Whose Blues?:
Eight Infuriating (or Hope-Inducing) Half-Truths
About the Modern Blues Scene
April / May 2000
By Adam Gussow
"The Negro looks at the white man and finds it difficult to believe that the "grays"—a Negro term for white people—can be so absurdly self-deluded over the true interrelatedness of blackness and whiteness."
—Ralph Ellison
No, we're not going to have that particular argument again—the one about white rip-offs of black music, and whether white boys can play the blues, and whether the blues, when you get right down to it, are inherently and inalienably and forever black. Of course they are. As are most white people, at least partly, if you believe Ralph Ellison's claim about the mulatto nature of American identity. "Was Huck Black?" is the title of a recent academic study by University of Texas—Austin professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, but it's also a question that resonates profoundly within a current blues scene fascinated, among other things, by a series of towheaded young Hucks named Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, and Kelly Joe Phelps.
Are these latter-day Hucks black? Obviously not. Are they "black," as in culturally blackened—talented purveyors of an art form whose originators and acknowledged geniuses have, with few exceptions, been African Americans? Well, yes. "Black" but not black: the definition of a certain kind of hip—or earthy—whiteness. The voice of Twain's Huck, according to Fishkin, was taken almost verbatim from a black boy named "Sociable Jimmy," whom Twain had encountered in Illinois, and written up in column-form, several years before he began The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck's voice, like the guitar styles of his latter-day blues-playing avatars, is an uncanny mulatto blend. It gets its power from the veiled and transformed blackness it projects. The modern blues scene, dominated by white consumers, delights in such uncanny blends—white boys, the younger the better, who play "like" (and are certified by) older black bluesmen such as Buddy Guy and B.B. King.
Brody Buster, a towheaded harmonica player, was 10 years old when I saw him several years ago on the main stage of the Kansas City Jazz & Blues Festival, leading his all-black band. "Leading" is a misnomer. He was standing in front of them, warily eyeing the roaring crowd, going through the motions. He wasn't the dazzling virtuoso that young Stevie Wonder had been, but then few of us are. He was certifiably uncanny, though. He'd studied his masters. There were recognizable echoes of Sonny Boy Williamson, of James Cotton. Things had come full circle. His tiny blond self—a virgin bluesman!—was paying the bills for half a dozen older black men who were trying their best to back him up, to ground him. They'd been hired to authenticate him. Was he repaying their spiritual investment, or humiliating them, or a little bit of both? Or neither? Maybe, for all parties involved, it was simply one more gig. Then, too, there may have been offstage dynamics I knew nothing about that trumped the onstage racial dynamics in unexpected ways. Maybe the keyboard player was teaching Brody how to play speed chess in the band van between gigs, and kicking his little blond ass on a daily basis. (Lots of black men play speed chess. I almost ghostwrote the autobiography of the first black grandmaster, a 35-year-old from Brooklyn who hipped me to the scene he'd come up in—wild all-night chess jams for big money in Harlem playgrounds at breakneck be-bop tempos. If you're wondering where Brody Buster's youthful black counterparts are, they're checkmating each other and bragging about it. Sociable Jimmy wants to be the next Bobby Fischer.)
The modern blues world is a strange and marvelous place, rippling with contradictions and sorely in need of honest critique. By honest I don't mean irritable, which is usually the form that critique takes, particularly when words like "black" and "white" get connected with the word "blues." Having just returned from a series of job interviews at the Modern Language Association annual meeting in Chicago—a white guy being eyed skeptically as a possible hire to teach African American literature—I've become more convinced than ever that the academic world, cutting-edge as it tries to be about race matters, has absolutely no clue about the strange, innovative, theory-defying lives that many musicians, black and white, actually live. Don Byron, for example: the black jazz clarinetist who, out of a fascination with the life and art of Mickey Katz, has become one of the world's foremost exponents of klezmer music. A black guy daring to appropriate the ethnic folk-music of my Russian-Jewish forebears! First they want to be Bobby Fischer, now this! What's next? Gefilte fish? Too late for that, actually: My Jewish grandmother's longtime housekeeper, a light-skinned Barbadian woman—more Scotch than black, and proudly so—made better gefilte fish, and matzoh ball soup, and haroses, than my grandmother herself. Theorize that, why don't you, and send Faulkner the bill. Or just call it uncanny.
Here, in any case, is my list of eight infuriating, hope-inducing half-truths about the modern blues scene. No, we're not going to have that argument again. We're going to have eight of them.
1) White people can't sing the blues. If what you mean by "sing the blues" is express, in blues-idiomatic language, the transcoded grief of a people who have been uprooted from their homeland, chained, hurled through the Middle Passage, sold and worked as slaves, "emancipated," Ku Klux Klanned, lynched, prison-farmed, sharecropped, Jim Crowed, publicly humiliated, culturally appropriated, and otherwise mistreated by the surrounding white world on American soil for more than 350 years—then no, white people can't sing the blues. Hell no, in fact. This long, deep, painful history simply isn't available to the white blues conjurer, no matter how spiritually empathic or technically adept. White blues singers can bewail lost love, big bossmen, and empty pockets; what they can't access through their songs is a people's pain, a comprehensive family legacy, within which lost love, big bossmen, and empty pockets take on far deeper dimensions of meaning.
By "people's pain," of course, I mean African-American people's pain. One could argue, for example, that the Jews have suffered their own version of such pain—a history of exile, oppression, and racial murder—and that Jewish blues singers like David Bromberg find in blues song a way of expressing that pain. You could argue that, if you're willing to stake your claim on Bromberg's schmaltzy rendition of "You Got To Suffer If You Want To Sing The Blues." Surely the Holocaust deserves better. The black Holocaust, however—the plague of lynching-with-burning that swept across the South between 1890 and 1930 and claimed thousands of black men—finds profound, chilling expression in Little Brother Montgomery's "The First Time I Met The Blues," later covered by Buddy Guy: "The first time I met the blues, mama, they came walking through the wood/The first time I met the blues, mama, they came walking through the wood/They stopped at my house, first, mama, and done me all the harm they could/Now my blues got at me, lord, and run me from tree to tree/Now my blues got at me, and run me from tree to tree/You should have heard me begging, Mr. Blues, don't murder me."
Jonny Lang can sing this song, but he can't own it—claim it and be claimed by the history it encodes—the way Buddy Guy can. If there's a difference between white blues singers and black blues singers, apart from learnable technique, it lies here.
2) Black Africans can't sing the blues. Well, they shouldn't be able to, should they? The slave trade dispersed Africans into many corners of the New World, but only African Americans in the southern United States evolved blues music. Painful colonial histories alone weren't the vital spark, or blues would have sprung up in Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Brazil. Instead these countries have produced reggae, bomba, and samba. Afrodiasporic musics, all—members of the family—but nothing like the funky shuffles we know and love. To get blues you need more than forcibly displaced Africans. You need lynch-happy crackers, piney-woods barrelhouses, guitars and harmonicas tuned to Western intervals that could nevertheless be smeared blue. And you need a network of hoppable trains to get you the hell away from the lynch-happy crackers. African syncopation and pentatonic melody were necessary but not sufficient. To get blues you need America, in all its miserable, miscegenated, Jim Crow glory.
How, then, to explain my friend Abraham Yameogo? Abraham and I met in Avignon in the summer of 1986, when he rolled off the train and into town—dreadlocks flying, Les Paul Custom cradled between his legs, rucksack hanging from the back of his wheelchair. Born in Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) and raised in Paris, Abraham was and still is the lead singer and guitarist for the Kilimandjaro Soul-Blues Band, a six-piece interracial group based in Nancy, near Strasbourg. His hero and chief influence is Muddy Waters, whose name he pronounces Maugh-dee Waugh-TAIRS. His singing voice is dark, deep, throaty, haunting; it's also slightly sharp, in a way that bothered me at first, until I heard a singer from Mali who did exactly the same thing. Although French is his native language, his English—the musician's lingua franca—is surprisingly good. He sings all his songs in French-accented English, to audiences that consist almost entirely of French-speaking white people. He's a big deal in France. He's a gifted and energetic performer, he writes great songs, and he no doubt feeds some unacknowledged hunger on the part of French audiences for blackness, for bluesiness—even for Americanness, strange as it sounds. They hoot and holler at his versions of "Sweet Home Chicago" and "Kansas City."
Is Abraham Yameogo an "authentic" blues singer? Not if authentic means sounding like Buddy or B.B. How could a blues singer with a French accent—black, white, Arab—possibly be authentic? Abraham is something far more complicated and modern than that. He's deeper than authentic, the very definition of uncanny. He's colonized Africa by reclaiming the blues and refashioning it in his own image.
Of course, when I hear that thick French accent pouring itself all over Sonny Boy Williamson's "Help Me," I sometimes smile indulgently and think, Close, but no cigar. Because when you get right down to it, the blues is American music, isn't it? Gotta have that American inflection to do it up right. Anything else is...well, an imitation.
It's also possible, of course, that black Americans listening to a guy like me singing "Help Me" might smile indulgently and think exactly the same thing: Close, but no cigar. Because when you get right down to it, the blues is African-American music, isn't it? Gotta have that blackfolks inflection to do it up right. Anything else is...well, an imitation.
The modern blues scene: an infinite series of regressions from a fictive, fast-fading, endlessly reconstituted Primal Black Source, located somewhere down in Mississippi.
3) White Americans can play the blues. If you're talking about instrumental music—guitar, harp, keyboards, drums—they certainly can, and do. They have produced, arguably, two geniuses, Paul Butterfield and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and a handful of others (Eric Clapton in his Bluesbreakers/Cream phase, Duane Allman, Kim Wilson) who have added something significant and indelible to the evolving blues idiom. One of the most remarkable developments in American music over the past 40 years, in fact, has been the emergence of several generations of talented and tasteful white blues players. No one could have predicted in 1960, as Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee worked the folk-revival circuit, that white kids would pour across the line separating black musicians from their new white audience, that they would buy guitars and harmonicas and how-to books by Stefan Grossman and Tony "Little Son" Glover, that they would play so much horribly bad white blues with so much joyous abandon in the late '60s and early '70s, that they would hang in there and actually begin to learn their craft as the Age of Aquarius faded, that they would return to the vital sources—T. Bone Walker, Little Walter—and consolidate the discoveries made by Butterfield, Allman, and others, that they would coalesce into a series of local blues scenes (Austin, L.A., Chicago, Detroit, New York) made vital by a continuing sense of interracial fraternity and exchange, and that the result would be what we have now: a thriving American blues scene, driven largely but not entirely by white audiences and consumers, in which white musicians play both leading and support roles. Those who now front their own bands have often paid considerable dues—which is to say, learned their craft and ethos—playing behind older black musicians: Muddy, Pinetop Perkins, Johnny Copeland, Albert Collins, George "Harmonica" Smith. Real teaching, and real learning, has gone on. To claim otherwise—to insist that the modern blues scene can be explained as white Americans having "stolen" the blues from black Americans—is to turn a deliberately blind eye on this process of interracial mentorship. Why deny that older black men and women can be effective teachers of the music they love to those willing to honor their gifts?
4) White blues players sometimes honor their black mentors in weird ways. In 1993 I wrote a young man's angry letter to Living Blues magazine in which I decried what I called "the residue of blackface minstrelsy in the current white blues scene." I was referring to performers—I named a couple of well-known California harp players—who dressed up in slick suits, wore sunglasses, turned the music more often than not into a stagey joke, and addressed their audiences in a retro-'50s "black" patter that included lines like "Ain't we havin' a sho-nuff good time!" These players and others of their ilk struck me as a weird and politically retrograde throwback to the age of cork blacking, "nigger minstrels," "Ethiopian seranaders," the whole Tambo-and-Bones schtick. White men playing at being black, and seriously diminishing the deep blues I loved.
Both of these white blues performers, I should add, were protégés of George "Harmonica" Smith; both had spent quite a bit of time working in black clubs. From one standpoint—the question of dues-paying—they were as authentic as white bluesmen could be. They'd been culturally blackened, no doubt. My problem was with what they made with the gifts they'd been given. I was young and idealistic and wanted my blues pure.
One of the guys read what I'd written. It pissed the hell out of him. A fellow harp player telling him off in print! He stored up his feelings until our paths crossed, which they did two summers ago at a festival in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. His band was coming offstage just as my act, Satan and Adam, was coming on. He strode up to me as I lingered backstage. He was wearing a pink tuxedo and patent leather shoes. He towered over me. He was fuming. He was also—I suddenly realized—a little unnerved by me, as though my stern reproof in print had conjured up an image of some Grim Reaper he couldn't quite connect with the skinny young redhead standing in front of him.
"I'd appreciate, if you're gonna write some letter to some magazine, that you leave me out of it," he said.
"Yeah," I said. "I, ah...."
Suddenly he was quivering with anger, his finger in my face. "You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. You don't know where I've been."
What I didn't know at that point, thankfully, was that he'd stabbed people earlier in his life, back when he was a junkie.
"It was a stupid letter," I said. What I thought was: Even if what I said in the letter was true, or partly true, I have given my fellow blues harmonica player the blues. My fellow pro. I've hurt the guy. All he's trying to do is make a living as a musician, doing what he does best. Fuck.
He seemed to find me compelling, but confusing: an object of weird fascination. I felt the same way about him. Two white-American blues harmonica players of slightly different generations, big and little brothers trying to figure each other out.
We exchanged a few more words, came to a tenuous understanding. He let me live. Recently I heard a cut from his latest album on my local jazz/blues station. And you know what? He was singing deep blues. The music was no longer a joke.
5) White deep blues singers are rare, but they do exist. I'm thinking, in particular, of Bonnie Raitt and Rory Block. Both singers have four things in common: a period of youthful apprenticeship to, or contact with, older black masters whom they have neither forgotten to credit nor slavishly imitated (Sippie Wallace and Mississippi Fred McDowell in Raitt's case, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, and Son House in Block's); personal lives littered with a fair share of chaos, romantic disappointment, and death; an unsurpassed mastery of blues as both instrumental music and microtonal vocalization; and an instinctive avoidance of the temptation to minstrelsy. Neither Raitt nor Block seems remotely interested in the accoutrements of white bluesgirl "style"—the vampy red dresses and femme fatale bustiers, the Garboesque suits, not to mention the Panama hats and sunglasses preferred by the boys. Raitt went to Radcliffe, by the way; her father is a well-known Broadway actor. You might have expected her thing to be uptight and stagey. The content of her musical character dictated otherwise.
6) The white blues audience has demanded that a new generation of younger African-American blues artists arise to slake its insatiable need for blue-blackness, and a new generation of young African-American blues artists has obliged. Which is not to say that these younger artists—Keb' Mo', Alvin Youngblood Hart, Shemekia Copeland, Bernard Allison, Corey Harris, Big Bill Morganfield—don't play the blues for many reasons having little to do with the white blues audience. Just that the white audience and its inordinate hunger is a reality for these artists (as the severely diminished black audience is not, except as a palpable and perhaps lamentable absence), and their creative efforts are inevitably pressured by what that white blues audience would like them to be: i.e. the reincarnation of Robert Johnson, the next Koko Taylor. White blues hunger is epitomized by the creepy phrase "keeping the blues alive," the mantra of more than a few well-intentioned white-run blues organizations. What many whitefolks want to keep alive, to be blunt, is what might be called the Pristine Black Folk Subject, the postmodern reincarnation of the Old Time Negro. Aging Old Time Negroes are great—the real bluesy deal from Chulahoma, Mississippi!—but Young Old Time Negroes are even better. Restive young African-American men, so-called "New Negroes," have always unnerved whitefolks: Witness the reflexive dismissal of rap by your average white blues fan. But if these New Negroes are remakes of Old Time Negroes? Hell, bubba, we're home free! The late Lonnie Pitchford, a younger black Mississippian fond of constructing one-string diddly-bows and plunking them onstage, was the white blues audience's wet dream.
What I find so impressive about Mo', Hart, and Harris is that they've managed to give this audience what it wants while simultaneously risking its wrath by veering away from the down-home "real blues" dead end. They can do the Pristine Black Folk Subject thing—i.e. Robert Johnson redux—but they can also do the pop thing (Mo') and the Afrodiasporic thing (Hart and Harris). Not all their white critics in the blues magazines are happy about this. I suggest that you pay particularly close attention to the things that white critics don't like about the evolving aesthetics of younger African-American blues artists. What you'll find, more often than not, is an artist struggling to free him- or herself from deadly audience (and record label) expectations. Shemekia Copeland, the anointed successor—at age 18—to Koko Taylor, is struggling, mutual friends tell me, with the Big Bad Mama role to which the hardcore white blues audience is delighted to consign her. She's a Harlem kid, with a rich musical background; "Wang Dang Doodle" is not all she was put here to sing. Watch her closely, and hope she surprises the hell out of us. That would be keeping the blues alive.
7) American Indians can play the blues. Who said the modern American blues scene was only a matter of black and white? Sherman Alexie's novel Reservation Blues (1995) begins with a scene in which a tired and romantically bereft Robert Johnson, having rambled a long way from Mississippi, shows up one day at a crossroads in Wellpinit, a small town on the Spokane Indian Reservation. After a brief, cryptic conversation with a local named Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Johnson walks away toward the summit of Wellpinit Mountain, where a spirit named Big Mom—according to Thomas—will help him reclaim his soul. He leaves his guitar behind, on the floor of Thomas's van. "Thomas picked it up," writes Alexie, "strummed the strings, felt a small pain in the palms of his hands, and heard the first sad note of the reservation blues."
Alexie's myth of black-Indian cultural exchange is, as it happens, considerably more than fictive. B.B. King tours every summer with a multi-act blues show; the opening act last summer at Jones Beach, on a bill that also included Kenny Wayne Shepherd, was an all-Indian quartet called Indigenous. (This may be an inside joke. Smoke Signals, a recent movie based on Alexie's fiction, opens with an Indian DJ on the tiny rez radio station joking "It's a good day to be indigenous"—itself a puckish play on Chief Dan George's noble-savage proclamation in Little Big Man, "It's a good day to die.") The music of Indigenous owes less to Robert Johnson, arguably, than to Stevie Ray Vaughan: highly amplified, guitar-heavy Texas shuffles. The lead guitarist had long silky hair—black, not blond—and seemed neither more nor less spiritually committed than Kenny Wayne Shepherd, who came out later and built his set into a surprisingly effective guitar-god crescendo. B.B. King came out last, as he always does, and was fine, although not quite as ebullient as he'd been six months earlier, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. As always when making his grand entrance, he exchanged exaggerated ritual bows with each member of his band. The bass player, I noted, was the same tall awkward white guy B.B.'s been using for the past 10 years.
8) Some older black men take blues lessons from white boys. For many years—when blues gigs weren't paying the bills, when my grad school stipend ran out—I have made a part-time living as a blues harmonica teacher. Students of the instrument come in all shapes and sizes. More men than women, as a rule, with a preponderance of earthy, direct white guys—film-industry grips, actors and voiceover specialists, stock traders with surprisingly pungent souls. (One former student, a financial analyst itching to break free, recently sent me a Christmas card from his new startup venture, an investment firm called Blue Capital.)
Six black men, ranging from slightly to considerably older, have studied blues harmonica with me over the years: Ebenezer, Greg, Charlie, Tony, Atibah, and Vernon. I still run into Greg from time to time at blues shows; he's a tall, slightly nerdy computer programmer. I bumped into Charlie, an Upper West Side retiree, last summer at Lincoln Center, where blues piano legend Jay McShann was giving a free outdoor concert. Tony was a struggling actor from New Jersey; we used to meet back in the late 1980s at a rehearsal studio he rented out on 47th Street just off Broadway. Atibah was a Harlem husband in Kente cloth and Malcolm X glasses; we worked together for more than a year, until his wife decided she wanted him at home with their children. Vernon, another Harlemite, is a retired transit worker who got my name from a blues guitarist I know. Ebenezer, whom I haven't seen in years, used to show up in Harlem, tape recorder in hand, when Mr. Satan and I were busking the sidewalks of 125th Street. My playing clearly haunted him, but field recordings weren't enough; he finally took the A-train up to where I live and I taught him bending, tongue-blocking, warbling.
It's fair to ask—I've certainly asked myself—what a younger white guy can possibly teach these older black men about the blues. That depends on what you mean by the blues. If you mean the bitter despairs and releasing euphorias and frustrated ambitions and redemptive triumphs, the whole spectrum of distinctive feelings, grounded in a people's history, to which black men in America alone are privy, then I can't teach them a thing. Those blues aren't mine, and can't ever be—which isn't to say that I don't know from bitter despair and releasing euphoria. Just that what I do know is tinted a lighter shade of pale.
If by the blues, however, you mean the musical techniques and creative ethos evolved by the blues harmonica players I learned from—most but not all of them black—then yes. A white boy like me does indeed have something to teach a black man about the blues.
(Actually, while we're at it, can we stop calling men my age "boy"? Brody Buster is a white boy. I'm almost 42; my stubble is gray when I forget to shave. "White man" is hardly how I prefer to self-identify, but "man," standing alone, is a word I can live with, and the implied respect is nice. White boys don't get much, frankly.)
We get along quite congenially, my black students and I, and they seem pleased enough with what they learn to come back for more. My own harmonica teacher, a gifted black Bronxville native named Nat Riddles who died of leukemia in 1991, taught me well; I do my best to pass along his teachings. A gift only lives if you do that, according to Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. "[W]hen gifts circulate within a group," writes Hyde, "their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges." I charge for the lessons I give, of course, as Nat charged me, but the ethos Hyde describes remains my governing ideal.
Slavery and sharecropping are a thing of the past, although their long shadow lingers; the brave new world, with blues falling everywhere, is where we live now. None of the old theories about racial formation or cultural transmission quite explains us. "The white man," "the black man," "the Indian": remember those labels, from the last millennium—comforting to many, deadly to all? I'll put my faith in Nat and Abraham and Bonnie and Sherman. Thank god we all listened to the blues, shared what we'd learned, and began to get real.
END
Adam Gussow, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton and reformed street musician, recently won the 2000 Keeping The Blues Alive Award in Literature from the Blues Foundation for Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir (Pantheon Books, 1998), an excerpt from which appeared in the February/March 2000 issue of Thirsty Ear. He lives in New York and has published articles and reviews in Harper's, Boston Review, Village Voice, Newsday, and the Wall Street Journal. Under the band name Satan and Adam, Gussow has recorded three CDs with Mr. Satan, all of which were released by Flying Fish.
© 2001 - 2002 Thirsty Ear Magazine ALL RIGHTS RESERVED