The Big Guys

For the first half of Delta Blues, Ted Gioia focuses on very obscure characters in the Blues World, who nonetheless, had a very large impact on the future direction of the blues. Examples of these people include Son House, Charlie Patton, and Robert Johnson. These men had a very good grasp of how to make really blue blues, but had almost no formal training. Despite this they had a huge impact on future Blues musicians who gained great fame, like BB King, Howlin Wolf, and John Lee Hooker. These better known men, while they seem to have made it farther, cannot be said to have been as important to the development of the blues, except for its development from a little known entity to that of a national favorite. They had less influence on the actual music and are responsible for less of the sound and feel of the Blues than their lesser known predesessors.
Examples of this the influence that the first guys had on the blues are plenty. For example, these men were the ones who were "lean loose-jointed guitarists playing the blues with a knife at Tutwiler train station" (Gioia 234) in the early 1900s. They are also the ones who have a sound so distinct and blue that it is unreplicable by modern day pros. "'Pony Blues' includes many of the elements that are most endearing - and maddening - about the country blues. The piece sounds deceptively simle, but many highly trained musicians would struggle to imitate Patton's rendition" (Gioia 68) The new pros like king and Wolf used much of their predecessors material for inspiration. "Johnson would never record these songs, or any Patton composition for that matter, but attentive ears will hear hints in his music that seem to point back to the older bluesman." (Gioia 106) This shows how much of the later blues was less original. Becasue of this, I don't feel like it can be given the same level of respect. While I do like listening to more modern blues, I think that what modern performers do is less impressive than the more original works of older bluesman.

Talent vs. Education

Early 20th century blues performers with nearly no education are featured often throughout Delta Blues. Gioia writes often of men who came from plantations or prisons and had no exposure to any music theory, or music education. For example, he talks of Son House whose only education came from church, and definitely not an education in the blues. "I was mostly churchified....that's all I could see into" is the way that he described his childhood. Then there's Charlie Patton, who grew up on Dockery's Plantation. He too had very little formal musical education. His family was musical, but he had not been taught extensive theory. "Patton was ostensibly the son of William Patton and Sara Garrett....[both of whom] were well to do by Delta standards, eventually owning land, running a store, and managing his own sharecroppers." (Gioia 49)
From these men, however, some of the most influencial music was born; music that would shape that of future generations. The question arises then, if an education in music is neccessary, or if musical ability is just a natural skill that some people have and some don't, regardless of education. The example of Charlie Patton is used, "'Pony Blues' includes many of the elements that are most endearing - and maddening - about the country blues. The piece sounds deceptively simle, but many highly trained musicians would struggle to imitate Patton's rendition" (Gioia 68) This shows that music education really isn't everything. There is also the example of Louis Armstrong, who grew up in New Orleans and never had an education in music, yet got very far simply by being good. Maybe a music education is a good investment, or maybe not, but the blues greats were able to get by without it, and at the same time be very musically influencial.

Themes of The Blues

Time and time again, Ted Gioia recounts the disappearance of a great blues musicians back into obscurity. These are men (and a few women) who, for the most part, grew up in the harsh oppressive climate of the white-controlled antebellum American South. They had seen harsh times and not much else. In this excerpt Gioia tells of Kid Bailey, a bluesman who disappeared after the creation of a few, now cherished, recordings. "Wardlow felt that Bailey might still be alive in the 1950s - and what a find that would have been! - yet the bluesman proved devilishly hard to track down." (103) Gioia talks again of the sketchy history of many famed blues artists. He writes, "Yet the disputes and uncertainties surrouding the name Willie Brown hardly stop there. Some have tried to use his enigmatic story in order to solve another Delta Blues mystery, drawing a connection between the Willie Brown recordings on Paramount with the work of the obscure musician known simply as Kid Bailey." These two examples of how blues artists have very sketchy, elusive histories, causes one to come to the conclusion that when faced with an opportunity to gain fame and wealth, some choose to sink back into obsurity to stay where they feel safe and familiar.
This conclusion is not true for most cases, which usually show the opposite approach on the behalf of the person whose future is in question. Gioia gives the example of Louis Armstrong, jazz great of the early 20th century, who made a fortune from small beginnings as the son of a New Orleans prostitute. Gioia also recounts the blues musicians who chose fame and wealth over their previous hard labor. He gives the example of B. B. King. Gioia says, "Yet no one could dispute King's popularity. The success of his records made it possible for him to tour anywhere in the country, and King's determination transformed the road life into a personal prerogative." (331) This recount of King's history shows that, just like so many others, when wealth and a future came knocking, he answered by leaving his sharecropping past and becoming a well known, well traveled success.

Blue Business

This week in Delta Blues, Ted Gioia again proceeds with stories instead of the initial textbook style. He starts out talking about how businesspeople were now eying the blues as a possible commercial opportunity. These people, Henry Speirs, the foremost were responsible for taking almost all of the profits from black performers' music, and paying them very little in comparison. They did, however serve an important role; they supplied people with the blues, not allowing it die, and saving a spot for it in the musical spotlight. "Speir's preeminent talent, in his own mind, was that he knew what the market wanted," (52) writes Gioia. This kept him selling a lot of recordings, mostly to black people, of black artist. He writes, "At his Jackson store, he would sell between three hundred adn six hundred records on a good saturday, and almost 80 percent were by black musicians. And the percentage of black purchasers was even higher." (52)
Speir was in charge of making his own records, and was very attentive to detail. He would supply black musicians with better instruments to make their music better, and more sellable. Gioia describes him, "He paid close attention to the instruments his musicians used for recordings, and if necessary provided them with something better." This is interesting because on the outside this appeared as altruism, but for those who knew his intentions, he was just trying increase his profits, anything but an altruistic measure for a man who was already very wealthy.

Finally!

In my previous post, I remarked on the lack of plot in Delta Blues, by Ted Gioia, saying that it was mainly an anthropological look at the Delta Blues. This was interesting, but at times quite monotonous and textbook like. But, finally, in chapter three, it starts recounting the lives and stories of major blues players. Chapter three starts out describing the history of the previously unmentioned Mississippi plantation of Will Dockery, dating from the mid 19th century. Gioia describes it as an relatively upstanding plantation, "The late Will Dockery - who had abstained from smoking and drinking, and always dressed in an austere black suit - had aimed to uplift, not corrupt, his black workers, taking care of their needs, both earthly and eternal. Instead of jukehouses, he could boast of two churches (one Methodist, the other Baptist) and two elementary schools on his land, as well as a commissary, a sawmill, and a blacksmith's works. When he learned that town practitioners were overcharging his tenants, he hired a white physician to reside on the plantation and take care of all patients, whether black or white." (46) When reading this, it seems totally unrelated, but Gioia soon introduces blues great Charley Patton. As Gioia says, Patton was a "hard drinking, loose living, work shirking field hand hanging out among the ramshackle cabins and broken-down boxcars that passed for living quarters on the northern end of the plantation. " (48)
Patton is painted as a rough, uneducated man, “Patton could only spell one word, his first name; and even that he couldn’t write down, but merely name the letters.” (52) Gioia points out an interesting observation, “He was proud and boastful, and often contentious. H.C. Speir, the talent scout responsible for Patton’s first recordings, remembered him as “kinda forward” for a Southern black man of his day.” (48) Because of this forwardness, he gives a new face to the black, southern blues musician, not as an entirely suppressed, being, but an intense, fun-loving, outgoing person. Now that I have the information and background that the first textbook-like chapters gave me, I have something to relate the stories of individuals to, as well as a context for their lives. I’m looking forward to reading about more blues this week.

The Blues

Delta Blues, by Ted Gioia, is quite different from how I imagined it would be. The blues, born in the deep south, with roots in Africa, clearly didn't have scholarly beginnings. Because of this, I expected Delta Blues to be a recounting of stories of the lives of blues performers. Perhaps it will get to be more story oriented, but as of now (page 45), it takes a very anthropological look at the blues. Gioia writes, "Without the blues, much of the music we hear every day would be fundamentally different, eviscerated and tepid." This excerpt demonstrates the professorial approach that he takes to talking about the blues, describing it in the scholarly terms of "eviscerated," and "tepid." He goes very in depth when talking about the instruments that influenced blues in it's early days in Africa, referencing little known instruments, "The diversity of these African instruments is remarkable: the bolon, with its striking appearance of a hunter's bow married to a calabash drum; the harplike kora, with its twenty-one strings, perhaps the most expressive traditional intrument found in any part of the world; the two-string konde of Burkina Faso, with metal bells attached to its neck, so that it jingles when the strings are plucked; the lutelike ngoni, an ancestor of the banjo, often unfairly dismissed as a hillbilly novelty in the Americas, but in Africa the instrument of heroes and kings." He goes on to talk about how these intruments influenced early blues, and how the cultures that employed these instruments were also influencial in the distinct sound of the delta blues.
As well as acting as an anthropologist, Gioia also takes the stance of a historian, when addressing the path that the blues has followed since the nebulous date of its creation. He begins by recounting the performances of minstrel troupes and medicine shows. Gioia describes their performaces, "In addition to the standard music and comedy fare, and the inevitable promotion of a healing potion, the shows might represent trapeze artists, circus acts, ventriloquism, dramatic skits, stage magic, vaudville routines, or anything else that might hold an audience's attention for a few minutes at a time." These minstrel troups and medicine shows also had distasteful, offensive portrayals of black people by whites who would smear charchoal over their faces. These "blackface" skits, usually inclued performances of the delta blues. "At a time when few black musicians had the means to present their music directly to the public, these surrogates took on undue influence. For many Americans, especially those outside of the South, their attitudes toward the county's growing slave population, their sense of African-American vernacular speech, music, and behavior, were shaped as much by these vulgar routines as by any firsthand encounters with black culture," Gioia explains. He goes into more detail about a few blues musicians who lived after the popularity of these "surrogate" performers. The next chapter, titled Dockery's Plantation, appears to be more story oriented, with a picture of blues great Charley Patton. This will be a nice break from the textbook style writing of the first two chapters.

magazines

For the past few years, I've had a subscription to the Atlantic monthly. For the past few months, I've had a subscription to the Economist weekly. Both of these publications I enjoy reading very much. I am always very apprehensive for Mondays when the Economist comes and I get to see what the headlines are and take a quick look at the articles for the week. They mainly are on foreign affairs, but there is always a very interesting technology section and a section devoted to an interesting person who has died. For example, the issue before Christmas profiled a man who had had a lobotomy because he had been having up to 11 seizures per week. After the procedure he only had 2 seizures for the next year, but he was also incapable of forming new memories. He had had the operation when he was 16 years old, my age, so he only remembered things that happened before he was 16. He died last year at the age of 91. That's 75 years of only remembering years 1 through 16. In the Atlantic, they have a very eclectic mix of topics. This makes receiving the next issue especially fun because I never know what I am going to get. For example, last issue, they had a transcription of an interview between one of the Atlantic correspondents and the man who is in charge of holding all of the US's debt in China. They also have articles on interesting parts of the world and unique foods. I spend a lot of time reading these, but at least it gives me a reason to look forward to Mondays.