Adam Gussow and the Brotherhood of the Blues

He’s a top-notch harmonica player whose playing, American Harmonica Newsletters says, is characterized by “technical mastery and innovative brilliance that comes along once in a generation”; he’s been nominated for a W.C. Handy award; in a career spanning over 30 years, he’s played major blues, jazz and folk festivals, and on stages with Bo Diddley, Buddy Guy, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Otis Clay, and Johnny Winter; he’s the subject of a popular and moving Netflix documentary, along with Sterling Magee, the other half of the duo Satan and Adam; and he’s a popular harmonica tutor with students all over the world benefitting from his online video lessons.

And if that’s not enough, Adam Gussow is a professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where he teaches courses in American and African American literature, the blues tradition, southern autobiography, and, would you believe it, the literature and culture of running! He’s the author of a number of award-winning blues books including a memoir of his days playing with Sterling Magee, a novel, and Beyond the Crossroads, which was voted “Best Blues Book of 2017” by the readership of Living Blues. And one which enhanced my own understanding of the blues greatly when I read it a few years ago, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, which won the Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

So, with this rich background as a blues historian, blues artist, blues mentor and teacher, Adam Gussow clearly has a thing or two worthwhile to say about the blues and its history and tradition.

Down at the Crossroads was pleased to get chatting to him recently, and I suggested, first of all, that 2020 had been quite a year for him, with a new book being published, a new album being released and then, of course, that Netflix film.

He pointed out that the film had come out first of all at the Tribeca folk festival back in April 2018, but began to show up on Netflix last year. At that point, his email box blew up with lots of people he’d never heard from telling him how much it had touched them. If you haven’t seen it, don’t hesitate, it’s a great show and tells a remarkable and heart-warming story.

It charts the story of Adam’s relationship with Sterling Magee, beginning with his 1986 Harlem street jams with “Mr Satan,” at a time of considerable racial tension, and stretching through the next 23 years as they became a touring duo, were included in U2’s Rattle and Hum documentary, and released a number of albums before Sterling Magee mysteriously disappeared. What happened next is remarkable and I’ll not spoil it for those who haven’t seen it.

Adam said he had nothing to do with the way that director V. Scott Balcerek told the story but that he was pleased with the way it turned out. The film begins with Adam meeting Sterling on the street and beginning to jam, but what the film doesn’t explain is that Adam by that stage was an accomplished harmonica player. He had been tutored by Nat Riddles, a New York blues master. “Nat Riddles was a very important figure in my life, my mentor, and I had been a busker in New York, played solo, then played with two different guitar players, and then spent two months in Europe in the summer of ’86. So there was a whole lot of dues paid.”

Overall, though, Gussow said, “I think V. Scott Balcerek did a really good job and the proof of the pudding is that people again and again, say ‘it brought tears to my eyes.’”

He went on to explain the importance of that more sentimental aspect of the film, by mentioning Martin Luther King’s ideas about the beloved community, the interrelatedness of humanity. “I think,” he said, “there’s a lot of people who imagine that that idea just kind of somehow faded away. And I think that what our film does, is that it offers a kind of story, a narrative, living proof of that forged long-term brotherhood kind of relationship. And I think it gives people hope with all of this identity politics stuff.”

“I think that Sterling and I were kind of race rebels in some way, playing on the streets during a rough period of New York history in which young black men died. There’s no question that it was a rough time and he and I were out there, and he was very conscious, and he helped me be conscious, of the way in which we were offering a kind of a living image of brotherhood… after a while I sank into the woodwork. It was like I was just a part of the street scene. And all the guys who hung out around us…I was just wanting to be one of the guys. But what I would say is that 99.9 times out of a hundred, the response that I got, when people came up, and it wasn’t like they were praising me, it was more like it was a chance for them to talk, even connect in some ways.”

Gussow talked about what had happened in December 1986 in New York when a white mob in Queens had severely beaten three African Americans who’d been stranded when their car broke down, one of whom had been killed whilst trying to flee. Gussow had been away in California for a couple of weeks and when he came back in early January, he found Sterling and began to play on the street with him again. “At least two hundred people came up to give us, to shake my hand, which is to say, people were saying, basically, not only are they not associating me with the whiteness out at Queens that had killed this black guy, they were saying, we’re glad you’re here…we have a partnership. What’s going on in Queens can’t touch the brotherhood that you all are putting out right here.”

I asked Adam about his new book, called Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of Music, in which he contrasts and discusses two opposing views of the blues. One he calls blues universalism, where there’s “no black, no white, just the blues,” with a recognition that the blues is played and appreciated globally. And the other is “black bluesism,” which insists that the blues is black, and wants to resist cultural appropriation and to ensure the trauma of black communities which is inherent to the blues is properly safeguarded. It’s an important question, and one which Gussow deals with in a thought-provoking and sensitive way. He has, after all, come face-to-face with the issue in his long-standing engagement with black blues artists over many years; and, his in-depth knowledge of the blues and the social history of the blues gives him the tools with which to open up the discussion for the rest of us.

I asked him who the book is aimed at and he suggested there were several.

“One audience is probably white, Anglo, American blues aficionados, blues fans and blues musicians…What I’m determined to do is to think about the way that we talk about the music and to sort of educate. My generation of blues players, and I’ll say white blues players, came up at a time – and I know many musicians who fit this mould, including the guys a generation or half a generation ahead of me, like Rick Estrin and Kim Wilson, white harmonica players – came up at a time when, if you’re going to learn the music, you were in predominantly black or all black contexts, some part of the time you were in bands backing up African-American players, and you were getting all of this mentoring, all of this understanding. If you’re Paul Oscher, you were in an all-black context in Chicago.

“And there’s a number of us out there who had that sort of training, which is to say we can’t think about blues without thinking about African-American mentors, teachers, friends, who you’re on the road with. It’s your family. So that’s how we grew up. That’s how we learned the music. That’s how we think of the music. And so, you know, the phrase blues is black music obviously has a kind of weird paradoxical resonance for us, because on the one hand, we know the guys we learned from, we have played with. We also know that we’re a part of it though.

“So there’s a paradox there. So, what we don’t want to hear is that phrase and think you’re trying to tell me I don’t have a right to play this, to carry on a tradition that I was mentored into with somebody who trained me and valued the training he gave me…those guys would often talk about these younger white musicians as their sons.

“But there’s a younger generation that didn’t have that experience at all. And as blues goes around the globe, there are cultures in, it could be Ireland, it could be Chile and Argentina, where there’s no African-American presence to speak of. And so somebody might hear the phrase, blues is black music, and really not even feel the tension that I feel. Really not even get it. And so part of what I’m trying to do is speak to that audience. And I’m trying to say, let’s go back, at least before we move on into the future of this music, let’s go back into that.

“Before we go to the future, let’s go back and understand how the music really came into being with all of the paradoxes – one of my favourite little anecdotes is that in the 1920s, you get this handbook basically for would-be white blues singers written by two African-American blues songwriters that is saying, you must empathize with the lowdown feeling. The music is full of paradoxes, but there’s no question that it has a sort of black Southern identity in some profound way.

“It’s in the language, it’s in the call and response. So I want to make sure that everybody is grounded in that. And that was where, as somebody who taught blues literature, I was invested in saying, here’s how thinking about W.C. Handy can help you. Here’s how thinking about blues conditions, blues feelings, blues expressiveness, the blues ethos, here’s how those concepts can actually help ground you in this. And so that’s one of the audiences and I didn’t want to push that audience away from the music at all.”

Adam’s second audience, he says is the Corey Harrises of the world, black American artists who feel somewhat possessive about the music. “I want to say, I understand that. I want to think critically about the phrase, no black, no white, just the blues. I’m trying to understand what the people who use that think they’re saying. And why people who don’t like that, don’t like it. Maybe diffuse a little bit, I’m trying to see things from a range of perspectives.”

The third audience, he says, is academic readers, people who might be teaching the music. “So that’s why in some of the chapters I talk about the way in which I teach the blues. And my hope would be that those chapters might be of interest to people who teach the blues or are thinking about the blues. It may be in a school context and might help people think a little more clearly about stuff.”

That’s a very interesting section of Whose Blues? where Gussow talks about the worldwide interest in the blues, particularly in his own area of harmonica. He introduces us here to harmonica players around the world who have been keen to learn from Gussow’s library of video tutorial material at www.modernbluesharmonica.com, some of whom have become accomplished players.

In conversation, Adam talked more about blues around the world, noting the role that B.B. King had playing the blues in around 55 countries and seeding the blues in places like Japan and Russia, African American blues artists going to play festivals in Europe, the British blues explosion in the sixties, and the role of American and British radio stations over the years. The blues has truly become a worldwide phenomenon.

In the book, Gussow says, “These are in the process of mastering the music as best they can and making it a part of their own developing cultural inheritances. Should we celebrate this change or condemn it? Should we embrace the postmodern globalization of the blues as a kind of progress, a victory for blues music as a cultural form, or critique that global spread as a crisis of cultural expropriation and dilution, a tragic erasure of the burdens and meanings of black history into the very fabric of music?”

The reality is, Adam told me, that if we were to do “a census of all of the people in the world who listened to blues today, and all of the musicians who played the music, we’d find that African-Americans are the least part of it these days. But in global terms they’re still there. They’re not irrelevant at all. In fact, a lot of the images, the music, the language – everybody knows Hoochie Coochie Man, I’ve got my mojo working, right? And those are all that kind of hoodoo stuff that goes directly back to sort of African rituals. That’s blues music.”

Gussow seems keen to, as he says, embrace the globalization of the blues, but at the same time wants to ensure the blues history, its tradition, its feeling is not lost. And he wants to ensure that the African-American presence is still felt.

Zora Neale Hurston

Which was why he says he thought it was important to talk about blues literature in his book. One of the interesting things you’ll find in the book is the considerable amount of discussion Gussow has about blues writers, as opposed to just musicians: Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston. I would hazard a guess and say that most blues fans don’t know them at all. Gussow suggested to me that “blues is more than music,” which you discover when you read the blues literature, including authors he doesn’t deal with in the book, like poets Sterling Plumpp and Tyehimba Jess.

So, as well as acknowledging the reality of people responding to, and wanting to listen and play the blues around the world – and encouraging that, and welcoming that – Adam Gussow is anxious that the way in which the blues is rooted in Black history is kept to the fore.

“Blues is history. Blues is survival tools. It’s a site of memory. I try to make this point in my book, of memory for the traumas of slavery and Jim Crow. Blues indexes the sufferings of Jim Crow. And it’s a way of connecting with that history. And I think it’s so important that we not forget that, that we not imagine blues as just music. I don’t think of blues as just music. I think it is a music, but it has a power that’s deep, and it has some deep magic in it that I’ve certainly felt as long as I’ve been alive.”

Adam Gussow’s deep experience of the brotherhood of the blues, forged through decades playing with Sterling Magee and other African Americans, is on the one hand able to transcend race, but on the other it is rooted in the historical reality of the blues as a complex response to the context of social and political oppression of African Americans. That seems to me to a good pointer to the future. The globalization of the blues just is. But we need voices like Adam Gussow’s to keep us mindful of the reality of the blues.

Since call and response, as Gussow explains, is a key part of the blues, it’s appropriate, I think, to conclude with this joint statement – first the Black Arts Movement spokesperson Larry Neal (in italics), then Gussow’s commentary, echoing and expanding on Neal’s pronouncement.

“The blues were shaped in the context of social and political oppression…the blues are basically defiant in their attitude toward life. They are about survival on the meanest, most gut level of human existence. They are, therefore, lyric responses to the facts of life…These blues are not sorrow songs but survivor songs: the soundtrack of a spiritual warriorship that refuses to say die. These blues wrest far more than their share of swaggering lyric joy out of an evil world, inscribing personhood and sustaining the tribe in the process.”

Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of Music by Adam Gussow, is published by University of North Carolina Press.

Happy Birthday W.C. Handy (and me)

---

Acclaimed “father of the blues,” song-writer and band-leader W.C. Handy was born this day 137 years ago. He’s an important figure in the history of the blues – the first real superstar, through his sheet music compositions, his 1914 St. Louis Blues, and his claim to recognizing the “world famous blues note.”

And, whatdayaknow, I share a birthday with W.C. Handy! Handy, of course, is credited with recognizing the blues for the first time in the plaintive slide playing by a man on his guitar at a station in Tutweiler, has a statue in a park named after him in Memphis, and his compositions are played to this day.

Me, I was a member of the winning sprint relay team in the Belfast primary schools’ interschool competition at Dunmore dog-racing stadium in the late ‘60s and am the proud author of this blog.

But, of course, I’ve one thing going for me over Mr. Handy. I’m still here! Though with each passing birthday, you’re painfully aware of the passing of time. You’ll never be in the sprint relay team again, your hair gets thinner and just about every muscle group in your body heads south. As Jackson Browne says,

Time may heal all wounds
But time will steal you blind
Time the wheel, time the conqueror.

But, there’s no point is dwelling on that too much, I reckon. I like the attitude of acoustic blues master, Rory Block, who’s now over 70 and who told me when I spoke to her a while back:

“Getting older or passing years is only what you make it. You know, you may make a disadvantage of it, but honestly, I don’t go there. I see it as an advantage. Now maybe I’m crazy, but I see it as a real opportunity to know more, to do more with what you know, to feel more…your fruit ripens! And to me it’s like I don’t feel old. What are you talking about? I’m more clear that this is what I was put here to do. You know, really, I see it that way. And man, I’m just getting started! I don’t feel a limitation at all and I don’t feel old – my goodness, not at all!”

So, as I celebrate my something-somethingth birthday, I’m with Rory. There are books to be written (a new one coming out soon); albums to be reviewed (though I’ll never keep up with the prolific and quite wonderful Rocking Magpie); guitars to be played; family and friends to cherish; grandchildren to greet into the world; and a big old hurting world in which to try and make a small difference (with God’s help).

Bob Dylan’s Forever Young from his Planet Waves album in 1974 – which, incidentally, someone gave me as a birthday present – hits the right note, I think:

May your heart always be joyful
May your song always be sung
And may you stay forever young
May you stay forever young.

And now, to help W.C. and me celebrate, here are a few blues songs.

Louis Jordan and his Tympany 5’s big band Happy Birthday Boogie gets the party started. “Happy birthday to you, and I hope you have many more”

Sammy Mayfield gives us a more bluesy version of the song.

And B.B. King has his Happy Birthday Blues, with a bit more blues feeling

And check out this bit of fun from Chris Kramer and the Beatbox, who hopes all our dreams come true.

And finally, it’s not the blues, but it’s a celebration, and it is Bruce Springsteen. Written for his wife Patti, but now dedicated to everybody who’s having a birthday today:

So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. (Psalm 90:12)

Nepal’s Prakash Slim has been living the blues

Prakash Slim is a country blues musician and educator based in…wait for it…Nepal. His remarkable story is straight out of the history of the blues.

He was born in 1980 during the rainy season in a field in the small village of Lamatar, just south-east of Kathmandu in Nepal. Nepal is a country of 28m people, situated between India to the south and China to the north. It has eight of the world’s highest mountains, including Everest and a very ancient culture.

Prakash’s village saw its first electric bulb in 1983 and its first automobile in 1995. Although Nepal is now one of the fastest growing economies in the world, much of the country remains very poor – around one third of the population lives on under $3.20 a day and the GDP is only around $30bn (compare that to South Korea, with a similarly sized population and a GDP of $1.6tr.)

Prakash’s father passed away at a young age, leaving his mother to provide for three children by working in a neighbour’s field. Food and clothing was scarce and the annual festival was much anticipated by Prakash, when an uncle would gift him a set of new clothes. Life was tough.

So, perhaps it’s no wonder that Prakash has gravitated towards the blues. He’s lived the blues, growing up in a rural village with significant hardships, and the road to the future paved with considerable difficulties.

After becoming an accomplished guitarist and playing in a number of bands in Nepal’s lively rock scene, Prakash has become an acoustic bluesman, with Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt as his guiding lights. He’s now a recognized, internationally affiliated Artist/Performer and Educator of the Blues with the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund in Mississippi.

The recent lockdowns because of the pandemic have enabled Prakash to play in a number of international blues events, so we were delighted at Down at the Crossroads to have the opportunity to chat to him:

Gary: For someone born in rural Nepal to become a blues artist sounds like an amazing story. Tell us briefly how you first started playing the guitar and how did you get started performing.

Prakash: Well, I was raised by a loving, loyal family but we had very limited means. I went to a public school where, instead of desks and benches, we had mats made of straw. When I was young the only ambition I had was survival. Ambition, as far as I was concerned, was a privilege for rich kids.

I was interested in music from a young age. I’d play music by drumming against a water container and sing songs all day.  Music drew me in. My most prized possession back then was a bicycle that my sister gave me after she landed a job. Now I wanted to learn and play the guitar but I didn’t have the money to buy one, so I sold my bicycle to buy my first guitar. I told my family that a friend had taken it for a few days! But anyway, I got the guitar and started playing.

For two years, I searched for a mentor who could teach me everything I needed to know about music theory. Finally I found a teacher, and even though he lived 10 kms away from my home, my passion for music was so great that I never missed a lesson. Come storm or rain, I always arrived ahead of time and ready to learn.

I worked hard at my music for a number of years and was able to join my mentor, the legendary C.B. Chhetri’s band and gigged in a circuit of restaurants playing mostly rock music. I kept busy playing lead and rhythm guitar and bass, and doing vocals for various bands throughout Nepal.

Gary: Given your background, growing up with very little, is there a particular resonance for you with the blues, in their original setting in the struggles of black Americans?

Prakash: There are a lot of differences between African Americans and me, but, it’s true, we faced difficulties in life like education, economic depression, and discrimination. So many of the social issues are similar.

Gary: What blues artists did you first encounter, and which ones are important to you?

Prakash: I liked to listen to Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and many other rock blues artists.  For over 12 years I played in rock bands and I’ve tried to give the songs I play an urban blues feel. When I first heard B.B. King’s recordings I was eager to learn the magical intervals: sixths, ninths, major and minor thirds. I wanted to learn his bee-sting vibrato technique. Then when I heard the country blues artists like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Blake, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and many others, I knew this was the style that most spoke to my heart. So, now these country blues legends are the most important to me.

Gary: Has where you live been an advantage or disadvantage in pursing your art?

Prakash: Well, that’s an interesting question! My life experiences, including my hardships and struggles, are reflected in my music. I really want to express my experiences and feelings through the blues. But then, the limited access I have to instruments, equipment, sheet music and online music other than YouTube is a real disadvantage for me.

Gary: What sort of interest in blues music do you find in Nepal? Is there any resistance to it as Western music? Is it confined to Kathmandu?

Prakash: Well, we have a history in Nepal of the blues that goes back three decades, so I don’t think there’s any real resistance to the blues as western music. Some well-known blues bands are still active. People are interested in the blues but most people think that the blues start with B.B. King and Eric Clapton. Very few people know country blues, all the early stuff which is root of the modern music. Blues in Nepal, for sure, is centred in the capital and major cities and really, we have very few platforms and venues for the blues.

Gary: Are you able to make a living with your music?

Prakash: It’s very hard to survive as a musician in Nepal. It’s difficult to convince people how important music is for all ages and walks of life. For musicians of all genres, of course we have some pubs, restaurants and hotels to play. But for me, there is not much of a platform as a country bluesman.

Gary: How did you get your nickname, Prakash Slim? That’s a very cool blues name!

Prakash: Well, when I finished some serious blues research funded by the Mount Zion Memorial Fund in Mississippi, Dr. T. DeWayne Moore gave me the name. Prakash “Slim” Papa Pokharel. But when I got some international platforms, many friends suggested that I go for something shorter so we settled on Prakash Slim – “Prakash” represents Nepal and “Slim” represents the land where the blues began.

Gary: Tell us about your work in promoting blues music in schools.

Prakash: Well, blues is not only the music but also a culture. Without knowing its history, blues would be incomplete. We can empower and educate people through the blues. Knowing about the blues helps race relations and makes aware people of social issues. I’ve been teaching blues in schools here for some time now. My students know very little about black communities in the US and the problems they faced. I teach them that blues is an experience of life. I also teach them to play instruments and how to write song lyrics. I’m very happy that some of the students from grade three and four have now started playing slide as well! This year I did a blues exhibition in one of my schools. So, blues education is very important and I feel proud to be a part of it.

Gary: You recently collaborated with a friend of mine, Fabrizio Poggi in Italy. Tell us about that. [catch our recent chat with Fabrizio here]

Prakash: Well, Fabrizio Poggi is a renown Italian blues harmonica player and Grammy nominee. He and his wife Angelina and I connected as friends when I did an interview for Blues Radio International. Both of them are great human beings!

After talking for few days, Angelina said to me, “Why don’t you and Fabrizio do something together? I really would love to see you playing together. It would be a great message of hope for the world. A musician from Nepal and another from Italy? Why not? The coronavirus won’t let us leave our homes but we can travel all over the world through music.”

So, I was very excited and happy to do play with a legendary blues artist. I asked if we could do a favourite number of mine, a Robert Johnson song. I will always be grateful to Fabrizio and Angelina for this opportunity.

Gary: Prakash, tell us about your ambitions and hopes for the future.

Prakash: I really want to establish myself as an acoustic bluesman. I hope one day to play the blues with a National guitar in Mississippi. I consider that the sacred land of the blues – the blues Mecca. I want to spread blues in every corner of the world.

Gary: How has the coronavirus pandemic affected Nepal and has it affected your music making?

Prakash: We are all living in different and strange times. Nepal was not much affected by the pandemic in April and May, but we now see the number of affected people and deaths starting to go up. So, of course, yes, it has affected my music making badly. Schools and colleges are closed and all the venues are too.

Gary: Thanks, Prakash. We wish you well in your music making and every success in the future. Hopefully we’ll hear a lot more from you!

Blues in the Time of Corona #7

As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, we’re choosing a few songs to reflect on, maybe to lift our spirits a bit as we go through it.

This week’s song is B B King’s There Must Be A Better World Somewhere. It was on the album of the same name, B B’s twenty seventh studio album released in 1981, and for which he won a Grammy.

Like a lot of blues songs, it bemoans the way things are, the woman who’s breaking hearts, but looks hopefully toward a better future.

Some of us are merely inconvenienced by the lockdowns we’re experiencing – none of our family are sick, we’ve got enough to eat, to drink and to entertain ourselves with – and, really, so what if our movement is curtailed a bit for a while? Others of us have been sick or have lost loved ones. Some of us have lost jobs and have been hit financially. And many people around the world are quite literally starving because of the necessary lockdowns. For a lot of people, it’s been a tough time.

B B’s song reminds us of the old Persian adage: This too will pass. Hang on in there. (And if you can, reach out to someone who needs some help).

If it ain’t here, maybe in the year after
Instead of tears, I’ll learn all about laughter
Meanwhile, I’m stuck out here, Lord knows it just ain’t fair
But I know, yes, I know that there must be a better world somewhere

 

Blues in the Time of Corona #5

For this week’s Blues in the Time of Corona, we’re going with Flesh and Bone, a song by Buddy Guy and Van Morrison on Buddy Guy’s 2015 Grammy nominated album Born To Play Guitar, which was dedicated to the late, great B B King.

Morrison and Guy share vocals and, as well as Buddy Guy’s sweet guitar, there are some lovely gospel-sounding harmonies. The chorus reminds us that:

This life is more than
Flesh and bone
Turn back now before you’re gone.

That seems to me to have a particular resonance at the moment. The world has been turned upside down and there’s a lot of suffering out there. We expected a lot of older people to be badly affected by the virus, but we’ve seen a lot of younger people dying as well. We’ve suddenly become aware of our own mortality. Having to stop work and being confined to home, watching the news and catching some of the anxiety of the day, has given us the opportunity to think more about some of the bigger questions of life.

So Flesh and Bone seems like a song for the moment.

Praying away the blues

These are troubled times for us all, for sure. The Coronvirus pandemic is sweeping the world and normal life is impossible as we self-isolate, keep our social distance, wash our hands, and try and keep ourselves and each other safe.

(Photo by Miguel Medina)

Suddenly we’re in a situation in which we feel out of control. For those of us in the wealthy parts of the world, life has never been so good – healthcare, nutrition, peaceable times, leisure and the ability to spend on non-necessities, overall are better than they’ve ever been in the history of the world. Apart from the small matter of the despoiled planet, which to many people still seems personally unthreatening, life is pretty good for most of us. But here we are, suddenly feeling vulnerable. We’re suddenly beginning to understand, just a little bit of the uncertainty that people in poverty in the two-thirds world face, who are threatened by the global pandemic of tuberculosis – it kills 4,000 people a day – or by malaria, which causes more than three hundred million acute illnesses and kills at least one million people every year – nearly 3,000 a day – or the hundreds of thousands displaced, injured or killed because of conflict.

For sure we need to take the warnings about this pandemic seriously for ourselves and others, but how do we cope with the fear and anxiety that can take root? Keb’ Mo’ comes to mind here – “get on your knees and pray.”

Which is clearly what Blind Willie Johnson did in the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which killed 50 million people worldwide. In his God Don’t Never Change, Johnson looks back to his experience of God in those times:

God in the time of sickness
God in the doctor too
In the time of the influenza
He truly was a God to you
Well he’s God, God don’t never change
He’s God, always will be God.

Here’s great version by Ashley Cleveland:

Prayer crops up a surprising amount in the blues – perhaps not surprising given its roots in the hardship and suffering of black communities. For people whose life choices are limited, who face hardship and troubles, often there is no option but to pray for help. Even Robert Johnson, often (mistakenly) more associated with the devil because of the crossroads myth, appeals to God in his song Cross Road Blues, “Asked the Lord above to have mercy; save poor Bob if you please.” Muddy Waters who, like many blues artists had grown up in the church, doesn’t seem to have lost at least some of what he learned at a young age, and knew where to turn when things got bad –  “I be’s troubled, Lord, I’m troubled, I’m all worried in my mind”, he sings in I Be’s Troubled.

Son House in his Preachin’ Blues says he “went into my room, I bowed down to pray”. Problem was, “the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away”, presumably the “old worried heart disease.” as he later referred to the blues. Same thing happens again for Son House in Death Letter Blues, where he’s in his room praying when he gets the terrible news that the woman he loved had died.

B B King, in the bluesy Servant’s Prayer, prays to the Lord to:

Keep me safe from hurt and harm
When I’m burdened or I’m lonely
Comfort me within Your arms.

Trixie Smith’s Praying Blues from the early 1920s, catches this note of needing to turn to prayer when trouble comes:

Hope you don’t know half the trouble I’ve seen…
Nobody knows but the good Lord and me,
Lordy, lord, won’t you hear my plea

We find Lightnin’ Hopkins in Prayin’ Ground Blues, also praying in a situation of some desperation:

Well, I went down to my prayin’ ground
Wooo, fell down on my bended knees
Now mama we ain’t got no home
Oh, the poor children runnin’ cryin’
Now mama we ain’t got no home
Take heed to Mother fair, trust in the Maker your Lord.

We get anxious, not only about ourselves, but about those we love. Bob Dylan’s Protect My Child expresses the prayer of every parent. More than ourselves we wish good things for our children. Here’s a great version by Susan Tedeschi:

Sometimes praying doesn’t seem to come easy, even when we want to – you remember Jesus’s disciples kept falling asleep on him when they should have been praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. Eric Bibb has a great version of the Rev Gary Davis song, I Heard the Angels Singing, where the singer is opposed by the devil:

What you reckon the devil said
I heard the angels singing
He said that heaven’s door is closed, go home don’t pray.

But, “I heard the angels singing,” and he presses on to the valley to pray, Bibb’s animated performance accompanying the victorious pray-er.

Then there’s Kelly Joe Phelps’s Down to the Praying Ground from his excellent Brother Sinner and the Whale album, where Phelps’s prayer is for forgiveness and mercy, a cry from a man who has exhausted his own resources.

The cry of distress to the Lord, the anxieties that disturb the mind, are all, of course, familiar to readers of the Psalms – Israel’s blues book.

In Psalm 6.6, we get “I am weary with my moaning; Every night I flood my bed with tears”. Psalm 38.17 says, “For I am ready to fall; And my pain is ever with me”. The Psalmist’s response to the injustice of life and the calamities that befall him and his people is to cry out to God, “O Lord; attend to my cry! Give ear to my prayer (Psalm 17:1); In my distress I called upon the Lord, And cried to my God for help (Psalm 18:6).

At such times in life, it seems the only thing to do, even for those of us who rarely pray or admit our need of God. The God of the Bible of course is the God of the needy, the oppressed, the afflicted, those with that “old worried heart disease”. As the Psalms writer says confidently in Psalm 120.1, “I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me”.

How God answers prayer, of course is a mysterious business. In fact, the whole business of prayer defies explanation. Why does God seem to answer our prayers sometimes and not to hear at other times? Why should God answer our prayers in the midst of the current pandemic when there’s a whole world of suffering out there?

One of the best approaches to this that I’ve seen comes from a song by Canadian blues singer, Colin Linden (and talented music producer, music director and songwriter). It’s called God Will Always Remember Your Prayers and is on his superb 2009 album From the Water.

Linden asserts “God will always remember your prayers”. This even “though it seems like he ain’t even there”. How many of us can identify with that? But Linden goes on:

“Just get on your knees and pray,
He might not answer right away
But God will always remember your prayers”

Linden notes what we’ve just been talking about, “We all pray our deepest prayer when trouble comes.” Ain’t that the truth? But insightfully, Linden suggests that God “only longs to hear us pray his will be done.” Our prayers are made from the limited perspective of our own circumstances and difficulties. Maybe God sees the bigger picture of our lives and we need to come to a place of trust. The song goes on:

“In this world understand that he might have a better plan
But he will always remember your prayers
God will always remember your prayers”

Not only might God not seem to answer your prayers, suggests Linden, he might actually leave you for a while “stranded”, not able to “find a way”, not able to “tell the darkness from the day”. Says Linden,

“He might leave you on your own
And let you find your way back home.”

So where does that leave us? The song’s last verse gets to the heart of things – when things are at their darkest and “you think your words can’t reach so far above”, well, maybe “all that you can give him is your love” – at this point, at an end of our own resources,

“The answer you’ve been waiting for
Is the peace down in your heart”
God will always remember your prayers”

There’s a serenity, Linden seems to suggest, that comes, after doing all we can do and all we’re supposed to do, from surrender to God’s “better plan” and a trust in God’s loving care that brings peace, even in the darkest of days. This, then, the song suggests, is what prayer is about – not about simply asking God to come and make things better (that’s our immediate inclination, and there’s nothing wrong with that) but getting ourselves to a point of trust in a God who loves, cares and who sees the end from the beginning. Linden’s chorus sums it up:

“I’m calling you Lord, I’m calling you Lord
I’m calling you Lord, Lord, Lord, calling you Lord
I’m waitin’ on you, I’m waitin’ on you
And I can’t do nothin’ till you come”

The last word, we’ll leave to Eric Bibb: I Want Jesus to Walk with Me.

Lonesome Christmas Blues?

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.

A Blues Odyssey: Part 2, Memphis

“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 10^th 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.

[to be continued…]

Prescription Blues

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’s T.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’s Broke and Hungry, or Big Bill Broonzy’s Starvation 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.”

B B King’s Legacy

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.