I mean, his playing is the equivilent of having a seisure while slapping an out-of-tune dobro. Ah, but it's REAL! And that's what counts!

Now, I must say that the Delta blue is not my thing - I prefer piedmont and atlanta styles which use complex fingerpicking and ragtime influences, as well as witty, hip lyrics and in-key singing. Buddy Moss, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell and the rest of those fellas. But as far as I can tell, the reason that Delta Blues, which refers to the likes of Robert Johnson, Son House, Charlie Patton and Tommy Johnson, is the most famous and lauded genres of blues is because it's simplistic. It requires very little brains or skill to play or sing, is often completely tuneless or out-of-tune and the lyrics are repetative and moronically simple. Which is, apparently, more "authentic".

This is where the root of the "authentic" issue comes from. Take a guy like Louis Armstrong and put him up against Son House. Why is Son House "authentic" while Louis Armstrong is not? They both came from the same poor backgrounds, both born around the same time (Louis Armstrong was actually one year older), both black and from the South. The difference? Louis went and learned to play an instrument, joined bands, innovated new musical ideas, learnt to read sheet music, played with a studied complexity and combined his own knowledge of folk music with modernistic ideas. While Son House sat and banged out the same out crap for 86 years without changing an iota.

All of which brings me back to Robert Johnson. Well, everything I said about Son House applies to Johnson too, but there is a lot more to it. For me, there is nothing more irritating than seeing endless 100 Best Guitarists lists online and in magazines filled to brim with the usual wankers like Slash, Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen and Eric Clapton and then stuck somewhere around the middle, Robert Johnson. It's ridiculous. Not just because Robert Johnson wasn't a very good guitarist, but because his style has nothing in common with anyone else in that list and you know he's only been placed as a point of hipster recognition. "Oh yes, we loooove Robert Johnson, he's sooooo dark and real! You know he sold his soul to the devil?!" Yeah, yeah, we all know he sold his soul to the devil and magically became an ingenious guitarist...in fact, more people know this than have ever even heard his recordings. More than anything it's this that embodies the Delta Blues Mystique. There is nothing special about Robert Johnson - in fact, he's not particularly good a guitarist at all. The likes of "If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day" could be played by someone who'd had about a week of guitar lessons. What counts is the hype.

Now, I must say, it's not entirely due to ignorance that Robert Johnson is so well known. When the album "King of the Delta Blues Singers" was released in 1961 it was for a lot of people, particularly in Britain, the only easily available country blues album and with the blues/folk revival kicking off it's hardly suprising that people ranted and raved about Robert Johnson in the absence of anything else. Still, that's not a complete excuse and it's certainly no excuse nowadays in this age of internet where people can find out about far superior (and far more enjoyable) blues musicians like Blind Blake, Peg Leg Howell, Bessie Smith and so on...it's all at your fingertips.

I'm not exactly one for shirking ideas of "authenticity", I would quickly mentioned. Or to put it another way, I do think that age does add value to music; surviving the ravages of time and changing culture is difficult and older music adds insight into a vanished period and provides a point-of-view and inspiration which simply can no longer exist. But that must be merely a part of it, rather than the main drive. And it often ends in hypocrisy - what's more "authentic", "Oh Susanna" or "Crossroads Blues"?

Stupid question.

American Artist No. 2: Blind Blake

You know, there's a very typical image of the bluesman in most people's heads. That of the haggered old guy, dressed in dusty dungerees, sitting on a porch swing, banging out some amelodic 3 chord drone and wailing in an off-key voice about the devil, death and his "baby" her various weelings and dealings.

Yeah? Well, Blind Blake is NOTHING like that. Blind Blake represents the other side of the bluesman spectrum - dressed up sharp, singing often-witty lyrics over the maybe the most stunning guitar playing ever put on record. Look, he's fecking smiling in that photo!

Nothing is really known about Blind Blake. The photo above is the only one ever discovered. Some people have suggested he came from the Gullah (or Geechie) communities of South Carolina, since on one of his records he starts using the dialect, but this has never been confirmed. Even his real name was never sure - on another record he actually states his name is "Blind Arthur Blake", but some have suggested his last name was actually "Phelps" and that "Blake" was a nickname denoting a "hard-ass". He was probably born circa 1893 and is thought to have died sometime in the 1930's, although this has never been proven, either. He was, along with Blind Lemon Jefferson, the best-selling blues artist of the 1920's and, unlike Blind Lemon Jefferson, it's not hard to see why - his records are catchy, witty, cool and jaw-droppingly complex.

Blake played blues, but he equally often played ragtime, pop songs, jazz and even a British music hall number (sort of). He is often considered the Father of Ragtime Guitar - he pioneered an incredibly complex method of fingerpicking which is maybe, to this day, the most innovative and complex ever recorded outside of the most advanced flamenco or classical guitarists and while many people (including myself) have attempted to imitate it, none have ever succeeded. At the time, adverts referred to it as his "piano-sound guitar" and that's basically what it is. Take this recording, "Skeedle Loo Doo Blues" from 1926, as a quintessential example of his ragtime style - the name is probably just for marketing purposes, as the song is most certainly ragtime:



That's one guy with one guitar and yet somehow he manages to play bass, rhythm and lead all at the same time. Perhaps the thing that makes Blake so amazing is his bass lines - whereas even other blues fingers just use an alternating bass with their thumbs (bum-bum, bum-bum, one two, one two, you get the idea) Blake seems to actually create a whole seperate melody with his thumb, while engaging in stunning improvisational playing with his forefingers.

His first record release was "West Coast Blues" backed with "Early Morning Blues" in1926. "West Coast Blues" is another ragtime piece, while "Early Morning Blues" is a genuine blues song. It begins the long line of casually misogynistic songs in which he cheerfully extols the joy of shooting your woman:



The record was a hit and things just kept flowing for him. One thing I'd like to point out about Blake was that he was not really a "country blues" artist, but much more of an urban musician compared to the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson or Blind Willie McTell.. As such, there are no folk songs in his repetoire and he has a much more heavy jazz influence. On his 1928 record, "Southbound Rag", he is joined by jazz clarinetist (and Louis Armstrong regular), Johnny Dodds:



Maybe his biggest hit, and most well known song, is "Diddie Wah Diddie" from 1928. This is his blues-pop masterpiece - it's a blues in structure, but the song itself is so catchy, bouncy, fun and yet intricate and filled with some of his most jaw-dropping instrumental passages that you could hardly imagine the likes of Robert Johnson covering it:



There's so much I could post for Blind Blake but it would be overwhelming - a really good article on him can be found here: http://www.gracyk.com/blake1.shtml

The main thing about Blind Blake - and the main reason he's not so well known today, except by guitarists - is that he never, EVER fits the patronising bluesman stereotype that was formulated during the 1960's. You can't put him up a symbol of how hard black people had it in the 1920's and how they express the suffering of the negro people through song. Blind Blake was not about suffering or misery. He was about the fun times, the jazz times, he was the spirit of the Roaring Twenties. He came, he made a lot of records, he sold a lot of records and then dissappeared leaving a legacy which those people who really appreciate good music and incredible guitar-playing have treasured and which those pretentious twats who only want their bluesmen to be simplistic, god-fearing, miserablist dumb-asses in order to appease their own elitist insecurites have ignored.

Blind Blake was the man. To finish, here's me playing one of his classic ragtime-pop hits, "That'll Never Happen No More":



Shang goose, cruds!

American Song # 1: Funky Butt

Hey, it's me! The younger, hairier, more foul-mouthed, slightly less famous answer Pete Seeger!

Today we deal with the song, "Funky Butt". This is one of those casually obscene songs popular in New Orleans around the turn of the century, originating in the many whorehouses and illicit clubs around Storyville. In this sense, the word "funky" means "smelly" basically and the song is presumably about either farting or sweating. I suppose it could probably be the first piece of music where the term funky was a applied though - Ray Charles eat yer heart out...

Anyway, although no-one knows for sure who wrote the song, it was most associated with Buddy Bolden, the supposed Father of Jazz.



Buddy Bolden's band were allegedly playing jazz as early as the 1890's and his cornet playing was said to audible for miles around when he played. Some people, notable Jelly Roll Morton, have argued that he was merely a very loud ragtime musician and since there are no existing recording of Buddy, we'll never really know. Jelly Roll Morton adapted "Funky Butt" into the slightly sanitised "Buddy Bolden's Blues" or "I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say". Here's a recording of him playing it from around 1938:



Here's a bunch of guys whom I have never heard of playing a slightly more modernised very of "Funky Butt", albeit with the original title:



And here's ME playing and singing it on the guitar! Loosely based on the version by Mississippi John Hurt:



Buddy Bolden, like everyone apparently, went mad and was sent to a mental institute in 1907, dying there in 1931. He missed out on the Jazz age, but his influence spread directly to the next generation of musicians like Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver. There is a film being made about him starring Anthony Mackie set for release in 2010:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0858419/

Anyway, until next time, shag loose, hangers...

So, let's talk about Ragtime!

Let's talk about RAGTIME!!!



Ragtime is maybe the most misunderstood genre in American music. Arising in the 19th century in black urban communities, ragtime was one of the first truly indiginous music forms to arise in America - involving syncopation, seventh chords, back-beat and lots of other goodies that I'm not technically gifted enough to explain, it was essentially a form of very catchy dance music. Although popular for many years in vaudeville and medicine show circles, the first published form of ragtime was the, heh, Coon song.

Coon songs were basically songs written by both black and white ragtime composers which stereotyped, ridiculed and charicatured the lifestyles and society of black people. I suppose at the time a lot of people thought they were accurate representations of black society, but today they can only be percieved as bizarre and offensive. Still, you've got to allow for historical perspective - it's not as though they're white power songs, they're just hopelessly dated in their ideas.

One of the catchiest was Mary Irwin's (most famous as the first woman to kiss on film) "The Bully Song" from 1895. This song was later sanitised as the folk song "Bully of the Town, but here it is in it's original glory, recorded in 1907; you may shit yourself when you hear the lyrics...



At the turn of the century, however, a new form of ragtime arose now known as classic ragtime. The leading proponents of this were Joseph Lamb, James Scott, Tom Turpin and, most famously, Scott Joplin, who is maybe America's greatest composer. The main thing Scott Joplin and his ilk brought to the table was a classical influence - their rags are considerably more complex and harmonically interesting then coon songs or country rags. The first published rag by an African-American was Tom Turpin's Harlem Rag in 1897, but inarguably the quintessential ragtime composition, perhaps ever, is Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin from 1899. Joplin never lived long enough to record anything properly, but he did make piano rolls - programmed sheets of paper which record the pianist's playing for it then to played back on a player piano, motorised pianos like the ones you see in old Tom and Jerry cartoons. Anyway, here's him playing America's answer to Ode to Joy:



Scott Joplin is most famous to today's music lovers through the film, The Sting, where various compositions of his provided the soundtrack. Like most people in his position, Joplin caught syphilis, went mad and died in a mental hospital in 1917. The ragtime era produced few recording dues to both an inability to record it properly and the unwillingness for companies to record African-Americans but there are a few gems that made it through. Perhaps the greatest ragtime musician of the era was Vess L. Ossman, a virtuoso banjo player who, with his ragtime band, produced some surprisingly well recorded, extremely catchy and very intricate recordings. Here's a recording from 1909 of the classic St. Louis Tickle:



What happened to ragtime? One word: Jazz. Ragtime fell out of popularity and was almost completely replaced in public mind by jazz. Even old ragtime musicians dropped their original style in favour of jazzing it up. Jazz introduced improvisation, blues, energy and dispersed with the plantation associations that still plagued ragtime. By the mid 1920's, ragtime was all but gone in the public mind. However, ragtime compositions still popped up in the repetoire of jazz bands. Take Louis Armstrong's 1927 recording of the 1914 "12th Street Rag":



And ragtime also found its way into a new medium: the guitar. Blind Blake, arguably the greatest guitarist of all time, was known as the Kind of Ragtime Guitar and songs like "Southern Rag" from 1927 adapted the piano style to the 6-string:



So, that's ragtime for you!

Various recordings are available from this site:

http://www.archive.org/

Anyway, hang loose bloods!