Blues and the Isolated Chair
by Jim Danger March, 2013
How could you isolate a chair?
If you thought this chair was so
special that you wanted to purify it, to isolate, disentangle
it from all other things, how could you do that? The moment you put
it in a glass case on a pedestal, now it's not just a chair, it's a
trio; it's a glass case, a pedestal and a chair. Not only that, it's
the floor, the whole room it's in, the building it's in – 'cause
you have to go to such-and-such a place to see it, so you've
certainly failed to isolate that chair.
You can't isolate
the chair – or anything else!
This
is how I feel about “the blues”, as a brand of music. “I'm all
blues, man, I am the
blues. I'm all about the Blues, Blues, Blues, and I don't do nuthin'
but the blues.” I
mean, that would be stupid. “The Blues” is like that chair. You
can't isolate it.
To
me, the blues is a constituent;
it's an ingredient. No,
you can't isolate it, you can't purify it,
in that sense, and detach the blues from Music Itself. Then
try to separate music from
anything else – forget it!
This has
everything to do with what Bruce Lee was talking about, regarding
martial arts. He scoffed at the notion of separate styles, segregated
and presumed to be removed from other styles. “As long as a human
being has two arms and two legs, there will be only one style of
fighting. I no longer believe in styles.”
It's
not just the blues, of course, it's the same with bluegrass, or
country, or even jazz, any brand
or attitude of music that gets its own general heading, its own
pigeonholed stereotype, which may later spin off another, allegedly
separate style, so we get all these sub-headings, like “progressive
jazz”, or “progressive rock”, or country-gospel, or gangsta
rap. You think there are only a few different headings, like
something is either jazz, blues, country, rock'n'roll, classical, or
folk. Then you realize that you really can't stop. The headings
continue to come to mind, another, then another, and another. Pop;
Easy Listening; Tinpan Alley; Ragtime: Salsa; Swing; Ska; just try
to exhaust the number of
delineations, and you'll find out someone's just split another hair,
and the Psychobilly crowd has splintered away from the Rockabilly
gang, and raised their own flag,
stuck in its own pigeonhole. Turns out, the more someone – of any
“style” – strains toward
being purely “this”
or “that”, the
more full of shit they are. What's “pure country” today would
have been banned from the Grand Ole Opry one or two or three
generations ago. Everything, in musical categorizations, it turns
out, is as fluctuant as everything else in life – and you're never
going to be able to isolate that
chair!
The
Blues, as an ingredient, is really indispensable to almost any
“other musical style”, for
its essential power, once heard, is remembered, recalled and
reproduced, to greater or lesser extent, in any music that has come
into being since the
Blues has first shown its unique face. It has bled into, and blended
in with, so much of –
especially – popular music, almost any sort commercial
music, to the extent that if one could imagine a scenario in which
the blues had never yet been born, what would be left of any music
produced in the last hundred years? Jimmie Rodgers, the “singing
brakeman” and “father of country music” {circa 1920s and '30s},
was most definitely steeped in the blues. Though a “country”
yodeler, he titled his songs, “Blue Yodel #2,” “Blue Yodel #5”,
etc., and his style was very bluesy indeed. This is “the father of
country music”! Hank
Williams {introduced many a time as “the Lovesick Blues boy”} was
quite bluesy, himself. One isn't going to be able to tease the Blues
thread out of country music, ever. It was born in the
blues.
I
consider myself to be a rock'n'roll player. That I do some “strictly
blues” songs as part of my repertoire, is to me a natural and
foregone fact of being a rock'n'roller. Rock'n'roll required that
“the Blues” come first, because blues is a necessary and vital
component of rock'n'roll. Then there's “Rhythm and Blues”, from
the Fats Domino New Orleans rolling sounds of “Blueberry Hill”,
to the “Got My Mojo Workin'” of Muddy Waters and the Chicago
sound – and the pre-dawning rock'n'roll/R&B of Bill Haley's
“Rock Around The Clock”, which is so closely related to the two
above-mentioned rhythm-and-blues tunes that it's senseless to try to
make any stark distinction between them. When Country, Bluegrass and
Gospel music were thrown into the mix with this fiery R&B sound,
and rooted, still, in the Blues, rock'n'roll
was truly born and came into being on its own, as its own “new
style”. Rock'n'roll was {I say “was”, because as mentioned,
nothing is not in flux, and rock'n'roll of today is often
unrecognizable when compared to what it “was” or will
be} a unique kind of music because it was a hybrid, an inevitable
blending of all that had been up to that point, especially
what had been up to that point
in the southern half of the United States. Southern
Baptist and Pentecostal church
music – Gospel music – was every bit as indispensable to the
creation of rock'n'roll as was the blues. Rock'n'roll came to be in
its season. Other forms, other
brands of music had to come
first, just as the ingredients of a cake must be extant before said
cake can be produced. These other accents – blues, country,
bluegrass, rhythm-and-blues and gospel {I don't mention jazz
specifically, because its connection to rock'n'roll, its contribution
to rock'n'roll, was in the R&B branch – and in the very-much
blues-influenced great jazz vocalists. The jazz influence on
rock'n'roll was more in its offshoot of R&B – thus, an indirect
influence. In fact, Elvis Presley, when asked by cynics about “real
music” like classical and jazz, stated flatly that he did not
understand jazz music. {“I'm not going to knock
it, I just don't understand it.”}
Elvis, one of the four main “architects of rock'n'roll”, one of
the four main pioneers and creators of
rock'n'roll, had a phenomenally thorough and encyclopedic knowledge
and understanding of blues, country, bluegrass, R&B “race”
music {yet another pigeonhole of the day} and gospel music, of the
American South. He could authentically and with utter sincerity, sing
“pure” blues, “pure” gospel, “pure” country and
“pure” bluegrass, as well as
the “race” music and R&B that came before him. He had
to have a thorough knowledge,
understanding and genuine feel for all of these ingredients, in order
to combine them with a natural grace, into what came to be called
rock'n'roll. Jazz, however, he had no understanding of, no
appreciation for – it had not “spoken to” him. This is why I
say that jazz had no direct
influence on rock'n'roll. Jazz, as stated, did, certainly,
have an important secondary, or
indirect, contribution, via its merger with blues which led into
Rhythm-and-Blues. Listen to Benny Goodman, and where the blues got
into his music, rock'n'roll would inevitably come to be – after the
introduction of the other elements, country and gospel. Louie Prima's
“Sing Sing Sing” {circa 1930s, showstopper performed by a number
of big bands, and even used as the basis for a “Battle of the
Bands” on at least one occasion} virtually had to
eventually result in
rock'n'roll!
Speaking
of “Sing, Sing, Sing”, especially as performed by the Benny
Goodman Band with Gene Krupa on drums, I remember thinking that this
would be the perfect song, if only one song could be selected, to
play for alien civilizations on far-away planets, to let them know
what the best of the
human race was capable of. I would be proud to say, “Yes, I'm from
the race that created, Sing, Sing, Sing.”
Rock'n'roll is in that music, as surely as it's in the mad energy of
Rossini and the 4/4 rhythm of Beethoven.
Just
as an incidental note, I thought Chuck Berry wrote the book on how to
play rock'n'roll guitar – until, recently, I was studying the
guitar work of John Lee Hooker, and realized that's where
Chuck Berry got most
of what he was doing on the guitar. In fact, anyone who learns to
play John Lee Hooker's riffs, can play just about any rock'n'roll
guitar solo, which, to this day, are all based on what John Lee
Hooker, pure blues man {or “boogie-woogie” man – pick your
label} was playing.
Really,
it was the whole thing about labels, brands, styles, and “musical
purism” that I wanted to address, here, with the isolation of a
chair being my allegory. Why not just use the labels less, or at
least, since I can see the practical importance of keeping folkies
and rockers apart, and jazz artists and country players out of each
others' paths, not use them so strictly or exclusively. I just think
everyone should take their labels with a wink, realizing, first of
all, that such distinctions are not important, and secondly, that
what the person actually plays is very likely to bleed out of one
musical pigeonhole and into, or at least up against, another one, two
or three. You'd really have to be quite stupid, and incredibly
ignorant, it seems to me, to stay very tightly within the
cordoned-off borders of any particular
musical style, consistently. I see that like I see someone who speaks
with a very heavy, hick accent, as though they've never heard anyone
speak who wasn't born and raised in their little neighborhood, and
haven't realized how absurd and ignorant their accent makes them
sound, to others outside that
hick little patch. It does turn out that not everyone
who speaks with a stupid accent is stupid, which surprises me, but I
know this to be true. It just makes them sound stupid,
to most people outside their neighborhood. That's how musicians seem
to me, who stick so very closely to their little particular style,
and even wear costumes and
hairstyles and everything, all pointing to that little alley of music
in which they live and breathe. I see them as apparently fucking
stupid.
I
just don't like walls, anyway. I mean, walls that divide humans from
each other, like teams all aligned against one another, or fearful
tribes huddling together to avoid all others, or people gathering
psychically under headings involving a political or religious point
of view, or philosophical, sociological, ideology of any kind, which
excludes some humans and therefore sets itself in opposition to
others, rather than seeking to find points of agreement with them,
and a way of harmonizing, living peacefully, learning more about
themselves by learning more about one another. It seems that the only
glue guaranteed to hold a group of people together is opposition to
those not in their group. A group, segregated psychologically from
others, is held together by having someone to oppose. You
can't even worship a God, without demonizing someone or something, so
that this idea of “God” is itself held together by having someone
to oppose. {This actually makes such a “God” story bogus, because
an actual First Cause, or Source of All, could logically have no
opposition.}
So I say,
don't put a lot of emphasis on musical headings, styles, or other
narrow or well-defined groups or schools of thought. As Alan Watts
said, that's like trying to hold water in a sieve.
