Читать книгу Boogie Man - Charles Shaar Murray - Страница 11

3

THE REAL FOLK BLUES?

The Mississippi Delta is land both created and shaped by its river. Ambiguous union of fluid and firm, the delta is a liquid land where life responds to both tidal and freshwater urgings. The processes of creation have been going on for a long time here . . . there is about the delta something original, primeval. We look to the delta for many of the oldest continuing life forms . . .

Barbara Cannon, from Mississippi River: A Photographic Journey

[The blues is] the only thing after all these years that still sounds fresh to me. The serious old blues guys get it from somewhere else, it seems to me, and that’s what I want to know about.

Eric Clapton, interviewed in the Guardian

I guess all songs is folk songs – I never heard no horse sing ’em.

Big Bill Broonzy, possibly apocryphal

In 1966, during a brief hiatus between lengthy stints with the Chicago independent label Vee Jay Records and the New York-based major ABC, John Lee Hooker allowed himself a brief dalliance with Chess Records, to whom some of his Detroit sides had been leased a dozen or so years earlier. The sole product of this union was one album: The Real Folk Blues, a title loaded with ambiguities. For a start, Chess released it as a companion volume to a series of albums by three stalwarts of its 1950s electric-downhome roster: Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. However, the Williamson, Wolf and Waters Real Folk Blues entries were all compilations of previously uncollected singles, whereas Hooker’s album was derived from sessions recorded specifically for album release. Moreover, the use of the Real Folk Blues title was little more than a marketing device, since the music on the album consisted entirely of the kind of rocking small-band electric blues which Hooker had recorded between 1955 and 1964 for Vee Jay, Chess’s principal Chicago rival, providing them with hits like ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom Boom’ during the late ’50s and early ’60s. The Waters, Wolf and Williamson collections had assembled 45s recorded for Chess’s traditional core clientele – working-class Southern-born blacks, either relocated to the great metropolitan centres or still resident ‘down home’ – and repackaged them for a newly developing audience: white teenagers whose interest in blues had been piqued by the success of the Rolling Stones and other long-haired, blues-based white acts. Some of these newfound customers perceived and experienced blues as a revered ancestor of rock and others as a subset of ‘folk music’, but both factions were linked, above all else, by a shared craving for ‘authenticity’, for a more profound set of human values and a higher degree of emotional truth than were available from either the white or black pop mainstreams of the time. And since this new audience was considerably more affluent than the blue-collar blacks who were the traditional supporters of the blues economy, what they wanted they got.

Their desire for authenticity was partially rooted in a rejection of the conformist social norms of the ’50s. Spearheaded by the ubiquity of television, the explosive expansion of commoditized mass culture had threatened the survival of unique ethnic and regional cultures and identities which youthful cultural dissidents deemed valuable and deserving of preservation. This resistance to the seeming homogenization and blanding-out of once-vital forms of popular expression often manifested itself as a fear of pop; or rather, a fear of the implications of a new form of linkage between pop’s two central ideas: the people’s voice and the people’s choice. Broadly speaking, folkies attempted to preserve and protect the former against the remorseless incursions of the latter. They infinitely preferred the art which people made for themselves to the art which they chose to buy once someone else had created it. By the same token, their combination of nostalgic tastes and progressive politics represented no implicit contradiction; both were cut from the self-same cloth. Their notion of a ‘popular’ idiom was one of and by the people; by contrast, the commodity culture defined it as that which was most obviously and demonstrably for the people: i.e. the one chosen by the largest possible audience and voted for with the largest number of dollars. The two cultures had spectacularly collided in 1950, when The Weavers had scored a huge hit with a sentimental version of Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’; unfortunately, Leadbelly himself didn’t live to enjoy either the success and the money, or the manifold ironies of their spectacularly belated arrival. However, since The Weavers’ overtly leftist cultural and political stance was considered unacceptable in the Eisenhower ’50s, their speedy exile to the blacklists left a vacuum deftly filled by the depoliticised, anodyne Kingston Trio. Their clean-cut collegiate version of the hootenanny defined the mass perception of ‘folk music’ until the liberal but wholesome Peter, Paul & Mary enabled Bob Dylan to infiltrate the pop mainstream via the side entrance by peeling the husk and bark off Dylan songs like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’, rendering them AM-radio-friendly in a way that their composer never could. The next thing you knew, there was an entire sub-industry called ‘folk-rock’. Purism never stood a chance.

‘Folk-rock’ of the white variety essentially consisted of two wings and a centre. On its nominal left, there was an attachment to traditional instrumentation (acoustic guitar, particularly the exotic and resonant twelve-string beloved of Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell, banjo and mandolin) and melodies as settings for radical new lyrics; on its new right, a blend of actual traditional and original neo-trad material performed with the instrumentation of the post-Beatles rock band. Byrds founder Jim (later Roger) McGuinn virtually invented that new centre by flitting from one wing to the other. Armed with an impeccably traditional 12-string acoustic guitar, he initially livened up his folk-club appearances by injecting Beatles songs into the standard hootenanny repertoire; later, he and his Byrds colleagues, including David Crosby, sweetened the new electric Dylan just as Peter, Paul & Mary had softened his earlier, acoustic incarnation. In other words: folk-rock was a juggling act involving new wine (post-Dylan singer-songwriterisms) in old bottles (trad instrumentation and melodies) and old wine (folkloric materials) in new bottles (electric guitars, drum kits, serious amplification). By contrast, the Rolling Stones – the matchmaking middlemen who made by far the most profound contributions to the rapprochement between electric blues and ’60s rock – were themselves self-identified blues purists. As far as they were concerned, they weren’t softening the music at all: they were playing it just as authentically and sincerely as they knew how to do. However, since they happened to be ugly-cute lower-middle-class English boys who sounded exactly like who they were despite their best efforts to the contrary, they ended up sweetening it anyway.

The Stones’ eclectic repertoire included material borrowed from soul contemporaries like Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Marvin Gaye, which was displayed alongside their trademarked blues items gleaned from Slim Harpo, Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters. However, even their more modern songs were performed in a style derived from their primary source: Chess Records from the ’50s, complete with harmonica and slide-guitar riffs assiduously learned from Muddy Waters’ records; prominent maracas and judderingly reverbed rhythm guitar on loan (metaphorically, at least) from Bo Diddley; plus, of course, the Chuck Berry guitar licks that inspired Keith Richards to take the first steps on the path which ultimately led him to formulate one of the most idiosyncratic guitar stylings in all of rock. In this context, the application of the ‘folk’ tag to Chicago blues provided an index of the extent to which perception of the music had shifted since its commercial heyday in the 1950s. To academics and purists who considered acoustic rural blues the only acceptably authentic form of the music, the likes of Waters, Wolf and Hooker were apostates selling a noisy, commercialised dilution of the pure milk (or maybe that should be ‘a watering-down of the pure whiskey’) of the blues. The notion that ‘Chicago blues’ – the rumbustious, clamorous soundtrack of the urban world of Delta migrants transplanted to the big cities – had cultural value equivalent to that of the downhome rural forms was an entirely new one, and not entirely unfree from controversy. In Britain, harmonicist Cyril Davies and guitarist Alexis Korner were sufficiently inspired by a live album cut by the Waters band at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival to form a band of their own which was, quite possibly, the first white electric blues band in the world. After one of their earliest attempts to perform in public resulted in their expulsion from a London jazz club for the heinous crime of bringing in amplifiers, Davies and Korner started their own club; and it was that club which gave the Stones their first real platform.

The standard dogma had stoutly maintained that the genuine folk artist remains, by definition, unaffected by the demands of either High Art or the vulgar mass market. The innate fallacy of this argument is that the majority of the pre-war rural bluesmen (and women) of the ’20s and ’30s had been hustling the vulgar market – or, indeed, any market they could find – virtually as soon as they had gained sufficient mastery over their instruments to be able to perform in public without being pelted with rotten fruit. Many got their start on street corners, singing what passers-by wanted to hear, be it blues, popular ballads, vaudeville songs, hillbilly songs or gospel. They were recorded not by idealistic philanthropists seeking to preserve and protect the People’s Art, but by grasping small businessmen who knew that there was money to be made by issuing records of rural blues artists, and they wanted to release and sell as many records as possible while spending as little money as possible. In other words, they were in the pop business, and – as far as they were concerned – they were making pop records.

Nevertheless, these artists’ music qualified as ‘folk’ because it was rural in origin and archaic in form. It had also by this time long ceased to be pop, or even popular; long-supplanted first by commercial, ensemble rhythm and blues, and subsequently by the gospel-inflected dance music and balladry which, by the mid-’60s, would be universally known as ‘soul’. In its turn, the ‘electric downhome’ sound of the Chicago bluesmen (and the equivalent music which Hooker had been making in Detroit, on the other side of Lake Michigan) also succumbed, a casualty of the evolution of the self-image of their ghetto constituents as they began to perceive themselves as city-dwellers rather than Delta migrants. Typically, John Lee Hooker’s last appearance in the R&B singles charts was in 1962. Inevitably, he and his fellow titans of ’50s city blues needed to develop a fresh, new audience in order to survive: they sought, and they did indeed find. The pivot point had been that very same 1960 Newport Folk Festival, when Muddy Waters, backed by his full Chicago blues band including James Cotton on harmonica and the great pianist Otis Spann, had headlined a blues afternoon co-starring Hooker himself. It simultaneously marked the music’s formal acceptance by the (mainly white) jazz and folk establishments, and its passing as the indigenous voice of the ghetto. Orphaned, city blues was now up for adoption, first into the ‘folk’ family and then into the community of what was about to become ‘rock’.

The most crucial, as well as the most frequently overlooked, point about ‘folk music’ is that the constituency whom it most truly represents doesn’t consider it to be ‘folk music’, but simply their music. ‘Folk music’ is, invariably, a term applied from outside the cultures and communities to which it refers. In terms of theory, ‘folk’ music – the traditional set of forms, styles and songs indigenous to a people, a culture or a locale – is radically distinguishable from ‘art’ music, of both the classical and avant-garde varieties, and from ‘popular’ music, mass-produced for and mass-marketed to a mass audience. In practice, it’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart.² Before the advent of recording, these distinctions were not so much a critical device as a precise description of the class system: which is not surprising, since these are essentially European definitions, and reflect prevailing European social structures. European classical music operates according to a strict hierarchical structure, with the composer (the monarch, so to speak) at the top. The composer’s wishes are interpreted and enforced by the conductor (the general) and carried out by the orchestra (the troops). During their lifetimes, the great composers often also functioned as the featured soloists, but after their deaths their music became fixed and formalized, those who succeeded them rarely inherited their licence to improvise.

The classic model of ‘folk’ is – as David Evans points out in his invaluable Big Road Blues: Tradition & Creativity in the Folk Blues³ – the similarly formal tradition of the Anglo-American ballads, with their fixed musical structures and set narrative lines. To perform one of these ballads, a singer is by definition required to preserve intact both its storyline and its musical setting. The Anglo-American use of the term ‘folk’ music implies that such music exists, simply and solely, to fulfil the needs of a particular community. They create it by and for themselves over a period of centuries as part of a single collective process, only slightly more personal to any given individual than the shaping of a rock by water. Through oral transmission, it filters down through the generations, serving both as a touchstone of the community’s history and values, and as an index of how its communal life has changed. It is this latter attribute which many traditionalists find alarming or repugnant: for them, the key element is the preservation of a piece’s pure and unsullied essence, and the imposition of an alien style onto a traditional piece is deemed an act of presumption verging on outright heresy: at the very least, it effectively amputates the piece from its native roots. For this precise reason, Bob Dylan was regarded with some suspicion by serious folkies long before he swapped his Martin acoustic for a Fender Stratocaster. Everything he sang, whatever its origin, was thoroughly Dylanised; by the same token, this was exactly why rockers loved him. If the term ‘post-modern’ had existed when Dylan was starting out, it might well have been applied to him. Dylan came to folk music with attitudes formed by teenage experiences of pop (specifically, the rock and R&B of the ’50s), a tradition which is overwhelmingly individualist. Pop is personality-driven; it’s about stars, icons and the Great Man Theory, and, until ‘Good Old Rock And Roll’ was nostalgically revisited in the late ’60s, remained a defiantly forward-looking idiom which refused to admit that it had a tradition at all.

In the blues world, over on the African side of the African-American hyphen, the picture is far more complex. In Africa itself, songs, ballads and poems have traditionally served as vessels by which the community transmits its history and its values to its youth, but for those particular Africans who found themselves involuntarily transformed into Americans (of a sort), that history and those values had been forcibly stripped away. As a result, blues obeys a correspondingly different set of imperatives – one radically distinguishable from both its African and Anglo-Celtic ancestors – and simultaneously holds the following truths to be self-evident: yes, there is a strong and very clearly defined tradition, and yes, its practitioners are expected to improvise freely within it, recreating it anew to meet the immediate needs of both performer and audience. There are set themes, and there are specified functions: dance songs, work songs, celebrations, laments, love songs, hate songs and so forth. The tradition is unfixed; indeed, it demands to be freshly re-invented with each performance, recreated anew to reflect the changing needs and circumstances of its time and place. Blues artists both ancient and modern have worked from a ‘common stock’ of folk materials: instrumental motifs and vocal tics, melodies, lyrical tags, chord progressions and even complete songs are derived directly from the tradition, and some of them, as we have already seen, long predate the era of recording, let alone the conventional mechanics of publishing and copyright law. What counts above all in the blues is individuality: the development of a unique and unmistakable voice, the ability to place an ineradicable personal stamp on those ‘common stock’ materials freely available to all. While instrumental dexterity, vocal facility and stylistic versatility are heartily respected within the blues community, what distinguishes the truly great from the merely professional is the fully realized man (or woman)’s communicated essence of self; the ability to serve as a conduit for the full gamut of human emotion, to feel those emotions with sufficient depth and intensity to reach out and touch listeners in places that those listeners might not even have known that they had. Without exception, every blues singer who has managed to pull ahead of the pack or haul himself (or herself) from the hordes of hopefuls chasing the blues-lovers’ dollar has this quality. Any competent blues artist should have the ability to entertain – those who don’t should simply bacdafucup and find another line of work before they starve to death – but the measure of true mastery, from ’20s pioneers like Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton to contemporary brand leaders like Robert Cray or Ben Harper – is the scale on which performers are capable of being themselves in public. And, by extension, the depth and complexity of that self. To serve as a neutral transmitter simply don’t cut it here.

Naturally, real life is never quite as cut-and-dried as the above might suggest. The boundaries between these two traditions are of necessity blurred – with considerable movement of repertoire and instrumentation – and examples of each approach can be found in each camp. Nevertheless, they share this belief, both in theory and in practice: that ‘folk’ music – like folk tales, folkways and folklore in general – is the collective property of a community. Everybody uses it, and nobody owns it: a musician can draw on the common stock and use the tools of that heritage to create and express, and those creations can then be added to the common stock, becoming freely available to a fresh generation. Songs and ideas travelled as and when people did; ‘oral transmission’ – an oddly medical term more appropriate these days to viruses than art, unless one considers that art is a virus – was the only way that a song or an idiom could boldly go where none of its siblings had gone before. And since music exists to be played rather than read, a written lyric or notated piece of music is to a song as a recipe is to a meal: a series of instructions as to how a thing is prepared, rather than the thing itself. No two chefs will prepare a dish in exactly the same way even if they’re working from the same recipe and using similar ingredients; and therefore no two performances of a written (or memorized) piece will be exactly the same. The definitive performances of the music of Mozart or Liszt would, in theory, have been those of Mozart or Liszt themselves, but since those gents were sufficiently inconsiderate to have lived, worked and died before the development of recording technology, we are denied their improvisations and must make do with their notes. This means that there are no definitive performances of Mozart or Liszt; only good ones and less good ones. It also means that you can’t eat a recipe. A skilled chef can read a recipe, form an instant impression of how the meal described would taste, and apply his or her accumulated knowledge and experience to the task of creating a customized personal variation, but this is of only theoretical interest to someone who happens to be hungry.

Essentially, recording did to oral transmission what photography did to painting; in other words, relieved it of the burden of simple representation. It was no longer the painter’s primary responsibility to produce a permanent visual account of what people and things looked like, but rather to provide some insight into what things meant and, simply, to create objects and images which were beautiful or intriguing in their own right. Similarly, recording meant that songs and pieces of music did not need to be written down – or even memorized – in order to be preserved for posterity. A recorded performance is, literally, recorded: short of the destruction of the master tape and all known copies, it will survive, exactly as it was originally performed, long beyond the lifespan of the musician(s) who played it. Another artist, approaching those same materials afresh, has no need to reproduce what went before except insofar as (s)he wishes to demonstrate the contrast between the basic themes and the fresh elements with which they are replenished and renewed. Nowhere is this principle better illustrated than in be-bop, where a standard melody – the ‘head’ – is stated at the beginning of a piece as the springboard for the improvisations which follow. The standard melody and chord changes provide the bread, but the improvisation puts the meat into the sandwich: it’s what everybody has actually come to hear. And when those improvisations are flowing thick and fast, it would take a fiendishly accelerated hand and ear to transcribe them in sufficient detail for another musician to be able to come along the following morning to sight-read and play them precisely as they were improvised. In a sense, this is what makes improvisation so special: it occurs in the here-and-now, to be imagined, played and heard as part of a single process; and once played, it’s gone – unless, of course, someone recorded it.

Recording was the first of a series of linked phenomena which forever altered the folk process. Via recording, songs and styles could travel wherever the physical object – i.e. the cylinder or disc – went, and radio removed even that limitation, permitting the music to transform itself into a phantom of the airwaves, solidified and realized by the presence of an appropriately tuned radio receiver. And, via copyright, what was once common intellectual property was effectively privatised. A classic example: during the early ’60s, the British folk singer/guitarist Martin Carthy made the acquaintance of several visiting Americans, two of whom happened to be named Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. During club sessions and late-night jams, Carthy introduced his new friends to his arrangements of a number of Anglo-Celtic traditional pieces. Dylan set a lyric of his own, later recorded as ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, to the melody and guitar arrangement of ‘Lord Franklin’, a technique literally as old as the folk process itself. Indeed, one of his most famous early songs, ‘With God On Our Side’, uses the same traditional Irish melody as Dominic Behan’s ‘The Patriot Game’; and, while the combination of that melody with Dylan’s lyric is copyrighted, the melody itself – one of several known as ‘The Fiddling Soldier’, or ‘The Soldier And The Lady’ – is still ‘out there’. Simon, on the other hand, was particularly intrigued by a tune called ‘Scarborough Fair’, which he and his partner Art Garfunkel subsequently recorded more or less intact. How ever, Simon and Garfunkel copyrighted the arrangement, which – after its use in Mike Nichols’ enormously popular 1968 movie The Graduate – eventually went on to become a Muzak and AOR radio staple and to generate serious amounts of money. The issue of whether or not Simon’s action appropriated Martin Carthy’s creativity and violated his intellectual property is one best left to m’learned friends in the legal profession (or rather, to those who can afford to hire their services), but the end result was the removal of an ancient song from the public domain and its transformation into a copyrighted item for the use of which Simon and Garfunkel must receive payment. There was indeed a financial settlement – the details of which remain relevant only to the participants – but Carthy was more upset by this heisting of what he had considered to be a communally owned cultural asset than by any possible financial loss to himself.

To reverse the argument, the copyrighting of a traditional blues piece has often proved to be the salvation of blues singers who have fallen victim to creative accounting, or – as was often the case with the storefront independent labels who pioneered blues recording – no accounting at all. Big Joe Williams almost certainly wasn’t the author of that beloved old chestnut ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ – a Delta staple memorably recorded by Muddy Waters as well as by John Lee Hooker – but the royalties generated by the Waters and Hooker versions (not to mention subsequent covers of the song by assorted blues-rock bands, most prominently the young Van Morrison’s Belfast rude-boy posse Them) provided Williams with some form of compensation for all the songs which he undoubtedly did write, but for which he was never paid. Skip James’ funeral expenses were met by the royalties generated by Cream’s cover of his ‘I’m So Glad’; a version which, incidentally, James despised. Still, it says something for Cream’s integrity that they credited him at all (especially considering that they had rearranged the song so drastically that they could probably have gotten away with claiming it as an entirely new composition), let alone made sure that the money reached him. In the blues world, the person who copyrighted a song might not necessarily be the person who wrote it, and – by the same token – the person in whose name a song was copyrighted wasn’t necessarily the one who collected the money. Case in point: Willie Dixon, who found that while the library of classic songs he composed for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other Chess stars was indeed copyrighted in his name, extracting the resulting moolah from Arc Music, Chess’ music-publishing subsidiary, was another matter entirely.

The conventional notion of song copyright resides in a song’s lyrics, melody and chord changes: register those, and the piece is yours. If someone cops your song – in other words, borrows your melody or lyrics – you can, given sufficient funding to hire heavy-duty lawyers, take them to court and hose them down, big time. (Just ask George Harrison about the ‘My Sweet Lord’ court case, but be prepared to duck.) You can’t copyright a rhythm or a bass line, let alone a ‘groove’; if you could, Bo Diddley would be a seriously wealthy man and James Brown would be infinitely richer than he already is. You can, of course, copyright a recorded performance, and if someone samples a snatch of one of Mr Brown’s records and recycles it without authorization or payment, they’ll soon be hearing from legal eagles representing Mr Brown and/or Polydor Records. ‘I know they say that they’re only taking a little bit of the record,’ says Brown of the sampler-happy hip-hoppers who’ve squeezed so much juice from his inimitable grooves, ‘[but] how would you like it if I cut the buttons off your suit?’ But if somebody wants to assemble a bunch of musicians to play your beat themselves, they’ve got it; and if this wasn’t the case, then most of the history of the blues would consist of lawsuits rather than records. Imagine if someone had successfully copyrighted the twelve-bar blues structure, or the shuffle beat, or the ‘Dust My Broom’ slide-guitar motif (from Elmore James out of Robert Johnson, Son House, Charley Patton and beyond), or even the line ‘Woke up this mornin”. Then imagine how many bluesmen would have been able to function freely under the resulting restrictions.

So let’s take stock. On the one hand we have a tradition based on a relatively free-flowing interaction of musical ideas and motifs; on the other a copyright system which tends to reward the cunning and well-connected as well as (in some case, read ‘rather than’) the creative and imaginative. In its own post hi-tech way, the sampling technology which drives rap and dance music would seem to be a way of reviving that free-flowing oral tradition (by ‘quoting’ existing works with all the digital fidelity of a 44,100-Mhz (slices-per-second) sampling rate), but said oral tradition developed in a time when there weren’t millions of dollars’ worth of royalties at stake. There are powerful arguments on both sides: on the ‘oral’ wing, we have the flow of ideas, the collective development of fresh variations of time-honoured traditions, the entire notion of folk and community culture. On the other side of the fence, we have the basic fiscal facts of the entertainment industry, the concept of inviolable intellectual property, and the impregnable right of the individual to receive and, wherever possible, enjoy the rewards of his or her creative labours. And in between, we have an artist like John Lee Hooker, whose work is uncompromisingly based in a deep and rich tradition and which draws freely on the resources of that tradition, but whose indisputable individuality rests on the uniqueness of his relationship with that tradition. The central issues that his oeuvre raises are these: how an artist can simultaneously be an utterly unique creative personage whose achievement, identity and agenda are totally and completely personal, while remaining inextricably linked, in the deepest roots of his creative being, to the cultural tradition of the community in which he was raised; and how that artist, born in 1917 and first recorded at the tail end of the 1940s, could achieve spectacular sales with music which seemed ‘older’ than the earliest country blues records, cut almost a quarter of a century before. The solution to such seeming paradoxes lies in the nature of the relationship between an individual and a tradition; and the innate flexibility of a tradition that not only permits, but specifically demands, that each individual who works within it should make it completely his or her own.

When John Lee Hooker says that he was ‘born with the blues’, he speaks naught but the literal truth: for all practical purposes, he and his chosen art-form are exact contemporaries. Hooker is not actually as old as the blues – no living performer could be – but he is almost exactly the same age as recorded blues. It’s a shame that we have to abandon the 1920 birthdate, because it implies a lovely symmetry; it would have meant that he was born the year that the first blues record – ‘Crazy Love’, a vaguely bluesy urban ballad sung by the otherwise unremarkable Mamie Smith – was released; a mere three years before the first rural blues records were made (by the little-known Sylvester Weaver), and an even less significant five before the Texan street-singer Blind Lemon Jefferson became the music’s first superstar. Hooker’s childhood and early adolescence coincided with the first great boom in blues recording: in strict chronological terms, this places him squarely in the centre of the generation of musicians who dominated the first wave of postwar blues. Again, that 1920 birthdate would have made him five years younger than Muddy Waters or Willie Dixon and five years older than B.B. King; ten years younger than T-Bone Walker and Howlin’ Wolf and ten years older than Otis Spann and Bobby Bland; twenty or more years younger than Leadbelly or Blind Lemon Jefferson or Alex ‘Rice’ Miller, the man best known as the second Sonny Boy Williamson . . . but here the analogy begins to break down, because the generation of bluesmen born between the mid-’30s and the mid-’40s is the one which begins with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells and takes in the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. Let’s leave it with this: had he really been born in 1920, Hooker would have been thirty-five years younger than Leadbelly, and thirty-five years older than Stevie Ray Vaughan.

As Hooker himself would put it, ‘At that time there wasn’t no songwriters, there wasn’t no publishers, nothin’. They just made songs up in the cotton fields and stuff like this.’ Needless to say, there wasn’t no recording studios, neither, so information about what the blues sounded like before it was first recorded is, by definition, anecdotal. We know who first copyrighted the basic blues themes, but that doesn’t tell us an awful lot of about who might have originally created them. Staples like ‘Catfish Blues’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, ‘Walkin’ Blues’ or ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” certainly long predate their earliest recorded manifestations, and each exist in numerous variations, none of which could with any certainty be described as ‘earlier’ or ‘more authentic’ than the others. Virtually every Delta singer had his (only very rarely ‘her’) distinctive personal version of the standard fistful of guitar or piano riffs and lyrical motifs. Generally, blues tyros learned from an older singer in their neighbourhood, who may well have learned it either from one of the many itinerant bluesmen who would pass through the saloons, levee camps or plantations, or from a city-based performer taking a swing through the South with a tent show.

Hooker’s earliest musical experiences came through the oral tradition: from direct contact with Tony Hollins, who taught him his first chords and songs, and from Will Moore, who gave him the boogie. Hollins was a professional bluesman, though not a particularly successful one, who travelled the highways and by-ways of the South and eventually wound up in Chicago; Will Moore was a popular and respected player among his local community, but was never recorded. Hollins’s only direct legacy is a fistful of songs cut in Chicago between 1941 and 1951which, at the time of writing, mostly remain unreissued – including some which, like ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ and ‘Crosscut Saw’, became ‘standards’ only through other artists’ recorded versions. Moore, as previously noted, never recorded at all. Hooker was their only direct inheritor. He eagerly imbibed songs and ideas from whatever early blues recordings came his way, but his most profoundly formative influences came from direct, face-to-face encounters with musicians who had themselves learned their stuff the hard way, the old way, the traditional way: from their elders, the elders who were themselves the first generation of bluesmen.

They were his folk. According to the online thesaurus thoughtfully provided by Microsoft as part of my word-processing software, ‘folk’ is not only synonymous with ‘clan’, ‘kith’ and ‘family’, but also with ‘house’, ‘kindred’, ‘lineage’ and ‘race’. The Concise Oxford Dictionary goes a little further: its primary definition of ‘folk’ cites ‘a people’ and ‘a nation’.

The music [blues] is not indigenous to a time or place, it’s indigenous to the people.

Taj Mahal, quoted in Tom Nolan’s

liner note to Taj’s first album, 1968

That stuff [the blues] transcends music and gets into realms of language. It goes beyond good taste into religion.

Frank Zappa, interviewed in Musician

Maybe our forefathers couldn’t keep their language together when they were taken away, but this – the blues – was a language we invented to let people know that we had something to say. And we’ve been saying it pretty strongly ever since.

B.B. King speaking at

Lagos University, 1973;

quoted in Valerie Wilmer’s

Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This

Listen to the blues, and it will tell you its own story. It will tell you who it is, what it is, and how it came to be: who made it, and why. The details of the precise circumstances of how this music came to exist are present in its every nuance, just as DNA, the basic source code of life itself, is present in each and every molecule of each and every organic entity.

It is the story of millions of people – men, women and children – who are forcibly abducted from their native lands. As an integral part of this process, they are separated not only from their families and friends, but from anybody else who speaks the particular language of their tribe and region. They are crammed like cargo into rotting, leaky ships headed for a variety of destinations; chained in the dark for weeks fed on scraps, sluiced with unclean water, left to wallow in their own excrement. Invariably, over half of the captives imprisoned in each vessel die of disease, malnutrition and maltreatment during each long journey to their new homes. Many of them are forced to lie chained to the decaying dead for days on end. Periodically the sick, the dead and the dying are simply pitched overboard to take their chances with the sharks. Once docked in the particular one of these new ‘homes’ with which we are specifically concerned here, they are not only sold into servitude, but subjected to a process designed to strip them systematically of everything they own and everything they are, leaving them with nothing other than their capacity for physical labour and their ability to reproduce. Denied the use of their own languages, they are taught only enough of their captors’ language to enable them to comprehend and obey simple commands. As with their languages, their own spiritual beliefs are withheld from them. They are taught only as much of their captors’ religion as is judged necessary to convince them to accept their new status: somewhere just below the lowest rung of humanity.

Their new masters were often, in their own terms, highly religious and deeply spiritual men. As such, they would have encountered severely distressing ethical and moral dilemmas if they were required to enslave those whom they considered to be their fellow humans and spiritual equals. On the other hand, in order to found the new society – indeed, the New World – which they believed was theirs by divine right and manifest destiny, they desperately needed the labour which slavery would provide. So, in order to salve their consciences, they justify this ‘peculiar institution’ with a cunning and sophisticated variety of arguments. Since there are minor physiological differences between captors and slaves – the enslaved peoples have darker skin, more crisply textured hair, thicker lips and broader noses – it is suggested that they are not actually human beings, but some sort of humanoid animal, or great ape, entitled to no better treatment than any other beast of the field or jungle. Others regard this view as overly cynical. They prefer to believe that these unfortunate creatures are indeed humans; albeit of some degenerate variety, so dreadfully backward and savage that enslavement – of their minds as well as their bodies – provides the best possible way to wean them from their primitive ways, and lead them by the hand into the civilized world. To achieve this laudable end requires nothing less than the enforced induction of a kind of collective amnesia. They are Adam and Eve reborn, the juices of the forbidden fruit still dripping from their chops. Its seductive flavour must be cleansed from their palates; its tainted knowledge erased from their minds. The masters have a similar attitude to the native peoples of the land which they have colonized; the majority of these are exterminated, the remainder herded onto reservations often far from their home territories, and their lands confiscated to serve the needs of those better qualified to inhabit and cultivate them.

Naturally, the slaves pay a price for the unsolicited gift of the civilizing process. They are denied their languages, and the right to language; denied their beliefs, and the right to those beliefs; denied family, and the right to family; denied culture, and the right to culture; denied their history, and the right to that history; denied expression, and the right to expression; denied mobility, and the right to mobility; denied pride in themselves or their traditions, and the right to that pride. To their bodies they do indeed retain limited rights, available to them whenever exercise of those rights does not conflict with the needs of their masters. They are encouraged to reproduce, but not to form permanent attachments to mates or children, since one or more family members might, at any time, be sold or traded away. They are taught that their physical differences are proof that they are intrinsically evil, as is their belief that the power that drives the universe is manifested among many different gods and spirits. Their own ancestral deities, they are repeatedly told, are in fact demons in the service of the Great Adversary and fit only to be destroyed by the One True God: that of the masters. Furthermore, they learn that this single (albeit tripartite) Supreme Being, despite His love for them, is punishing them for their unbelief in Him, and that He will continue to do so until they have earned His approval by passively accepting and enduring their fate. They are taught that their masters are good and that they are evil; that their masters are intelligent and that they are stupid; that their masters are beautiful and that they are ugly. Most crucially, they learn that their masters have won, and that they have lost.

The slaves survive as captive peoples always survive under circumstances where escape is virtually impossible, and where the only possible consequence of insurrection would inevitably be to provoke the extinction which only compliance, or the illusion of compliance, can keep at bay. Their first act of survival is the creation of a space within which they can share some small degree of intellectual and emotional privacy. Within this space, they develop methods of using any and every resource at their command to make some sense of their condition; and of preserving their humanity against what eventually turns out to be centuries of captivity or near-captivity. In other words, they set out – each separate grouping in their own way, in isolation or near-isolation from their peers both near and far, working with whatever they have – to transform a group of victims snatched at random from a variety of peoples, each with its own language and customs, into a People; one People with a common means of expression, a common awareness of their condition, and a set of common goals.

The first tool which comes to hand is the masters’ language. This is rapidly reinvented and modified into something entirely new, spoken and understood by the People but rendered impenetrable to the masters. From the captors’ tongue evolves a new one, deceptively similar to the old, but one in which the meanings of each word, each phrase, each sentence are radically affected by microtonal shifts of pitch and infinitely subtle shades of intonation. The new language is restricted in vocabulary, by comparison with its predecessor, but it is infinitely richer in nuance. First and foremost, it is a secret, private language that has emerged: words from The People’s various native languages – handed down, despite their formally proscribed nature, from generation to generation – are incorporated into the new lingua franca. Their work songs and ‘field hollers’ become means of conversing freely even in the presence of an overseer; the songs of the masters are subversively transformed to serve as the basis for new songs lampooning the masters, commenting on recent events, bemoaning their fate, and praising the new heroes: the rebels and runaways who defy the masters. Those whom the masters call ‘bad’ are the most thoroughly respected and the most fulsomely praised; in the new language, ‘bad’ becomes the highest accolade there is. Every member of the People grows up effectively bilingual, speaking one language in the inner world, another in the outer: the single language which they were forced to share, both with each other and with the master race, becomes two. With each language comes a face: the face they show to their masters, and the face they wear among themselves. The masters’ musical instruments, especially, are approached in new ways; they begin to make sounds never intended by their manufacturers, sounds reminiscent of the by-now near-mythical homeland whence the slaves had been wrenched all those years before. The part of the process incorporating elements of music and dance is an integral one, since the People came from cultures where music and dance were an integral aspect of everyday community life, and literally everybody sang, danced and played some sort of instrument. (Their musical traditions involved plucked stringed instruments, wind instruments and percussion; the latter pair also serving as means of communication. The People were therefore forbidden access to the drum and the fife in case they were used to send wordless, but articulately phrased and pitched, messages which contained or transmitted any whiff of sedition.) To the more devout amongst the masters, to whom all dance was anathema and for whom music was only acceptable if it was religious in nature, this was in itself evidence of innate primitivism, and all the more reason to replace their indigenous music with the hymns and ballads which the masters, and their ancestors before them, had brought from their own homelands.

The second tool is the masters’ religion, which was supposed to justify their oppression. One particular text of this religion yields up a central metaphor which becomes the linchpin of a powerful liberation theology: the tale of a captive People held in slavery in a foreign land until, eventually, they win their freedom and triumphantly return home. Almost as crucial as its content is the manner in which this religion is adapted to the spiritual needs of the captives: where the masters’ worship is staid and complacent, in the hands of the captives the same worship becomes visceral, becomes transcendental, becomes a rite of transformation, of possession, of joyous surrender to the spirit of the divine.

Time passes: the slave trade is finally banned, by which time the number of slaves has vastly increased. Because new arrivals are no longer forthcoming, the masters feel obliged to treat their existing slaves marginally better; since there is no longer a theoretically infinite supply of them, they now represent an asset which must be conserved rather than wasted. For the first time, the skills and knowledge of a slave are perceived as assets comparable in value to his or her strength and fertility. As a consequence, the masters find newer uses for their slaves. Some receive a broader education than their peers and become household servants, or even skilled personal assistants. Some of the enslaved women become sexual playthings for the male masters; their offspring never acknowledged as members of the owning families, but nevertheless highly prized as more valuable slaves. A convention arises that the visible evidence of even one slave ancestor among eight could outweigh any amount of the masters’ genetic inheritance in identifying someone as a slave. The proudest of the People take this to mean that their bloodline is measurably and demonstrably more potent than that of their masters; the most thoroughly intimidated take it as a sign that the shame of their origins is utterly ineradicable.

Towards the end of their second century of captivity, there is a war among the masters. Though the freeing of the slaves is not the specific objective of the side who eventually prove victorious, it is nevertheless part of their agenda, if only as a means of weakening the losers’ economic base. As such, it is successful. Unfortunately, what the People actually receive is a nominal liberation only; a legalistic simulacrum of freedom which reproduces slavery in all but name. It keeps the bulk of the People in economic bondage to the former owners, hems in the better-educated and more ambitious by blocking their progress with a comprehensive net of laws and codes, and denies them the legal and civil rights granted to any citizen who looks as though his or her genetic inheritance from the stock of the masters is untainted by any visible ancestors from amongst the People. The People’s exclusion from the public life of the nation continues to be justified on the grounds that they are intrinsically inferior beings who are nonetheless extremely dangerous. Those who had been forced to breed as if they were stud cattle are, as a consequence, considered overly sexual; those who have faithfully and lovingly nursed their masters’ children are deemed profligate and cruel; those who had been routinely subjected to corporal punishment nigh unto the point of death for the slightest infraction of an unfulfillable code are deemed uncontrollably violent. And what remains unarguably true is that their skin is still a different colour. For the fruits of their liberation, they have genuine freedom of movement and association in very few places in deed. They are not entitled to vote, and any attempt to apply for the right to do so is, informally but invariably, cause for spontaneous corporal punishment. Their word can be freely contradicted in a court of law by any member of the master race. They may be physically attacked with impunity. They are subject to the full penalties of the law, whether or not they have committed an actual of fence, but not entitled to its protection from a member of the master race.

There is more. They are forbidden to travel in the same rail carriages and streetcars as descendants of the former masters, to eat in the same restaurants, to drink from the same fountains, and relieve themselves in the same toilets. Even when they gain the right to serve in the armed forces, they may not serve in the same units. They receive rare and minimal promotion, are discouraged from learning to operate more complex equipment, generally on the grounds that their intelligence is unequal to the complexity of such tasks. They are given the most menial tasks away from the battlefield and the most dangerous duties upon it. They are required to fight and die in the nation’s wars, ostensibly to protect the basic principles of freedom and democracy at home and abroad, but they see precious little of either in the nation which is nominally theirs. In their nation’s cities (with very rare exceptions), even those few who could afford to do so are barred from living in the same areas as the master race. In the areas designated for them, they are charged higher rents for worse accommodation. Even when they are permitted access to the same jobs as members of the master race, they receive lower wages and infrequent promotion. It is considered just about permissible for a male of the master race to have sexual relations with a female of the People, provided that he pays for the privilege in cash and does nothing so foolish or self-incriminating as to form any kind of emotional attachment to her. Sexual relationships between males of the People and females of the master race are unacceptable under any circumstances. Even the unsupported allegation that a male of the People has made a sexual approach to a female of the master race is a capital offence: formally in some parts of the country, informally in those regions which are considered to be more enlightened. In this context, eye contact, however brief, is considered adequate evidence of a sexual approach. Any attempt by any former slave, or descendant thereof, to advance his or her circumstances is mocked or blocked. Any expression of anger, discontent or dissatisfaction with their lot is blamed on the activities of ‘outside agitators’; the descendants of the slaves are deemed insufficiently sensitive or intelligent to realise when they are being ill-treated without some form of external prompting.

Nevertheless, many succeed even against such concerted opposition. Former slaves and the children of former slaves enter the arts and the professions. They migrate from the rural regions, the scene of their centuries-long humiliation, to the bigger cities where discrimination needs to be enforced by law rather than simply occurring as custom. They are mocked and caricatured in the masters’ theatres, in which they are not permitted to perform, and the masters’ newspapers, for which they are never employed to write; they thus have no means of redress and no forum in which to state the case for their defence. Against all the odds, authors and poets, musicians and athletes, philosophers and scientists, dentists and accountants, soldiers and entrepreneurs, activists and leaders all begin to emerge. And all of the People have learned, with their mothers’ milk, how to survive in two worlds. One is the world of the master race, who control the laws and the money; the homes and the jobs; the frames of reference and the rules of the game. The other is their own world, which they themselves have created, and recreate daily, from scraps: the scraps which they managed to retain from their original, faraway homelands, and the scraps tossed them by the master race. The world of the former owners is the one in which they are compelled to exist; their own world is the one in which they actually live. They apply their creative skills, the only bequest from their ancestors which they have ever been allowed to keep, to the task of reinvention. Stripped of their traditional resources, they generate new ones; force-fed another’s culture, they transform it to meet their own needs. Barred from the institutions of the master race, they institute their own. And from the materials and implements of the master race’s music, they create their own. In one place – a comparatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan urban centre – the discarded military-band instruments of one of the now-departed minor occupying powers stimulates the creation of one kind of new music. In another area – harsher, more rural and vastly less tolerant – something else emerges.

Somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, what we now call the blues began to be heard in the Southern part of mainland America. It was a scion of a whole extended family of musics: the field holler and the ballad, the hymn and the rag, the vaudeville showpiece and the work-song and the chain-gang shanty. In the blues, we hear the raw materials of the master race’s music filtered through the tonalities, textures, rhythms, intonations and agenda which centuries of brainwashing and intimidation had failed to eradicate from the collective consciousness of a People inadvertently brought into being by abduction and slavery. It was sung on back porches and in taverns, in work camps and in urban theatres, in tents and jails. It was played on whatever instruments were available: here on pianos and trumpets, there on drums and mandolins, elsewhere on fiddles and saxophones and, in the South, most of all on the guitar, an instrument which – in a singular and felicitous example of cultural synchronicity – was ready for the blues around the time that the blues was ready for the guitar. Slowly evolving from a series of families of stringed instruments, the guitar had eventually divorced itself from the mandolin family by abandoning the notion of a variable number of ‘courses’ (sets of paired strings) in favour of six single strings, tuned (from low strings to high) E-A-D-G-B-E. This instrument emerged in France and Italy during the last years of the eighteenth century, but revealed its full potential most dramatically in Spain, where gifted luthiers refined and strengthened its structure and, through the medium of flamenco, gypsy musicians began to explore its expressive range.

By contrast, its earliest years in America recalled the courtly tradition of the instruments which were the guitar’s immediate predecessors, rather than the flamboyant duende of the flamenco guitarists. The typical American guitar of the nineteenth century was a small-bodied, short-necked, gut-stringed instrument: fragile of construction, low in volume, easy on the fingers and essentially delicate in nature. It was therefore considered to be a ladies’ instrument, ideally suited for boudoir and parlour; a very different beast from the ‘special rider’, an itinerant Southern bluesman’s powerful, resilient travelling companion. The transformation of the genteel ‘parlour guitar’ into something that could travel unscathed in a boxcar and still holler like a bird the next night came at the hands of a couple of innovators and a host of popularisers. In the early 1890s, Orville Gibson applied principles derived from violin-building – principally a carved, arched top and specially tooled steel strings – to his guitars; by 1900, the C.F. Martin company (founded in the 1830s by C.F. Martin himself, a recent immigrant from Germany) had combined Gibson’s steel strings with the reinforced necks and bodies which they had been developing for their gut-string models since the 1830s. The result was a flat-top guitar sturdy enough to take steel strings: a template for the majority of acoustic guitars constructed since. Other major luthiers followed, and so did a host of mass-production houses who flooded the nation with cheap but highly serviceable guitars. Thousands of customers who weren’t fortunate enough to live in a town which could support its own music store ordered guitars made by Stella and Harmony from the mail-order catalogues of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward: in 1908, you could pay anything between $1.89 and $28.15, and have yourself an instrument. To be precise, a new instrument: fundamentally related to an older one, but essentially an instrument which had never before existed; exactly what was required in order to conjure into existence a music which had never before existed.

Were it at all possible to rob a human being of absolutely everything that makes someone human, to transform a human being into nothing more than a dumb beast of burden, the aforementioned treatment would have done it. What the blues tells us is that humanity is indestructible. When everything that can possibly be taken away is indeed taken away, the blues is what’s left: the raw, irreducible core of the human soul.

The first known account of the music we now call Delta blues is a description, by the pianist, composer and entrepreneur W.C. Handy, of a guitarist whom he encountered while waiting for a train in a Mississippi railroad station in 1903. It has been frequently quoted, and quite rightfully so: it is perhaps the first truly significant American cultural signpost of the new century, so – with your indulgence – here it is again.

A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags, his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song too, struck me instantly. ‘Goin’ to where the Southern cross the dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.

Virtually everything Handy tells us has a specific significance. First of all, he notes the guitarist’s obvious signs of destitution. The travelling bluesman was the poet and entertainer of an underclass within the underclass. Delta people were considered hicks and peasants by the more educated and sophisticated blacks who had established themselves in the cities; and within those rural communities the bluesman was, in turn, frowned upon by the upwardly mobile. Specifically, he was hated and despised by the black churches, who believed his trade to be the Devil’s Music, a living reminder of all that evil African stuff they were supposed to have left behind as part of their painful induction into the social mainstream. With his workshy ways, his never-ending perambulations, his bawdy, earthy songs and his fatal attraction to normally respectable women, he was an outlaw, a virtual pariah. Even when a bluesman was popular and successful, with a smart suit on his back, rings on his fingers and a fistful of money to buy a round of drinks, rather than poverty-stricken and ragged like Handy’s avatar, he was still a virtual out law among the devout and respectable. Maybe our faceless, nameless vagrant was a professional musician down on his luck, waiting for transport to somewhere offering richer pickings to an itinerant entertainer; or maybe he was just a working man on his way to where the work was – to a levee camp, a construction project, or simply day labour on a plantation or farm – whiling away the time with a meditation on his circumstances.

Then Handy describes the guitarist playing slide, fretting his instrument with a knife. Since he cites the ‘Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars’, we can presume that in this particular case the guitar was played flat on the lap, rather than in the conventional guitarists’ position used by those who played with a glass bottleneck, or a short length of metal tube, on one left-hand finger. Nevertheless, while the technique of slide or bottleneck guitar may owe something to the touring Hawaiian ensembles so popular in the late 1880s and ’90s, the sub stance and content was an unmistakable African retention. One traditional practice which predated the cheap mass-produced mail-order guitar – and in fact survived well into the mid-twentieth century among those for whom even an instrument costing a buck eighty-nine was an inaccessible extravagance – was the trick of nailing a length of wire to a barn wall and using a piece of glass or metal to change the pitch. Known as a ‘diddley-bow’, such contrivances provided a first experience of plucked-string instruments for many a wannabe guitarist, including the young John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Under the influence of the slide or the hand-bent string, the rigid, tempered European scale melted to reveal all the hidden places between the notes: the precise, chiming instrument giving forth a liquid African cry.

If we were doing this as a TV movie, or if we had any other motive to milk this event for spuriously augmented dramatic irony, we could cheat by replacing that nameless guitarist with someone with mythic resonance of his own. Charley Patton, the Father of Delta Blues his own self, for instance; or a still more enigmatic figure, like the mysterious, unrecorded Henry Sloan, the bard of Dockery’s Plantation, from whom Patton had learned; or even the sinister Ike Zinneman, who taught Robert Johnson and who, according to Robert Palmer, claimed to have learned to play the blues by visiting graveyards at midnight. If we wanted to be really portentous in a Movie-of-the-Week sort of way, we could go the whole hog and speculate that it might have been Hooker’s stepfather, Will Moore himself.

Or maybe it was just some ordinary guy who happened to play a bit of guitar, some working stiff eking out his survival on the road, someone completely unknown outside of his own community, one forgotten drifter amongst many. Whoever he was, whatever he happened to be doing in that particular station on that particular night, wherever he was going, whatever his story had been, whatever fate finally overtook him along those highways and railroads on those dark spectral Mississippi nights, he stumbled into history that night and never knew it. What Handy heard him playing, right there in the station, was undoubtedly among the first Delta blues, a music that anyone who travelled extensively through the black Delta would end up hearing sooner or later. This was the earliest stirring of one of the most profoundly influential movements in all of the popular culture of the twentieth century, but at that time the sound was still sufficiently localized for Handy to find it strange and unfamiliar. And if this music sounded weird to W.C. Handy, an urban black man and an experienced, gifted professional musician, just imagine what the average turn-of-the-century white person would have made of it.

Handy’s observation that the singer repeated his one line – ‘Goin’ to where the Southern cross the Dog’ – three times without variation, slides yet another piece of the jigsaw into place. The ‘classic’ three-line blues-verse template, the norm from the mid-’20s to the present day, has an A-A-B structure: statement, restatement and rhymed response. The verse quoted here, which simply goes A-A-A, exemplifies a contemporary form which coexisted with the A-A-B pattern as the music was teething, but by the mid-’20s, when the first rural blues records were made, it was already an archaism which grew progressively rarer with each passing year. The content of the line was a specific local reference to the intersection between two railroad lines: the Southern, and the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley (the latter popularly known as ‘the Yellow Dog’) which met at Moorehead, in Sunflower County. Maybe our man was headed in that direction to work, maybe to play music, maybe to visit family, maybe to see a woman, maybe just to be on the move. Or possibly he was simply whiling away the time, thinking back to some other time that he’d travelled there, reminiscing to himself about what he’d found or possibly about what had found him.

Crucially, Handy locates this encounter in Tutwiler; just over the Coahoma county line, in the north-eastern corner of Tallahatchee County. Tutwiler is where Highway 49, ten or so miles south-west of Clarksdale, intersects with Highway 3. It’s roughly five miles south-east of Vance.

Let me propose a working definition of the term ‘folk artist’. Though it applies equally to artists working in any medium you care to name, I’m primarily concerned with the ‘folk singer’: one who draws upon the traditional arts of their community, and uses their mastery of those arts in order to tell the story of their ‘clan’, ‘kith’ and ‘family’; their ‘house’, ‘kindred’, ‘lineage’ and their ‘race’; ultimately, the tale of their ‘people’, and their ‘nation’. In contrast, the bluesman’s vision is, almost by definition, personal. His value to his community – and to the world – is directly contained in his ability to reflect, in a manner uniquely and distinctively and unmistakably his own, his life in particular and, through that personal story, the life of the community in general. The bluesman makes himself the focus of his work; by placing himself at the centre of his art, he is taking possession of his life. He is asserting his right to interpret his own existence, to create his own definition of his own identity; first in his own eyes, in the eyes of his community, in those of the world at large and, finally, in the eyes of God.

And whether that life is easy or hard, happy or sad, comic or tragic, what the bluesman tells us is, first and foremost, that his life is his, and that his self is intact. If the folk-singer tells us ‘this is how we lived’, and the bluesman’s message is ‘this is how it is for me’, then what could John Lee Hooker’s music possibly be, other than ‘the real folk blues’?