Being a traditionalist, I was more than excited to get to see Marquise Knox this weekend. This guy is the real deal. He's only 18 but he's got the swagger of an old blues man. His harp playing is ok, his guitar playing is good his voice is very good but the whole package is over the top good. I felt like I was watching a blues legend 60 years ago! Some might say he's not doing anything new and he's just rehashing the old guys but I love it and I think its good to keep the roots alive as well as growing new branches.
Without stirring up too much racial unrest, this demonstrates that the blues is the black man's music and I'm glad to see a young black man carrying the torch. Compare this guy to Johnny Lang or Kenny Wayne Shepherd or any other white kid blues prodigy. I'll take Marquise!
Some women might object to your claim that the blues is the black man's music. The first stars of the blues were of course women: Mamie Smith, Victoria Spivey, Bessie Smith, Clara Smith, Sippie Wallace. If you're going to make large, definitive announcements, make sure they can stand basic scrutiny.
I think it's great to see young black people choosing to play the blues, just as I think it's great to see young Italian kids choosing to sing doo-wop, Puccini, and the Sinatra songbook. But since the blues, in particular, is a music that was nourished by community rituals within black America, and since the audience for the blues these days, worldwide, is overwhelmingly non-black, your claim also falls short in a second key way: young black men who choose to play blues for white audiences are making a completely different set of aesthetic choices than were young black men in, say, Robert Johnson's or B.B. King's day. They're inevitably forced to adapt themselves, cater to, the tastes of people like....well, you. (I'm presuming that you're white. I've never met a black blues fan who frontally identified himself as a traditionalist. That's a word invented by the white audience.)
There's certainly nothing wrong with preferring older blues styles performed by younger black players. Just understand that if the blues wasn't the WHITE man's music, too--i.e., if there wasn't an eager and receptive mass white audience for traditionalist blues of the sort that you like--then Marquise would be doing something else. He's playing these blues, to a significant extent, because guys like you, guys with your particular set of tastes, want him to. He's not playing the music because any significant segment of the black community wants him to. And that makes a difference. It means that the "traditionalist" approach that he seems to be honoring depends very heavily on the receptive presence of white men. And women. You hear all those folks going "Whooo!" in the background of that video? That's how we white folks cheer blues: like we're at a football game. (The crowds I played for on the streets in Harlem didn't cheer that way. They shouted things like "Throw down!," "Go ahead, baby," and "Make it talk!")
Blues is the black man's music AND the white man's music, in other words. And of course Denis Lasalle and Bonnie Raitt are part of it all, too. Not to mention all the Native American bluesmen in the Oklahoma City blues scene.
I just wanted to clear that up. Carry on.
Last Edited by on Dec 07, 2009 8:48 AM
Points taken Adam. Certainly I should have black "folks." And certainly I am talking in generalizations. White folks can enjoy the blues, white folks can play or sing the blues but very few HAVE the blues. To HAVE the blues is a culture (see Estrins interview) which is inherently black. Very few white people really get it. There are plenty of black folks that aren't in this culture as well. Marquise grew up in the blues, it is IN him and it comes out naturally in a way most players can only hope to imitate. I got the impression this is who he is and he would be doing this even if white folks weren't putting on blues festivals. He'd be playing at the family reunions, or on a front porch with friends, or alone in his room at home.
Here's another one I post mainly to show the hat and suit. When I first saw his picture with a hat like that on I said "yeah right, here's some kid who can play a little guitar that's wearing an old corny suit trying to be a real bluesman." but after seeing him (you could tell in the first 30 seconds of the first song) the suit fits. If he's putting a show, he's pretty damn convincing.
"To HAVE the blues is a culture (see Estrins interview) which is inherently black"
I dunno, Scott. Judging from responses to the recent thread, Who Owns the Blues?, a lot of people on this forum (of varying ethnicity) would disagree with you. When postal workers, longshoresmen, telemarketers, lumberjacks, beauticians, electricians, taxi drivers, etc, lose their job, suffer heartbreak, or end up homeless on the street, can they only qualify as 'having the blues' if they're black?
I'll agree with you part-way: there is an aspect of The Blues that was tied up with a specific African American experience: spiritual/emotional responses to conditions of poverty and oppression in a certain part of the 20th century.
Is that what you meant by having the blues? If so, would you say that those experiences can be transferred so neatly to modern times? Does a young man of a particular race feel the same way today he might have 20, 50, 100 years ago? How can that be possible? Does he face the same challenges and obstacles, or different ones?
My guess is the latter.
Last Edited by on Dec 07, 2009 9:57 AM
@scottb: He certainly speaks with an unusual sort of gravitas for a 15 year old. He seems twice his age. It's eerie.
The interview is interesting. He notes at :49 that "everybody say, 'That's old folks' music," and he's clearly talking about his (black) friends, schoolmates, whomever. He defends what he's doing by invoking his grandparents' times as sharecroppers. What's interesting about this, to me, is that Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, most of the early blues greats, had to fight off their parents' and grandparents' claim that blues was the devil's music. As musicians, they certainly didn't invoke their parents as emblems of the sort of music they wanted to be making--although some, like Honeyboy Edwards, certainly acknowledged that their fathers and other family members were musical. Yet even as they did acknowldge that, they did so in order to say, "They didn't play the blues, they just played lil' ol' jump ups for the square dances, nothing special."
RJ in particular was trying to a new sound, as was B. B. King: completely up-to-date and hip, because that's what got you girls, recording contracts, and money. Things have flip-flopped. Now what gets you money and recording contracts, if not necessarily girls--and this again is a function of the almost-total-domination of the white audience--is the older sound.
I have no idea whether Marquise actually has the blues, but he's clearly moved by the music or he wouldn't risk the taunts of his peers ("old folks music," etc.). The family connection, the ancestral connection, that he invokes isn't trivial; since our understanding of blues in a post-integration world depends to some extent on what you might call constructions of authenticity (i.e., those who have sharecroppers in their background or are descended from famous blues performers are somehow more authentic than those who don't, with race always at least potentially a decisive trump card until proven otherwise, and class a secondary determinant [i.e., Watermelon Slim drives an 18-wheeler]), he gains weight and perceived quality when he makes these invocactions. He becomes a kind of griot. In the aftermath of ROOTS (1977), this is an important consideration. My grandfather grew up in a dirt-floored shack and fled from the cops--ah, I mean the Cossacks--but Lithuanian Jews aren't the first thing that comes to mind when people think about blues ancestry.
Edited to add: Marquise reminds me a little of a young guy I knew back in New York named Slam Allen. He was from the Hudson River Valley. He's on YouTube. He's Marquise ten or fifteen years down the line:
Being poor or losing your girlfriend or your job or your leg or anything else will make you sad and give you "the blues" but you won't automatically HAVE the BLUES. Like any music, the blues comes from within not just how you're feeling but what else is inside you that changes the way things come out, whether it be joy or pain. It's the whole culture that makes it the blues not just the I, IV, and V and a blues scale. It's the music you grew up to, the way you worship at church, the things you eat, the way you walk, what your dad called your mom, what your grandfather gave you for a nickname, how the crowd acts at a movie or how it responds to music like Adam pointed out, or what you do for entertainment, what liquor you drink, what you smoke, what movies you like, how you like your women, what car you drive, how do you gamble. It's the differnce from being from New Orleans and Nawlins or from Baton Rouge or Baton Rourege. All that and more makes you who you are and how you express yourself in music or otherwise.
Last Edited by on Dec 07, 2009 1:37 PM
"White folks can enjoy the blues, white folks can play or sing the blues but very few HAVE the blues. To HAVE the blues is a culture (see Estrins interview) which is inherently black. Very few white people really get it."
I've not read the Estrin interview to which you refer; Estrin hasn't read my thoughts on the topic either. But that doesn't make them any less valid.
I think that your idea of what the blues is, is based on an historically romanticised one; your image of it appears to be rooted in a notion of what it was like for one ethnic group living at a particular point in time. That is out-dated and does not apply to a black man or women living now anymore than it applies to me.
Sure, a black person can have the blues. But, so can I; so can you. Who hasn't suffered a broken heart? Who hasn't lost their job? A disproportionate number of the homeless people 'living' in London - if memory serves, it's 1 in 5 - are ex-servicemen, most of whom are white; can they have the blues?
I think that your generalisations would probably be quite hard to swallow for some people and, if taken out of just the musical context and put into a socio-economic one, even quite offensive.
Racial hatred, poverty, heartbreak and all the other human woes often associated with the blues are neither caused by, nor are they the sole preserve of any one race or group of people.
EDIT:
"Like any music, the blues comes from within not just how you're feeling but what else is inside you that changes the way things come out, whether it be joy or pain. It's the whole culture that makes it the blues not just the I, IV, and V and a blues scale. It's the music you grew up to, the way you worship at church, the things you eat, the way you walk, what your dad called your mom, what your grandfather gave you for a nickname, how the crowd acts at a movie or how it responds to music like Adam pointed out, or what you do for entertainment, what liquor you drink, what you smoke, what movies you like, how you like your women, what car you drive, how do you gamble. It's the differnce from being from New Orleans and Nawlins or from Baton Rouge or Baton Rourege. All that and more makes you who you are and how you express yourself in music or otherwise."
I don't even know where to begin unravelling that huge assertion. ---------- YouTube SlimHarpMick
Last Edited by on Dec 07, 2009 11:13 AM
This reminds me of the sociologist's argument of who you are being a result of your environment vs being born that way. Most of the blues songs with which I'm familiar have nothing to do with race(or racism).They are usually about things anybody can experience. Other than "Strange Fruit" I can't, off the top of my head, think of any blues songs that deal specifically with racism. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm always amused when the arguments appear as to who "legitimately" can play the blues because they've "suffered" enough. It reminds me of that brilliant Monty Python sketch called the Four Yorkshiremen, wherein four pythoners try to outdo each other as to who has had a tougher life.
yorkshirman 1: "you were lucky, we lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We had to get up a six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t'mill 14 hours a day, week in and week out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our dad would thrash us to sleep w' his belt."
yorkshireman 2: "Luxury. We used to get out of the lake at six in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky."
All kidding aside, who gets to be the arbiter and decides "well, you've had it tough enough...you sir or madam may legitimately play the blues"..?
I'm all for giving the creators of the blues their due. And lord knows over the years many of them have been screwed on this account(but so have white musicians) To make a statement saying to have the blues is a cultural thing only accessible to black people,is to me absurd.
I believe that the technical ability to master a musical instrument and that special gift to make people feel something from the music you produce, is both color and culture blind.
But hey, that's just me.
Last Edited by on Dec 07, 2009 12:41 PM
Is anyone reading my posts? When did I say anyone had to suffer enough to play the blues? When did I say white people can't technically master an instrument and play blues music? But the IT of the blues greats like Buddy Guy, Wolf, Muddy, Sonny Boy, Walter, Junior Wells, BB King etc is not technical mastery or personal suffering. It's a swagger, a charisma and an attitude about life which is rarely seen these days in white or black artists. Marquise has IT! I challange anyone to show me a white guy on youtube that has that IT quality especially at 18 years old.
OT - Sorry, I just have to share- The painting at :56 in the interview clip is the Gleaners by Jean-François Millett, a French painter in the mid 1800's. I'm not an expert on his work, but I am pretty sure that it does not depict share croppers but peasants collecting "leftovers" after a harvest. However, I think It is a very appropriate Illustration for the clip. Sorry I didn't mean to hijack the thread.
Scott, Hopefully you don't feel too attacked. I have to say, I probably wouldn't describe anyone as the blackest white guy I know. I can see what you're getting at -- "black" rather than black -- but it doesn't really work for me. -Murray
I swear I didn't read this until just now. Its a couple quotes from Marquise Knox's liner notes.
"Marquise isn't picking cotton or plowing a mule, but he's grown up in a city famed both for the blues and the conditions that feed it...
Marquise's music rocks, but it's not rock. It's funky but it's not funk. It's soulful, but it's not soul. His deep focus on the blues as he sees himself carrying it on from BB, Albert, Muddy, Henry Townsend, and the other icons, differentiates him from many other young musicians who are promoted as upcoming blues stars but who may in essence be playing rock music or some other offshoot. "Yeah, that kind of lights a match to my ass sometimes," he says, "Because it's our music. We perfected it. That was music that was in our history, not necessarily meant to be toyed with but it was just something that we had that we could call our own. Because then, we did not have nothin'. But for somebody else to come play it just because they can play and put no feeling behind it - you want to take it and then that's like you're portrayin' that to be somebody that you're not. What they got the white boys playin' - it's not the blues. It's the early rock n roll, see, what you call the upbeat tempo of the blues. They got the new generation fooled that that's the blues. And then the music that I'm playin', well, what is that? Well, this is the blues."
I think it's clear he thinks it's black folk's music and I would guess he has the support of so many older bluesmen, (the liner notes mention his mentors Honeyboy Edwards, Louisiana Red, Pinetop Perkins, Bob Margolin, Willie "Big Eyes" Smith, Calvin Jones, Lazy Lester, Bob Stroger, Bob Corritore, the late Robert Lockwood Jr. and Michael Burks) because they too enjoy seeing a young black man rise up to take back their music.
I think the fact that I could've almost written those liner notes after the first 30 seconds of his first song tells me he's a "real bluesman," which may be an indescribable role, full of intangibles, but very real. At least to Marquise and me.
What if it doesn't matter what kind of experiences oen has had, in what kind of environment one has been growing, what kind of music one has been listening, what kind of race and history one's family has had, etc.
What if blues is just music? What if it has a structure that is easy to get intuitively and even logically? What if blues lyrics are just people's experiences, fantasies and stories put in that kind of structure and format - concentrated feelings just like in any poems.
What if being a great blues man/woman has more to do with the context - the expectations and fantasies of the audience, than it has to do with the actual life and understanding of the artist? What if cool sounding voice or mastery of the instrument counts more than anything the person has ever felt or gone through?
I once did a lecture in buddhist perspective with the title "Life is blues" (as a reformation from the Buddha's first noble truth "Life is suffering"). I think that we all "got the blues", it's inbuilt in us. Some of us call it the blues, others call it dukkha or suffering, some call it separation from the true self. People have always wrote songs, poems and books about it, drawed it in the walls of the caves, told stories about it at the campfire and made cubistic paintings of it on the walls of Louvre. There's really no reason to try to fix it in some specific form, although it is the face it usually takes.
I think that this guy Marquise's got great voice and he knows how to play his role as an artist. Just like many others do. Nothing wrong about it, I think it is great - that's what the artists do.
@scottb I can see where you're coming from in a way - for instance I couldn't imagine a white musician doing exactly what someone like Corey Harris does for instance - but, on the other hand, if your frame of reference for "young white blues musicians" is Johnny Lang or Kenny Wayne Shepherd then may I present to you:
Nathan James & Ben Hernandez
I'm also impressed with John Alex Mason
and the UK's Ian Siegal
To my ears each artist is bringing soul and originality to the music
@ Mickil I think that your idea of what the blues is, is based on an historically romanticised one; your image of it appears to be rooted in a notion of what it was like for one ethnic group living at a particular point in time. That is out-dated and does not apply to a black man or women living now anymore than it applies to me.
Mickil I see you are from London? Do you really think you have an idea about African American culture? And if you think the western world is a homogenous mixing pot and we're all the same and all our experiences are the same, well... then we can stop talking now. I live in the South and even here people don't know about deep south black culture that produced this music. I do think it's strange that Marquise is doing this because things are different now. My whole point is that this guy seems to be a throwback 60 years and it seems to not be an act but really come from who he is.
I think a lot of times, people get confused between "having the blues" and "expressing the blues". "Having the blues" is a universal thing. Anyone can get the blues. How you express those blues, however, is a culturally specific thing. Certain ways of being, interacting, and communicating are ingrained in us by our cultural surroundings. If you didn't or haven't spent a lot of time in a certain cultural milieu, then you aren't going to completely understand the way that culture works, let alone be able to express yourself in the same manner as folks from that culture. You can study it from a distance. You can do your best to mimic it. But unless you've spent time IN IT, it's not real. This difference is what we anthropologists would call an "etic" perspective versus an "emic" one. Culture has nothing to do with race, so get that notion right out of your head. "Race" is meaningless. Ethnicity, Culture, Identity -- now those are concepts we can work with. The way one expresses one's blues in American Black Culture is different from the way one expresses the blues in other cultures (musically, or otherwise). It has to do with your identity and the culturally specific ques you implicitly know how to pass on an pick up. There's some super sad, mournful Bluegrass songs that express the same exact emotions and even some similar experiences as do certain Blues songs. They are both ways of expressing "the blues", but they aren't the same. Even though the sentiments may be derived from very similar life experiences, they cam from totally different cultural environments, and thus are not the same.
So, to say that "the blues" belongs only to Black folks is wrong. But to say that Black folks have a certain way of expressing the blues that we collectively understand as "the blues" is not wrong. Also, it's really important to not that these concepts are not stable ones. There is no such thing as an immutable "BLUES". Just as people grow and develop, so do cultures, an so do cultural concepts such as "the blues". These things are dynamic and ever changing. ---------- ------------------ The magnificent YouTube channel of the internet user known as "isaacullah"
Last Edited by on Dec 08, 2009 10:49 AM
@Kudzurunner: When I saw the video I also IMEDIATELY thought of Slam Allen. I saw Slam last April as the lead singer for James Cotton. There is certainly a parallel between Marquise and Slam.
---------- "Take out your false teeth, momma, I want to suck on your gums."-P. Wolf
"Mickil I see you are from London? Do you really think you have an idea about African American culture?"
Well, yes, I do have an idea. However, if you think that my geofraphical location procludes me from having an opinion on the subject then perhaps you should have made that clear when posting your thread: Southern African-Americans only need reply.
Furthermore, I think that your whole line of thought, as typified by '... this demonstrates that the blues is the black man's music ...' is based on a non sequitur, the antidote to which was put well enough by apskarp in his 'What if?' post above.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of another music genre where such silly debates about ownership or authenticity would arise. If someone where to suggest that a black man can't play authentic Bach or Chopin, they'd be called a racist as sure as flies land on shite. ---------- YouTube SlimHarpMick
OK, I've been thinking this over, (a lot!!) as you can can tell.
The whole problem here is my narrow definition of the blues. I realize that what I consider the blues is probably really part of the trunk and I consider it the roots because it's what I prefer. In this view there's only a small period of time and small population that could create the blues. But if I expand my definition to include all the branches of the tree (Texas Blues, jump blues, blues rock, Mississippi hill country blues, Chicago Blues, Piedmont Blues, swamp blues, etc) then the blues is for everyone and it is everyones music. Musicians continue to create and express themselves in a continually evolving way and the branches continue to sprout and flourish and everyone is happy!
"Off the top of my head, I can't think of another music genre where such silly debates about ownership or authenticity would arise."
This is a symptom of the internet and any forum on any topic. Back before the web, you could simply stay away from the arguments by attaching faces to discussions like these and choosing your friends based on a variety of common interests that kept things diverse and somehow simple....but most of all, cordial. The "flaming ...expletive deleted" personalities eventually were pushed out of the circle of friends to try again elsewhere.
Now, anything can and will pop into any conversation on any forum on any topic. Add the occasional "devil's advocate," the all too frequent "everybody is more ignorant than me" and the ever-present self proclaimed "resident expert" who will argue until the moderator kicks him/her off for getting personal when they can't "win the argument" they think the discussion is supposed to be (whew)....and there it is. Argument in a can. Batteries not included.
As far as swagger, dangerous edge, and all the rest, Marquise is an amateur next to Bill Taft. I haven't spoken about him here, but I wrote a whole novel to try and capture his magic. (Several people on this forum have read it.) It's true that the white blues boys these days for the most part don't have that edge, but Bill most definitely had it. He was the 1980s reincarnation--for me, at least--of Neal Cassady (aka, Dean Moriarty).
I first met Bill near the Astor place cube in Greenwich Village back in the fall of 1985. He played blues, rock, rockabilly. He was fearless. He wasn't pretending to be anything. He just WAS. He was the original American badass whiteboy without even trying. He was crazy. He was 21 years old when I met him. We teamed up and worked the streets of New York for about a month. We played just down the block from the Beacon Theater one night when there was a big show there. We played lots of places. I have a tape of a rehearsal we held in my apartment.
Here's his Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Taft
Here's a video in which he does a spoken-word thing in 1992, seven years after we played together:
I like the little bit of Marquise playing in that video, but frankly, he strikes me as doing exactly what apskarp says, which is playing his role as an artist very well. I don't mean that he's faking, because he's clearly committed to what he's doing. But I think what we need to understand is that somebody his age, with his background, dressing up in a suit in a way that shouts "Old bluesman," is adhering to a long-established social role, not pushing the music forward in any way. To that extent, I'm much, much more impressed with what our friend Brandon Bailey is doing with his Son-of-Dave inspired loops. He's actually daring not to "keep the blues alive," but to actually take the blues somewhere new. I think we should strive to do more than just keep the music alive.
Anyway, Bill Taft is a dangerous man. Some white boys are. And some of them can swing like hell and play the blues.
Last Edited by on Dec 08, 2009 3:51 PM
Actually, I'm surprised that Richard Johnston's name hasn't come up. He's the best I've seen. Not a new style, but an old style done with real soul-force and complete mastery. Another wild white boy who likes to get f'ed up and play the blues. He can really sing and really play and REALLY rock, although of course, as with all authentic bluesmen, his aethetics are situational.
The debates most definitely aren't silly, although of course they get annoying after a while. The blues, and blues music, are deep. They're deep because they resonate with large movements of history: in particular the fact that Africans brought to America were owned bodily by whites (people who looked like you and me) for 250 years. Music helped keep them alive, both spiritually and bodily; it helped the community define and know itself. Then came emancipation, only to be followed by a second sort of slavery, or rather multiple and connected sorts of slavery. (Read Douglas Blackmon's Pulitzer Prizewinning book SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME.) Blues music emerged in the post-Emancipation period as a way of dealing with an existential condition that had a specifically racial component: free but not free, restricted by law, lynch law, and custom in dozens of ways (Jim Crow). When blues became big business in the 1920s with the emergence of the recording industry, white controlled 95% of what happened in an economic and advertising way. (W. C. Handy and Harry Pace controlled a very small sliver of the rest.) Read August Wilson's play, MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM and you'll see how one of America's greatest playwrights--and certainly America's greatest black playwright--represents what was going on: as a form of rape that Ma Rainey, his hero in that play, stridently resists.
The blues are all about ownership: who owns your body, who owns the material product of your creative artistry. Does a man OWN his woman? Should a woman kill her man if he leaves her for another woman? (If she does, and she's Ma Rainey, she'll probably do it with a shotgun as long as her right arm, and catch the Canonball after she's done with the dirty work.)
I'm no hypocrite: look at this website. I'm teaching people, of whatever race, how to play the harmonica, and much of what I'm teaching them--although by no means all--is the product of African American artistry. I'm implicated in the whole ownership game. I certainly don't feel that ONLY black people can or should play the blues. I do my level best to know and acknowledge the true history that lies behind what I do. I'm an educator. I know that blues harmonica is powerful stuff, I know WHY it's powerful stuff--it's rooted in America's long and terribly problematic racial history, as well as in the paradoxes of black "freedom"--and I do my best to teach people how to wield that power in a skillful, knowledgable way. I don't say "Butterfield invented the stuff!" Nor do I try to keep Butterfield out of the conversation. He added something important to the language of the blues harmonica. I'm not nostalgic for the old stuff. I just know that it's hard to be truly creative unless you master the old stuff.
I don't in any sense feel attacked here, BTW. (Nobody has specifically weighed in about the political economy of this website.) I'm just trying to clarify where I'm coming from and what I'm about.
Self-ownership is important. The blues helps lots of people master themselves. In that respect, it's like a martial art. But it has a specifically racial component that deserves to be fully acknowledged and addressed, without romanticism or defensiveness. "Who owns the blues?" is a non-trivial question.
Edited to add: @congaron: There are half a dozen harmonica forums where you can talk shop to your heart's content and avoid anything that savors of racial politics or intellectual engagement. I'm proud to say that this website, and this forum, will always make a space for both the shop-talkers and those of us who also sometimes like to talk about the music in other ways.
Last Edited by on Dec 08, 2009 4:38 PM
It was a generic observation, nothing more. I enjoy the diversity here. Brain food is always better than exclusive shop talk to me. The observation comes from a wide variety of forums i've been interested in for many years. There is nothing new under the sun...to coin a phrase.
I guess i could have just said people will be people..that's what I was getting at.
Adam: "The blues are all about ownership: who owns your body, who owns the material product of your creative artistry."
"Self-ownership is important. The blues helps lots of people master themselves. In that respect, it's like a martial art. But it has a specifically racial component that deserves to be fully acknowledged and addressed, without romanticism or defensiveness. "Who owns the blues?" is a non-trivial question."
These are very interesting points as they talk about the very same thing I was talking about in my lecture I mentioned.
The basis for blues is in my opinion the very basis of our persona: The attachment to "self". There are millions of ways how that basic attachment is revealed in our daily life and therea are thousands of blues songs that very deeply point to these feelings.
When you listen to blues lyrics they are all about the losts, misfortunes etc. My baby left me, My dog died, I've been mistreated, lost my money and friends... And when you go to the root of it all it's ALWAYS about me. The things that I thought were my property - and not only my property but a PART of me. And life always seems to teach us the very same lesson: It actually wasn't your property, it actually wasn't part of you or at least isn't anymore. And in the end we'll learn that we don't even own ourselves - we don't have the power to decide what happens to us in the waves of the ocean that is life.
I think we try to become more approving for the fact that we don't have lots of things in this world that we can take for granted by sharing these kinds of experiences with other people in different ways. Music is very powerful device for this as it let's us to combine the words with something beyond the words that can touch our feelings in a different level.
In blues we have found ways to concentrate the whole story in just a few lines, just like in Japanese Haiku's. And we have found musical forms that are quite easily available for lots of people without need for advanced studies of musical theory. And on top of that we even have expressive instruments that are easy to carry with us and cheap to buy.. :)
So I need to agre with Adam, the Blues is all about self-ownership.
"First you have life, you open your eyes and you have life. Next you look around and then you're in love - I mean Love. And then seeing that nothing lasts forever the big B comes around and zaps you.." Etta James - Life, Love & the Blues
I'm lucky I don't live in a place with street musicians like Richard Johnston. I would never get anywhere! I could just stand there all day listening to that.
Of course, you're right. These debates aren't at all silly; that was a poorly and impetuously chosen word. But, they do get a little tiresome after a while. No, that's not I mean: it's not the debates themselves that are tiresome, but rather, the frequent assertions that - to quote from the post that began this thread - 'the blues is the black man's music.' That is like saying 'Wagner is the white middle-class man's music.' Once that music leaves the bow, it belongs to anyone and everyone in earshot. An example of that would be the way that both the blues and classical music have been enthusiastically embraced by the Japanese.
No doubt, it would be silly to argue that the form didn't originate from black Americans and their experiences. Nevertheless, that does not imply that there is any obligation or imperative to acknowledge the music's originators. Copyright issues aside, the music's re-creators – e.g. you and me – can choose to acknowledge and study where it came from, and, that in itself, is a worthy endeavour; it is not, however, a duty.
If, as you assert, the blues are all about ownership, then I fail to understand why that tenet should not be applied equally to any other musical work or form. Some of the songs of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan are extremely personal in such a way that their lyrics can only ever relate to the experiences of their authors. Cohen's Chelsea Hotel No. 2 with the line, 'Giving me head on the unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street,' can only ever relate to Cohen's experience with Janis Joplin. In a very real sense, he owns the lyrics and the experience they describe. In that sense, I would agree with you.
I suppose that blues lyrics can be equally difficult to separate from their origins. When I perform Got My Mojo Working, I never make any reference to 'going down to Louisiana to get me a mojo hand.' To me, that would be like singing karaoke. Instead, I adapt the lyrics to make more sense – and fun – to my South London audience. I sing something like, 'Went down to London town to see who I could see / And every girl I met, you know, she wants to talk to me / I got my mojo working but it just won't work on you.
My - possibly laboured - point is that you do have to be aware of certain issues unless you just want to mimic something that bears no relation to your own experiences. If that's what someone wants to do, that's fine. I just feel a little self-conscious doing that myself.
Lyrics are one thing while the music itself is quite another matter.
The blues music itself, as you know, is completely dependent on the basic I IV V harmonies and their extensions. These are the fundamental building blocks of Western harmony. Its dissonances constantly allude to the stability provided by those chords; that is why its harmonic tensions work, which, I realise you're aware of. Its call and response phrasing is virtually ubiquitous throughout the Western canon, though, as I argued in Elwood's thread, it is used less dualistically than in the blues. Its cross-rhythms, which do have their roots in African music – though, they're much more complex in the latter - are by no means absent in Western music.
So, in a purely sonic sense, it could be argued that I, a white man, have much more ownership over its musical language than a man of African, Balinese, Japanese or any other descent. It's cadences and harmonic nuances are as ingrained in me as the English language itself, in a way that Indian raga or Balinese gamelan are not But, I don't believe that confers on me any more ownership than it does on anyone else. Why? The musical language itself is devoid of any meaning or cultural implications until you attach words to it. Any meaning before that happens is entirely subjective. As Stravinsky once wrote:
“Music is utterly powerless to express anything. If it does so, it is by tacit and inveterate agreement, by values we have leant it, thrust upon it.”
As I've tried to argue, it is the lyrical content and their meanings that predominantly determine where the music came from, who it's intellectual owners are. What I aspire to do, is to take the form as I find it and stamp my own meaning on it, just as its originators stamped their meaning on the musical language.
The points I have made may or may not be your criteria for determining any kind of ownership or authenticity. However, they are important criteria to me. By the way, neither do I feel attacked. I just want to add my thoughts on the topic.
I am beginning to feel like I am back in the 1960's. There have been a lot of discussions here painting something as black or white. While I think that, for those interested in the musical history, it is fine to discuss Blues or any other music and its ethnic roots and influences, I believe applying that to the here and now is somewhat polarizing and frankly tiresome. I wonder what would happen if the same discussion were applied to engineering or computer science discussions? Or do they not apply as they are not art? If we are going to get hung up on ownership, I think we are heading down a sad path. Invention is one thing, ownership quite another.
