How do you like your Christmas songs? Schmalzy soft jazz, White Christmas and all that? Gritty like the Pogues? (please, no!) Or maybe with a tongue firmly in cheek, like the Bare Naked Ladies?
And of course there are the Christmas blues songs. B B King with Merry Christmas Baby; Freddie King’s Christmas Tears; Koko Taylor’s Merry Merry Christmas; Roy Milton’s Christmas Time Blues; Bessie Smith’s At the Christmas Ball Blues; or maybe Joe Bonamassa’s Lonesome Christmas. All on the general theme of – it’s Christmas and my baby done left me / I ain’t got a baby / my baby and me are apart.
But then there’s Victoria Spivey’s Christmas Morning Blues, where she’s lamenting the fact that her man’s in jail; John Lee Hooker’s Blues for Christmas, with the plaintive “I ain’t got a dime;” and Blind Blake’s Lonesome Christmas Blues where he remembers last Christmas when he was in jail, and this Christmas isn’t much better – “I’m sick and I can’t get well.” Tough times don’t stop for Christmas. Just ask the millions living in war torn Syria or Yemen or South Sudan; other those going hungry in East Africa, or the brutalized Rohingya people of Burma. Or even the more than 43m Americans and 14m Britons living in poverty.
Truth is, the world can be a tough place, and none of us are immune from tough times – family problems, health problems, relationship problems. The celebrations of the holiday season don’t make these go away.
It’s hard to find a blues song that taps into the heart of Christmas. And by that I mean hope. G.K. Chesterton, the writer, poet, and philosopher said that “hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.” So it was with the first Christmas – a family living under the occupation of a brutal, despotic regime; a new baby, brought into the world in the most humble and poor of circumstances; the birth announced to a bunch of rough, uneducated shepherds; the new family becoming refugees, forced to move to a foreign country. Pretty tough circumstances.
And yet the story is shot through with hope – that change and redemption is possible. That things can be different. That the power of love unleashed into the world through the coming of this baby can ultimately be more powerful than all the tyrants and war-mongers and greed-merchants and liars. That justice and fairness can prevail. Instead of despair at the state the world is in, the Christmas story urges us to take courage – see the possibility of redemption and change for ourselves and begin to make a difference in the world around. Hope in a hopeless world.
Hope. New possibilities. Change. It’s what Bethlehem is all about.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
“You boys wanna hear some live blues? Head on over to Red’s, starts about 9 o’clock,” said Roger Stolle when we visited his Cats Head Delta Blues and Folk Art store in Clarksdale. Red Paden’s Juke Joint is arguably the last of the real Mississippi Delta juke joints, set downtown between a weedy graveyard and the eastern bank of the Sunflower River. Sadly, we had to get back to Memphis and had to content ourselves enjoying a spectacular sunset behind us as we drove back on Highway 61, the sky changing colour magnificently from red to magenta to purple.
I’d met up with two friends from Texas a few days earlier in Memphis. Bob and Steve and I had met just over a year earlier in Sam’s Burger Joint in San Antonio, where we’d all come to see Sean McConnell and his band. That was a great gig, by the way – if you don’t know Sean McConnell’s upbeat Americana, go check him out. We’d got on well in our chance meeting, and Bob, very hospitably had invited me to his family’s Thanksgiving a few days later. So, after keeping in touch for the next year, here we were to explore Memphis and the blues. The Irish guy showing the Americans the home of the blues.
I woke up in my hotel in Memphis the first morning to glorious blue skies, a great view over the Mississippi River and – what the heck is that? Yes, an enormous pyramid overlooking the river. It turned out to a huge Bass Pro megastore and hotel. Apparently, it’s the 10th largest pyramid in the world, no kiddin’. Bass Pro, if you don’t know, is a chain of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ stores all across the US, particularly in the South. On visiting the store, I was astonished at the amount of gear associated with these pursuits, and utterly appalled at the gun section, where available for purchase were every conceivable hand-gun or rifle, including military style semi-automatic weapons. Deeply unsettling.
But Memphis is a great town. Beale Street may have become sanitized and tourist-friendly, but it’s got a lot of great eating establishments with live music every night, including B.B. King’s Blues Club. If you go, check out Blues City Café just across the road for some great bar-b-que ribs. Our best night for music was in Rum Boogie, seeing a band called Young Petty Thieves, who did the most original covers I’ve ever heard along with their own bluesy, Americana music. These guys deserve to be heard more widely.
You’re never short of things to do in Memphis. We had a great visit to the Gibson Guitar Factory, given the tour by the fast-talking and friendly Kyle (whose name, when he said it seemed to have about four syllables). I enjoyed sampling the finished article in the store afterwards, lusting after one of the Gibson Memphis ES-335s we’d seen being made – largely by hand – in the factory. At over four thousand dollars, I decided against an immediate purchase.
Across the road is the outstanding Rock’n Soul Museum which tells the complete story of Memphis music history, as researched by the Smithsonian Institution. And an absolute highlight was our visit to Sun Studio, “the birthplace of Rock’n Roll.” Graham, our host on the tour, was a goldmine of terrific stories about the early history of the Studio, featuring Sam Phillips who discovered Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. It’s a piece of musical history not to be missed. I loved the radio booth exhibit belonging to pioneering disk jockey, Dewey Phillips, whose Red, Hot and Blue show attracted 100,000 listeners in the 1950s and helped launch the career of Elvis Presley. He was reputed to play repeatedly on his show records that he liked, and to lift the needle off records he wasn’t appreciating and to smash them live on air.
Dewey Phillips’s Original Radio Booth
Most moving in Memphis is the National Civil Rights Museum. Set in the Lorraine Motel, where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, it is a gripping history of black America from slavery to the Civil Rights movement. The story of the injustice and suffering of this community is pains-takingly told, with exhibits that I found utterly absorbing. We looked at our watches after 3 hours and were surprised at where the time had gone. One story amongst many struck me forcibly – that of six-year-old Ruby Bridges who braved a hateful crowd of protesters in New Orleans, on her first day of attendance at the all-white William Frantz Elementary on November 1960. After she arrived, white parents pulled their children out of school and teachers refused to teach her. The courage of this little girl was remarkable, never crying or whimpering, despite the vile hatred she had to endure, including threats of poisoning.
The tour concludes with you passing by the room MLK was staying in that fateful day in April 1968 and being able to look on to the balcony at the spot where he was slain. Very moving. Across the road is the final part of the Museum’s tour, situated in the building from where his assassin, James Earl Ray, took the shot. You can look across the road from the bathroom window from where he shot, the balcony outside MLK’s room in the Lorraine Motel in full view. We didn’t linger too long over the exhibits detailing the various conspiracy theories that arose after Ray’s conviction, blaming the US government, the Mafia or the Memphis police for King’s death.
We had lunch a few blocks away at Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken, where I was able to sample some authentic Southern cooking – fried okra, sweet potato pie, greens, and gumbo. Pretty tasty. On other occasions I sampled catfish and tamales – “hot tamales and they’re red hot, yes I got ’em for sale.” And, of course, there was the endless offerings of barbeque chicken or pulled pork. Well, I did enjoy all this soul food, but have to admit, after a few days I was longing for a plain cheese sandwich.
Before we left Memphis I was intrigued to visit Schwabs’ 1950s style Soda Fountain on Beale Street. Here you can get phosphate sodas, milkshakes and soda jerks, buy a souvenir tee-shirt and browse toys some of us remember from our childhood in the 50s and 60s – catapults and balsa wood gliders with elastic sprung propellers, Chinese checkers and jacks. It’s a nostalgic walk back into time, definitely worth the visit.
Schwab Soda Fountain, Beale Street
Memphis is a laid-back town where everybody has time for you, and you always feel welcome. A great place from which to launch our visit to the Delta.
I listened to a great version of a song recorded in 1924 by Clara Smith called Prescription for the Blues recently on the Watkins Family Hour album. It struck a chord, having suffered some ill health recently myself – doctor’s prescriptions have been all too frequently part of life of late!
Of course the song isn’t really about treating physical health – it’s about the blues, what Robert Johnson called “an achin’ old heart disease,” the “worried blues.” W.C. Handy said that the “blues were conceived in aching hearts.” Prescription Blues is a clever, light-hearted, playful little song about being love sick, having a “heart disease” and asking the doctor for a cure:
All day long I worry all night I’m blue
I feel so awfully lonesome I don’t know what to do
And so I ask you doctor to see if you can find
Something in your sachet to pacify my mind
Oh doctor doctor write me a prescription for the blues
Let me tell you doctor why I’m in misery
Once I had a lover, but she went away from me
…Oh doctor doctor write me a prescription for the blues
And that’s what most of the blues are about, isn’t it – lost love, love gone wrong, unfaithful lovers, unrequited love, yearning and heart break. As Son House said, “Ain’t but one kind of blues – and that consisted in male and female that’s in love.”
Well, for sure that’s mainly the subject matter of most blues songs. But there’s more to it than that, and I think this is why the blues continue to resonate for us. The blues arose in black communities a century ago, in the hardship, toil, injustice and bondage of African Americans. B. B. King said, “The blues is an expression of anger against shame and humiliation.” And, as well as love, many of the songs address real life problems – not having enough money, illness, homelessness, bereavement, abandonment. You can easily think of songs like Victoria Spivey’sT.B. Blues (“I got a tuberculosis; consumption is killing me, It’s too late, too late…too late”), about a disease that is particularly associated with poverty, or Blind Lemon Jefferson’sBroke and Hungry, or Big Bill Broonzy’sStarvation Blues, where he sings about having no job, no place to stay and “starvation everywhere I go.”
Well, of course, there is a prescription for all this – we don’t have to tolerate injustice, racism, exploitation. They are all problems that can be addressed, if we have the will. The blues can keep on jolting us out of our safe, comfortable lives and alert us to the pain and ills of the world around. Will we be part of the problem or part of the solution? Which starts with the words of someone from a couple of thousand years ago: “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.”
The blues world and far beyond is trying to come to terms with the death of B B King, one of the last remaining links with the early days of the blues in Mississippi. King was a towering figure in blues throughout his lifetime and, as we look back on his life, we can see that the contribution he made to not only the blues, but to rock music more generally was enormous. Not bad for a skinny kid from a dirt-poor background in Indianola, Mississippi, raised by his maternal grandmother Elnora Farr, because his father had run off and his was too poor to raise her son.
The honours and awards he garnered were numerous and impressive:
inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.
inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
awarded the National Medal of Arts.
awarded the Kennedy Center Honors, given to recognize “the lifelong accomplishments and extraordinary talents of our nation’s most prestigious artists.”
awarded King the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.
He was ranked by TIME magazine No.3 on its list of the 10 best electric guitarists of all time; and no. 6 by Rolling Stone. Any guitarist or blues fan could recognize B B King if they heard just him play just one note, so distinctive was his vibrato, string bending and tone. “BB, anyone could play a thousand notes and never say what you said in one,” tweeted Lenny Kravitz recently. He won numerous Grammys, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.
His collaborations with and mentoring of other blues artists were legion: Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, Susan Tedeschi, Bonnie Raitt, Derek Trucks, Warren Haynes, Billy Gibbons, Mark Knopfler, Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Keith Richards and Joe Bonnamassa, all of whom rated him highly as a player and influence. But his musical influence extended far beyond the blues family – we could mention Willie Nelson, John Mayer, Mavis Staples, Sheryl Crow, Tracy Chapman to name but a few he mentored or played with.
His duet with U2 on When Love Comes to Town is a classic and introduced him to a whole new set of rock fans. His music has been sample by the likes of 50 Cent and Tony Yayo, Ice Cube, Action Bronson, and rapper O.S.T.R.
B B King’s achievements were more than any one person could reasonably expect in their lifetime – a testimony to his talent, hard work, and positive outlook on life. King contradicted the popular notion that blues music is sad and depressing. Even though he’s singing the blues and the subject matter may be that his baby’s done left him, or the thrill has gone, or his grave needs to be kept clean, in King’s hands the blues work their way through the present troubles with hope that things can get better. As he says in one of his songs, “There must be a better world somewhere.” “Instead of tears,” he sings, “I’ll learn all about laughter.”
There’s a joy that breaks through B B King’s music – as he said, “It’s good for me when I’m feeling bad, and good for me when I’m feeling good.” All the more remarkable, when you consider the trials of King’s life – the poverty of his early background, his failed marriages, difficulties with some of his children, the racial discrimination he had to bear along the way.
As we continue to mourn his passing, we can be grateful for the legacy of music he has left behind in both his recordings and the many musicians he has influenced. He will continue to influence many more.
Last month, Eric Clapton suggested that his days of touring are over. “The road has become unbearable,” he said. “It’s become unapproachable, because it takes so long to get anywhere. It’s hostile – everywhere: getting in and out of airports, traveling on planes and in cars.”
Understandable, when you’re nearly 70, I guess, but the good news is that it sounds like he doesn’t intend to stop doing studio work or one-off performances. Clapton has been entertaining us and enthralling us with his blues-based guitar work for nearly 50 years. Ranked by Rolling Stone magazine number 2 in their “Greatest Guitarists of All Time” (surpassed only by Jimi Hendrix – fair enough!), Clapton was once hailed “god” by an adoring fanbase. He’s had 17 Grammys, was awarded the CBE by the Queen, and songs like Layla or Tears in Heaven will be enjoyed and played long after Clapton is gone.
But Clapton is essentially a blues artist who has hailed Robert Johnson as the biggest influence on his guitar playing. He said of Johnson, “His music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice.” Clapton’s tribute to Johnson, on his 2004 album, Me and Mr. Johnson, is one terrific blues album, with excellent arrangements which really showcase Johnson’s genius and some outstanding playing and singing from Clapton. Clapton had previously said that Robert Johnson’s best songs had “never been covered by anyone else, at least not very successfully — because how are you going to do them?” This album and the follow-up Sessions for Robert really do Johnson’s songs justice.
B B King has said of Clapton, “I admire the man. I think he’s No. 1 in rock ‘n’ roll as a guitarist and No. 1 as a great person.” He credited Clapton, with other British artists, with breathing new life into the blues in the late 1960s. The collaborative album between King and Clapton,Riding with the King, won the 2000 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album, and although some felt it was just too polished for a blues album, it is a thoroughly enjoyable record that shows off both men at their very best.
Clapton’s struggles with drugs are well documented, not least in his autobiography, making for painful reading. “In the lowest moments of my life, the only reason I didn’t commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn’t be able to drink any more if I was dead. It was the only thing I thought was worth living for…they had to practically carry me into the clinic.” In 1987, he checked into Hazeldene Treatment Center in Minnesota for the second and last time, and recounts how, after a month there, just going through the motions, he had a quite profound experience.
He says, “At that moment, almost of their own accord, my legs gave way and I fell to my knees. In the privacy of my room I begged for help. I had no notion of who I was talking to, I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether…I knew that on my own, I wasn’t going to make it, so I asked for help and, getting down on my knees, I surrendered.”
He goes on to say, “From that day until this, I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night, to express gratitude for my life and most of all, for my sobriety. I choose to kneel because I feel I need to humble myself when I pray…If you were to ask why I do all this, I will tell you…because it works, as simple as that.”
Clapton’s been sober for nearly thirty years, and worked with a number of addiction treatment organizations before establishing the Crossroads Centre in Antigua in 1998 which helps people recover from the devastating effects of addictions to drugs and alcohol. Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, which has featured a who’s who of top guitar talent in on four occasions since 2004, raises funds for this centre.
I saw Clapton play on a couple of occasions, most notably in the tour which supported the Robert Johnson album. He didn’t engage with the audience much, but it was enough to be treated to a lengthy set of blues songs and classic Clapton numbers and to admire his fret-work on the big screen – the video-team clearly knew their audience, spending the majority of time on Eric’s guitar playing as opposed to shots of the band as a whole. It was a great night’s entertainment. If he’s decided to retire at this stage, then – thanks for your massive contribution to music and the blues and thanks for the memories.
But for the immediate future, we all can look forward to The Breeze: An Appreciation of JJ Cale, in tribute to JJ Cale who died last year, which will be released at the end of 29 July 2014. It features 16 Cale songs performed by Clapton, Christine Lakeland, Mark Knopfler, John Mayer, Willie Nelson, Tom Petty and Derek Trucks.
At the beginning of April, blues legend B.B. King had what his publicists called “a bad night.” Now 88, B.B. and his band had driven 1,600 miles to the show in St. Louis, Missouri, and on top of the rigors of travel, King missed taking his diabetes medicine, resulting in elevated blood sugar. The result was, by all accounts a rather shaky performance, to say the least, with King rambling on at length and playing only a couple of complete songs. After 15 minutes of “You Are My Sunshine,” part of the audience booed loudly and yelled for some real music, while other left. Eventually the show came to an untimely end.
There has been quite a lot of comment about what many felt was the fans’ disrespectful behaviour towards a man, who, after all, is a living link to the very earliest days of the blues in the Mississippi Delta and who has given audiences and record-buyers huge enjoyment for over half a century. I can see it both ways, though. Yes, there’s a sense in which just getting to sit in the room with the man is enough – I saw him play in Paris a couple of years ago and that was pretty much my attitude. (See my earlier post on this). Yes, we did get “You Are My Sunshine” and some flirting with women in the first few rows and the characteristic B.B. King guitar licks were a little thin on the ground. But just to be there, to hear him sing and play “The Thrill is Gone,” with that sweet vibrato on Lucille, was good enough for me.
But, on the other hand, the audience in St. Louis, who had spent their hard-earned money on tickets and travel, didn’t even get as much as that by all accounts, so one can understand their frustration. But afterwards King apologized for what had happened and said he humbly asks for the understanding of his fans.” I’m sure King and those around him will make sure there’s not a repeat of what happened.
We all want to remember B.B. King as the legend he is. King is typically quite deprecating about his guitar skills – but ask any guitarist and they’ll tell you that they can tell it’s B.B. King playing after one note. That takes a deep appreciation for the music and for the blues. Growing up in rural Mississippi in poverty in the 1920s and 30s, King has lived the blues, witnessing lynchings and experiencing first hand the hardship of the Jim Crow South. “I’ve put up with more humiliation than I care to remember,” says King. His song, That’s Why I Sing the Blues, recalls his people being brought to America on slave ships, living in the “ghetto” with vermin for company, being excluded from educational opportunities, having a poor diet and being subject to unjust harassment from the police.
“Guess you’re born to lose
Everybody around me, people,
It seems like everybody got the blues.”
B.B. King reminds us of the roots of the blues – he takes us back to the source. That’s why we respect him so much; that’s why we want him to be around for a long time to come; that’s why people will continue to go to his shows as long as he chooses to play. But at the same time, we want to remember him as a great artist, and there’ll come a time, maybe pretty soon, when those around him might need to persuade the great man to call it a day. Whatever happens, the good news is that we still have his recordings to keep us in mind of what a great guitarist, singer and performer B.B. King has been all his life.
What’s the relationship between the spirituals and the blues? James H. Cone, black liberation theologian and Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, in his 1972 book, The Spirituals and the Blues, says that both the spirituals and the blues are essentially about the struggle for black survival. He traces the spirituals to ante-bellum slavery in the Southern States in the dehumanizing and brutal experience of the African American community, and says that they were a means of black people “affirming that divine reality which lets you know that you are a human being – no matter what white people say.”
For Cone, “the basic idea of the spirituals is that slavery contradicts God.” They were a means of resisting the white gospel which emphazised the obedience of slaves to their masters. In the Oscar-winning, film 12 Years A Slave, there are two rather chilling scenes where white masters are seen reading the Bible to their assembled black “property,” the one with plantation-owner Epps reading about slaves obeying their masters from the New Testament, being particularly poignant. Cone suggests that songs favoured by black slaves were particularly those that recounted Old Testament stories such as Moses and the Exodus and Daniel and his friends as captives in Babylon. Clearly these stories of deliverance by God of those who are oppressed resonated strongly with a people in bondage, who looked and yearned for a day of freedom.
Cone makes the point that it would be simplistic to see these songs which celebrated passing through the waters of “Jordan” and going to the “promised land” as simply looking in desperation for relief from present sufferings beyond the grave. Such songs often had a double meaning: beyond “spiritual freedom” was “an eschatological freedom grounded in the events of the historical present, affirming that even now God’s future is inconsistent with the realities of slavery.”
Cone traces the roots of the blues to the spirituals, which both lamented black suffering and held out a hope of deliverance. The blues, he says, “are about black life and the sheer earth and gut capacity to survive in an extreme situation of oppression.” As such, the spirituals and the blues “flow from the same bedrock of experience” – the blues are, he says, “secular spirituals.”
Of course, as has often been pointed out, most blues songs are about love, sex and relationships. Son House said the blues were about what happened between a man and a woman. There has, of course, been a steady stream of blues songs which explicitly referred to the evils of the Jim Crow era and have sounded a note of protest – Leadbelly, Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy are prime examples of artists who raised their voices against the social situation in the South. But the blues rise from, and reflect, the context of the oppression of blacks, no matter what their explicit subject matter. They were a means of black people affirming their existence and an expression of their refusal to be destroyed by an oppressive environment. They are, in the words of Charlie Patton, a “Mean Black Moan.” Cone says simply, “the blues is black.”
Does that mean that white people can’t sing the blues? Of course it doesn’t – there is something about the blues that can get under anybody’s skin not matter what color, and something in the words, the music and the whole feeling of the blues that has universal appeal. As Willie Dixon said, “the blues are the true facts of life expressed in song, inspiration, feeling and understanding.” Audiences around the world for the blues are now, probably, predominantly white. And there are many great white blues artists who have a great appreciation for the music and the history. B. B. King said once that “playing the blues is like having to be black twice.” But he went on to say that “Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.”
But we can never forget that the blues are deeply rooted in the black experience of oppression and violence in the first half of the twentieth century. As Jimi Hendrix said, “Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.” Ain’t that the truth?
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