Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 14, 1993 TAG: 9303110306
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT
It is called simply the blues, but there is nothing simple about the extensive ways this black art form has influenced popular culture.Without the blues, Eric Clapton would not have swept the Grammies. There would have been no Chuck Berry, no Rolling Stones or for that matter no rock 'n' roll, period. And without rock 'n' roll, a generation of Baby Boomers may have grown up playing the polka on the accordion instead of cranking out "Johnny B. Goode" on the electric guitar.
John Lee Hooker, king of the full-tilt boogie blues, told the Roanoke Times & World-News in 1987 that the blues has been around since Adam and Eve.
Folklorists give the birth of the blues a more recent date. Kip Lornell, American music specialist with the Smithsonian Institution, says the blues actually originated around the turn of this century.
Blues evolved from ragtime and gospel, fiddle and banjo tunes and field hollers. The guitar, which was introduced into black-American culture around the 1880s, gave form to the music. Hard work and bad times, house parties and cheap whisky and the fiery sun of the Mississippi Delta and the rest of the Deep South nurtured it.
The essence of the blues consists of 12 bars, three chords and the soul-cleansing powers of bent guitar strings, wailing harmonica notes and vocal laments about restless love and leaving home.
Lornell says that it's impossible to point to the first blues tune. But a folk song titled "Poor Boy, Poor Boy, A Long Way from Home" is a prototype. Basically, blues are about disasters, migrations and most of all a good man or woman feeling bad.
While the blues has been around for a century, it has gone through two intense periods of popularity outside of the culture that originated it.
One was in the early 1960s when the urban folk revival and the British Wave exposed it to wide audiences.
The other blues revival is taking place right now, says Lornell, who himself may be fanning the flames of this new period of interest.
Lornell and Charles Wolfe, a professor at Middle Tennessee University, have written "The Life and Legend of Leadbelly," a biography of the great black folksinger who wrote such enduring songs as "Midnight Special" and "Goodnight Irene."
The book is causing a lot of interest outside of academic and folklore circles. It has been reviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly. Lornell has been interviewed on National Public Radio, and the authors have been approached for movie rights.
"For two guys who have written 11 or 12 books for university presses, it's a whole new world," Lornell says.
However, Lornell is not surprised at the reaction. The book appeals to Baby Boomers who went through the folk and blues revivals of the 1950s and 1960s.
"But Leadbelly cuts a wider swath," Lornell says. "He has high name recognition. We knew Leadbelly's name was important enough to music in general and the culture of the 1930s and '40s. This is the first biography of Leadbelly. It was one of those things waiting to be done, and Charles and I decided we were the ones to do it."
The Louisiana singer's repertoire encompassed a wide range of music outside of the blues, but blues was an integral part of it, Lornell says.
Ironies abound in the blues. The guitar, a European invention, is the primary blues instrument. Black musicians in the rural South seized it and used it to forge the kind of country blues epitomized by Robert Johnson, the Delta bluesman who stands tallest in legend.
After World War II, blues musicians looking for jobs migrated from the rural South to larger cities such as Memphis and Chicago and Nashville. In such places, the blues guitar joined with amplification, and the electric blues was born. Players such as B.B. King, Elmore James and Muddy Waters created the kind of music that would influence generations of younger musicians.
Meanwhile, the banjo, an African instrument, was embraced by white musicians who have made it a signature instrument in old-time and bluegrass music.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all can be found in both the people who play the blues today and the people who listen to the blues.
"This is at least the second revival of interest among white folks," Lornell says.
"There are more white musicians playing the blues than musicians in the black community. It's similar to what happened to the New Orleans jazz revival of the 1940s. Blues societies and newsletters parallel the New Orleans jazz revival."
Other similarities to the jazz revival of that time are the club circuits, festivals and corporate sponsorships of festivals.
Lornell attributes the decline of blues interest among black audiences to the inevitable dynamics of popular culture.
"Blues emerged as folk music, then changed to popular music and pop changes," he explains. "It's considered old-time and Southern and not contemporary. Therefore, you don't see young black consumers of blues."
Blues revivals such as the current one follow a general pattern in the folk process, Lornell says.
"Their are waves of interest in any vernacular music. It's American that's being rediscovered. That happens every 15 or 20 years."
This shift in audiences and players has not been without controversy.
Archie Edwards, a Maryland blues player who learned his art in Franklin County, is profiled in the book "Virginia Piedmont Blues" by Barry Lee Pearson, a professor at the University of Maryland. The blues has taken Edwards to Europe 14 times since 1982.
Edwards was contacted by phone for this story the day after Eric Clapton won a Grammy for "Eric Clapton: Unplugged." It contains several acoustic blues songs, and Edwards expressed anger over the award.
"The white man gets Grammies and Oscars. They hide where the knowledge comes from," Edwards said. "They know there's money and prestige in it. They steal the shirt right off the black man's back. Elvis got a stamp for being the king of rock 'n' roll. Everybody knows Chuck Berry's the King of rock 'n' roll."
Edwards maintained that no good blues could be played by white musicians.
Another school of thought contends that no particular group has a monopoly on pain or musical ability. Folklorists handle the argument by explaining that white players are interpreting black American culture in their own way. The word "interpreting" is key here.
"The color of your skin don't play the blues. It's your hands and your feelings," John Lee Hooker told a reporter before coming to Roanoke in 1987. "My band is half and half, and it plays the hell out of the blues."
Hooker, a musician who came out of the traditional culture of black blues, is gaining new audiences because of his musical association with Bonnie Raitt, a popular white musician. That's according to Chris Henson, manager of Books, Strings and Things.
Henson also notes that the Grammy-winning album by Clapton, a product of the '60s blues revival, has stirred up more interest in the blues. And that a string of new musicians such as Saffire Uppity Blues Women, Chris Whitley and John Campbell are fueling the fires of the blues revival.
Howard Petruziello is one of the converts in the current revival.
"I'm a babe - I'm 23," says Petruziello, who recently began broadcasting a two-hour show devoted to the blues Sunday nights on WROV-FM (96.3).
Ellen Flaherty, the station manager, says she's wanted to showcase the blues in a show of its own for several years. Finding the right person was the problem until Petruziello came along, Flaherty says.
The reaction has been good they say, with most listeners in their early 30s and up.
Petruziello plays a wide range of blues from early traditionalists such as Robert Johnson to latter-day guitar heroes such as the late Stevie Ray Vaughan.
His listeners include newcomers and some serious "blues heads."
Like a lot of blues enthusiasts, Petruziello worked his way back from rockers such as Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones to the roots of the art form.
"What appeals to me is that it's very honest music," he says. "It's minimal. Everybody's loved and lost. Robert Johnson said it all: `I love my baby, she don't love me.' "