“A glorious awakening of music tradition” – Music Maker Relief Foundation’s Tim Duffy

Tim Duffy is a breath of inspiration, and what he and the Music Maker Relief Foundation are doing and have been doing for the past 30 years deserves widespread attention.

Music Maker Relief Foundation, based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, was founded in 1994 by Tim and Denise Duffy to “help the true pioneers and forgotten heroes of Southern music gain recognition and meet their day-to-day needs.” In addition, it wants to preserve these traditions and help them flourish by presenting them to the world.

Over the years, Music Maker has helped over 500 artists who were struggling, and in many cases, impoverished, get paying gigs and back onto their feet. It has produced over 200 albums of music from these artists, and recorded thousands of tracks. It is keeping an entire tradition alive.

“It’s like a glorious awakening of discovery of all this music you’ve never heard of,” Tim Duffy told me. “These guys stand in front of me for 45 minutes and change the world. You know, they have a body of work and want someone to document it, and they do this because they want the next generation to know about it. They know it’s important work but they don’t have the means to buy a tape recorder or get into a studio. And when I tell them about the Foundation and they’re open for it, it’s a tornado. It’s just locked down. There it is, lightning in a bottle!”

Our chat began by me asking Tim what Music Maker is all about. He told me that it’s a nonprofit organization, founded in 1994, that “tends to the roots of American music.” He described the deep poverty in which he has found many artists living in – “from outside the US, it’s hard to understand what extreme poverty is like in the United States.” Just getting by is hard if you’re trying to live on the $7,000 to $12,000 a year that Music Maker regularly finds artists subsisting on. So, says Tim, Music Maker provides small amounts to help get bills paid and get prescription medicine, and then, “when we get them working and get them gigs, that can easily double their annual income.”

Music Maker has been doing this work for many years now, and I wondered if the levels of poverty amongst aging artists had improved any.

“You know, I hate to say it, I think it’s worse. I think poverty gets worse in America. It’s always bad, but prices of food go higher, access to medical care was always tough, and I think poverty in housing is about impossible.” Some people, Duffy told me, are still living in cheap trailers that were built in the 1950s for elderly people, trailers that had a shelf life of five years. So, he said, “Over the years I’ve been doing it, I think the times are harder. Food insecurity is hard, but there are even food deserts. There’s not even access to healthy food.

“And rent – these artists used to be able to have rent for $100-$300 a month. After Katrina, little Freddy King was renting for $300, but now rent for not even a nice place in New Orleans is $1,500 or so. But their income hasn’t gone up.”

Add to that the decreasing number of places for these artists to play, whether it’s churches or the Chitlin circuit, and you have an increasingly tough situation. One that, Tim suggested, was felt by more than the artists he deals with – “we have a huge problem of starving children in America.” His view is that these problems are fixable – if there really was a will to do it. Sadly, “there doesn’t seem a public will to help our fellow man, the really impoverished people.”

Older models of charity have often ended up with wealthier people sweeping in as benefactors in a way that robs those they are trying to help of their dignity. How, I wondered, does Music Maker avoid this?

Tim was clear that the artists he has dealt with have not been asking for a handout, rather they need a hand up. “Number one thing they want is a gig, a place to perform. They can earn their own money. That is the greatest thing. And then it’s a slow process because we can only do very little by our sustenance program. We don’t have billions of dollars, we can’t hand out $20,000 a year to hundreds of artists. I wish I could, but I don’t have that kind of resource.

“So, there are other things that we do because people are disenfranchised. Like community building. We have a social worker who writes every month to the artists and introduces them to one another. And they meet and when they play together, they exchange phone numbers. It’s like joining a little congregation, like a guild, so that now a very remote Mississippi blues man is friends with a gospel artist in North Carolina; and they’re friends with a blues man in Detroit; and they all talk to each other, and they stay in touch. So, it’s community building. Everyone needs someone to talk to someone who understands them. Building those friendships is one of the interesting things that we do.”

So that’s Music Maker’s sustenance programme. Then, says Tim, “we have professional development where we help make CDs and get artist’s music released, get bios written and make them known – from being unseen artists, to known artists, a known quantity. And then we have an education program where we educate the world through exhibits. We have photo exhibits that go to a lot of cultural institutions. Over the last six years, we’ve done over 50 of them. So that is the essence. We’re trying to let the world know.”

Tim pointed to the uniquely African-American experience at the root of the blues. This music, he told me “was born in the South. It was born from very disenfranchised people and those conditions still exist today. And if you go into these small communities, there are literally the great, great, great, great grandsons and granddaughters of the artists that created this music that have held dear to the older traditions. And they are very special people because this music really isn’t popular within their communities, but they keep it alive. And so, we try to amplify their voices and after they pass, keep their voices amplified. The greatest gift that America has given to the arts is our American musical traditions, largely rooted in the South. So our focus is going back within that culture and promoting what Alan Lomax would call cultural equity.”

Tim Duffy clearly has a deep respect for the music, its tradition and the artists who keep that tradition alive. He was never into pop or rock music, and from his days as a folklore student at the University of North Carolina, he has been seeking to record and promote the music he has found in the American South, especially the Carolinas. He spoke warmly and admiringly of artists he had worked with, like Cootie Stark, John Lee Zeigler, Wille Mae Butler, Drink Small, Macavine Hayes, and Adolphus Bell.

“You know, those are a bunch of names most people have probably never heard of, but I would say is they’re just as important American artists as anybody you know. I’m a folklorist, I like going to the most real rooted, unknown thing – a lot of people like going to big concert halls and big festivals, but I’d rather be in someone’s living room. That’s what gets me excited.”

These living room recordings – “field recordings” – are what Tim Duffy has done since the early days of Music Maker. What has been important for him is trying to replicate exactly what he hears in front of him, without filtering it. He mentioned Mark Levinson, renown audio system designer, who “fell in love with my work and taught me about biaural recordings, gave me these extremely expensive, beautiful, rare microphones, and a way of recording where it’s like replicating what you hear in front of you.”

Duffy recalled the example of Alan Lomax, noted ethnomusicologist and recorder of folk music, who could “change the world with one mic and 500 pounds of recording gear.” The music Lomax recorded in places like Angola Prison in Louisiana or Haiti “is still as fresh and vibrant today.”

What, I wondered have been the milestones along the way, as Tim looks back over the last nearly thirty years?

“Well, there were a couple. Meeting Mark Levinson was great and then meeting Taj Mahal in 1995 and him reaching his hand to help me and the elder artists has been huge. And then we went on tour with Taj, did a 42-city tour in 1998 and ’99, and my wife had the great idea to collect email addresses and we collected thousands of addresses.

“And then in 2000, I looked at Fat Possum records and I thought they were just so incredible, but I knew we couldn’t do what they were doing. I couldn’t sell records. So my wife and I decided we were going to really focus on being a nonprofit, instead of trying to be an independent record label. And that was a keystone moment. And here we are, 20 years later, still doing it.

“And I think the next key thing was meeting Freeman Vines. And when I got out of my car the first day I met him and saw his yard, I knew. When I had met Guitar Gabriel and a few others, I knew I was in the presence of a genius. But I didn’t have all the skills that I have now. And so when I met someone as smart as Freeman, that first day I could envisage the book and an exhibition. I talked to him about it and we had a lot of dialogue and then we spent five years putting it together.

“And I’m glad we did that. I don’t know what the next big idea I’ll come up with, put that kind of resources to. But that decision, to work with Freeman, was not a real popular decision in my organization or my board. And when we released the book [Hanging Tree Guitars], a lot of people were thinking, what the heck are we doing, going into a pandemic, releasing a book. But, we sold out of the first run of the book in five weeks. And so that little book has kept Music Maker going for the next year.”

Along the way, Music Maker Relief Foundation has caught the attention of some big names in the music industry, who have been prepared to lend a hand. Mark Levinson introduced Tim to Eric Clapton in 1995 which helped him to get a record deal with GRP records [a jazz record label founded by Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen in 1978].

“And then through Taj Mahal, I met his friend and producer, John Porter, who was recording B.B. King’s Deuces Wild record. Then, in LA, Taj introduced me to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. B.B. introduced me to Joe Cocker and took me over to England and which resulted in me spending time with Eric Clapton again, and Jeff Beck and Van Morrison and all these people.

“B.B. King wrote the introduction to my first book, Portraits and Songs from the Roots of America. He thought the idea of Music Maker was fabulous, and I spent a lot of time traveling with him, and he helped me form the ideas of the foundation. So, Taj Mahal opened that door for me and Taj lends his helping hand to a lot of people.” In the foreword to this first book of Duffy’s photographs, B.B. King wrote, “By documenting the faces and the deep, soulful eyes of the people who make the music I love, these photographs preserve a dimension of blues culture that could easily be lost forever.”

Beyond his work with Music Maker, Tim Duffy is also a master photographer who has documented the artists he has worked with over the years, and used unusual and very effective photographic techniques to do so. His latest book, Hanging Tree Guitars, a collaborative effort between himself, Freeman Vines, a luthier-artist and bluesman, and Zoe Van Buren, a folklorist, features stunning photographs of Vines’s work, documenting the guitars made by Vines out of wood from a tree that had been used for lynching. The photographs utilize collodion wet plate processing, an early form of photographic processing which gives them an aged look, and seems particularly suitable for the sombre subject matter.

“When I wanted to present Freeman to the world, I knew if I just took straight colour photographs of the images, it would’ve been nice, but it wouldn’t reflect my 25-year journey of looking at artists and how I see them. And I wanted people, when Freeman talked about parallel universes and the root of the lynched man and the wood, I wanted them to see something horrifying. I wanted to express the horror that I felt in Freeman felt through my art. And I worked for five years at that. And I think it did.”

If you’d like to know some more about this project, start by reading our interview with Freeman Vines here.

Tim Duffy began his work with Guitar Gabriel, who had been inactive in the music industry for many years, had received no royalties for his music,and was impoverished. He required almost daily assistance from Duffy, who provided transportation to medical appointments, money, and food for Gabriel and his wife. When I asked Tim what was the motivation for that, he was much more interested in telling me how his encounter with Guitar Slim had changed his life, how he had learned that there was no place in the music industry for elderly African-American artists, and how amazing Guitar Slim and all the other artists he had subsequently met were.

His focus is clearly on recognizing the worth and value of the artists he works with, sensing that when he grants funding, he doesn’t have to be prescriptive, because they know what they need to do for themselves. “And so we set up what I thought was a whole new model of folklore, of dealing with traditional artists – supporting them, recording them, and professional development and education. And we really haven’t veered very much from that. You know, it’s kind of like a church in a sense, it’s a family organization. We feel like a family.

“And then you connect fans with the music, like-minded people that have extra income that can support the foundation. And I have donors that have been donating to me since 1994, that haven’t missed a year, and they do it because they say it’s made their life a much better. So, it works on both sides. It’s just like when you go to church and a good preacher is talking to a whole congregation, but you feel like he’s talking directly to you and you leave feeling uplifted. And I think that the experience we create both for our donors and for the artists is an uplifting situation.”

The whole Music Maker enterprise is an uplifting one. As was my conversation with Tim Duffy. If you’re reading this, you’re a music fan – so scoot over to https://musicmaker.org/ and learn more about the fabulous work the Foundation does. And while you’re there, do your bit and buy some CDs, a book of fabulous photographs or just donate.

Photo Credits: Drink Small by Jimmy Williams; Hands on guitar by Axel Kustner; Others by Tim Duffy

Elizabeth King’s Living in the Last Days is a gift for us all.

“Her words have a clear message, but her deep feeling could move anyone.”
VICE Magazine

Photo: Houston Cofield

Elizabeth King is a remarkable woman. She was the female lead of a successful, previously all-male gospel group, The Gospel Souls, in the 1960s and 70s, which had a significant gospel hit on the D-Vine Spirituals label, I Heard the Voice.

She quit singing professionally to raise her children, and now, after a hiatus of nearly 50 years, she has gone into the studio to record a fabulous new blues-tinged gospel album, Living in the Last Days, on Bruce Watson’s new Bible and Tire label. [check out our interview with Bruce here]

Her powerful vocal performance on the record, reminiscent at times of Mavis Staples, is supported by a top-class band assembled by Watson (Will Sexton and Matt Ross-Spang (guitars), George Sluppick (drums), Mark Edgar Stuart (bass), and Al Gamble (organ)) and features the excellent harmonies of Christopher and Courtney Barnes from The Sensational Barnes Brothers. It’s a funky, blues, soul-filled pot of rich gospel fare.

Down at the Crossroads called Ms. King at her Memphis home, and asked her about making the album. She said first of all that this album was her debut solo album and it’s been forty-seven years since she stopped singing professionally. She told me that she was “just sitting at home one day,” when Pastor Shipp, the founder of the 1970s D-Vine Spirituals label, who had recently started collaborating with Bruce Watson, called her up. “And he asked me, did I want to record again? I told him, yeah. That’s how it came to be.”

From initial call to getting into the studio was very quick – “Yeah, no time for rehearsal or nothing,” said Elizabeth.

I asked her about the songs on the album, all terrific, positive songs. She told me that there are some that she has been singing for many years, and some that Bruce Watson brought to her. “And then there are a couple of songs on there I did myself that I have been singing from when I was, you know, a child growing up. The song Walk with Me, my mom used to sing that to me. And then, I got a song, Blessed Be the Name, I kinda got most of that out of the Bible.”

She sings this song unaccompanied on the album, a quite spine-tingling performance. The song tells the story of Job, perhaps a story that not a lot of people are familiar with these days. Job is a character in the Old Testament book of the same name, who suffers tremendous loss, including his family and all his possessions, but somehow is able to say, “God gives and takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

“To me,” she told me, the story “means that we can be blessed, in that God gives us a thing, and he has a right to take it away. And, I take the role of Job to just be patient. And when things are going good, or going bad, you just have to be patient.”

That’s a lesson that Elizabeth King has learned through the ups and downs of life. “Well, I kind of learned it mostly through my lifetime. And when I was a child – because my mom, you know, would tell me she gonna give us something, but you got to wait for it. So, as I got older. I found out that if you really want something, just wait, it’ll come.”

Elizabeth King was born in 1944 and grew up in Charleston, in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Life wasn’t easy, with the young Elizabeth having to help the family pick cotton before going to school each day. Positive person that she is, she had nothing negative to say about that.

“Well, to me it was fun, I guess, because that was all I knew. And we had to walk a long way to school and I would get tired walking, so my brothers would carry me because I was younger than they were. But it was a lot of picking cotton and chopping cotton. I loved to chop cotton. It really wasn’t so hard for me because I guess I was the only girl in the family and my brothers kinda spoiled me a little bit.”

I mentioned one of the songs on the album to her, Testify, which is a rocking, upbeat number. I wondered if, looking back over the years, this song of a testimony to God’s goodness and God’s guiding hand, reflects her own experience?

She told me that she had recorded a version of this song back in 1970, but was keen to have it on this new album, though rearranged somewhat. “It’s been a part of my life, because I’ve gone through quite a bit. I got fifteen children, and I’ve gone through three accidents. So, I do have a testimony.”

Elizabeth King quit recording music in the mid-seventies to concentrate on family life. She told me she has fifteen children, 57 grandchildren and 33 great-grandchildren. And she is proud of every one of them, including some of her grandchildren who are now recording artists in their own right.

“When my children were small, I stopped. Let’s see, what year was that? It’d be around, 1970, maybe 1972, and an opportunity for travel overseas came. But my children, my older two, were small and I didn’t want to leave them. So, I stayed at home to raise my children. Everybody said ‘you won’t get a chance to do your dream if you have to wait until your kids get grown.’ But I still have an opportunity. I just still believe I would have an opportunity to sing, you know?”

And here she is, all these years later, having just made this wonderful album. Not that she had quit singing entirely – for many years she has been singing in her church choir and singing solos. But “the only music and singing I know is a spiritual song and they call it a gospel song.” She was never interested in sing the blues or R&B.

“I guess because my heart just wasn’t in it. I didn’t like going to parties and stuff like that when I was young, I just didn’t like it because I always was afraid of drunk people.”

I asked Ms. King why music is important to her, and in particular, why gospel music is so important to her. She told me that it was her way of communicating with God and the source of God’s power in her life – to help her “be a better person. That’s what inspires me.”

And what does she think is at the heart of gospel music? The music, the feeling, the words?

“The words mostly would count for me. The music is good, don’t get me wrong. But it’s the words that carry the message for me. Because you know, you got some songs that they call gospel songs but they really don’t have too much of a meaning. But when you sing songs like Precious Lord or Amazing Grace, when you sing songs like that, it touches people’s heart. If you do it from your heart it’s going to reach the heart of any man, whether he’s saved or unsaved, and you can connect to that spirit.”

She had mentioned the accidents that had affected her life and I asked in particular about the one back in 1969, that was very serious.

“That one was a serious accident. I worked for a florist at the time, and a man hit me head on. I stayed in the hospital, I think, around 17 days. I really couldn’t remember anybody coming to visit me, but there was this one priest in the hospital that would come in every morning and ask me, ‘My child. Can I pray with you today?’ I would say, Yes. And so, when I came to myself, I was asking the staff, you know, the nurses about him. And they said that they didn’t have anybody on their staff like that. So, I said, who was this? Now I never could see his face, so I just described his body and what he had on and all of that. And they said, ‘we don’t have anybody like this on the staff.’ So, I just started praying and I just knew it was God. I knew I was in bad shape. I really was; I had to learn to walk all over again.”

With her remarkable recovery, Elizabeth King said she “dedicated my life to God, to my singing and to try to encourage people. My job now is just try to encourage people…when you’re going through something, just turn to God. If you don’t know him, get to know him.”

I wondered how Ms. King had got on with the musicians when she’d gone into the studio to make this record, and how had she learned the songs so quickly.

“Oh, they had the music all lined up for me and I don’t know, I just sing to the music! I used to be real fast learner when I was young, but the process of learning now is quite a bit slower, as I get older. But it wasn’t hard for me to adapt to the music because, you know, I never stopped singing. I’ve been singing all the time. I just hadn’t recorded.”

The album finishes with a very cool, bluesy version of one of my favourite songs, You Got to Move, famously recorded by Mississippi Fred McDowell and then, of course, the Rolling Stones on their Sticky Fingers album. I’ve always thought of that song as a resurrection song. When the Lord gets ready, you gotta move – it always reminds me of Ezekiel’s valley of the dry bones. Elizabeth agreed and said, “I would say no matter what nobody tried to do to keep you here, when it’s time for God to say you got to move, you got to move. I just love it.”

I asked her about another song on the album, A Long Journey, another one about Christian hope which talks about going home to get your crown. Elizabeth said, “My mom used to sing that to me when I was a child. Now that was a long time ago because I’m 76 years old! And that song has been with me all these years, but she used to tell me that I’m gonna leave you one day. I’m going on a long journey and I won’t be back. And I tell you, that song, it has stayed with me in the heart, and anytime I record an album, A Long Journey going to be on there.”

We finished up our conversation by talking about Elizabeth’s faith, which is clearly central to her life and being. She told me, “It’s been important to me because of the things that I suffered, things that happened to me, a lot of things that I had to go through. My faith made me strong about suffering, that’s what made me strong.” Life has not been easy for her, but she is certain that it was God that kept her going in the hard times and it was her faith that sustained her. “I believe in God, God gives me strength. And that would keep me going.”

Elizabeth King is a remarkable woman. She is positive, upbeat, ready to take on the next challenge and opportunity in life. She is a breath of fresh air. Here’s what she finished our chat with:

“Every day I get up, I thank God. Just let me be able to just take care of myself you know, and I just thank him. And I’m going to keep on trusting him until the time comes when he says that you gotta move!”

Living in the Last Days is testimony to Elizabeth King’s remarkable spirit and faith. Not only that, it’s a top-notch album, full of great songs, music that touches you, and Ms. King’s powerful vocal performance. It’s a gift for us all.

Meet the Music Podcast: Down at the Crossroads’ 7 recommendations for getting started with the blues

Check out this episode of Meet the Music: A Capella to Zydeco.

If you happen to be new to the blues, then here’s your way in. Seven classic songs to get you started on what will be a life-ling appreciation!

“Dr. Burnett shares a little history of the Blues and his deep love for the Blues.  In our conversation, we discussed the impact of women blues singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Memphis Minnie.  Listen as Dr. Burnett lists his suggested artists and songs for new listeners.”

Click for podcast

And here are my seven recommendations for getting started in listening to the blues:

Robert Johnson: Kind Hearted Woman, recorded in 1936, just a couple of years before he died as a young man of 27, poisoned, it seems by a jealous husband. Johnson was a jaw-droppingly good guitarist and a fine singer. He only recorded 29 songs, but Johnson has probably been the most influential blues artist on the whole of rock and roll. Eric Clapton says Johnson was his most formative influence and he has a great version of Kind Hearted Woman on his Me and Mr Johnson album from 1996. Keb’ Mo’ who is one of today’s great blues artist also has a fine version on his 1994 Keb’ Mo’ album.

Blind Willie Johnson: The Soul of A Man recorded in 1930. Willie Johnson was an exponent of gospel blues, and his slide playing, which he did with a penknife, was just outstanding. He’s a remarkable singer, at times a sweet tenor, at other time utterly raw. His music is making its way around the universe on the Voyager space probe launched in 1977 on a golden disk containing a sample of earth’s music. Quite what aliens might make of Johnson’s eerie slide playing and moaning on his song Dark Was the Night, is anyone’s guess! (Check out Tom Waits’ version of Soul of a Man on the 2016 tribute album, God Don’t Never Change, with various artists including Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Lucinda Williams, and Luther Dickinson.)

Mississippi John Hurt: Louis Collins John Hurt was a sharecropper who recorded some songs in 1928, which were not terribly successful. He was then rediscovered in 1963 and recorded a number of albums and performed on the university and coffeehouse concert circuit before he passed away. By all accounts he was a lovely man, and his guitar playing is just delightful. (The version here is Lucinda Williams with Colin Linden on guitar on a tribute album called Avalon Blues. Check out also Rory Block’s tribute album – just her and her guitar, also Avalon Blues)

Memphis Minnie: In My Girlish Days. Before the men began playing the blues, it was the women who were the big stars – women like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Victoria Spivey. Memphis Minnie was a performer, a guitar player and singer, mostly in the 1930s and 40s. The poet Langston Hughes described her electric guitar as “a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill” – but she was quite a talent. I’ve gone for her In My Girlish Days. You can hear a great version of this on Rory Block’s 2020 album, Prove it on Me, where she plays tribute to the women of the blues. Rory Block is an outstanding acoustic guitar player, and check out also her tribute to these women in her 2018 album, A woman’s Soul: a Tribute to Bessie Smith.

B.B. King: The Thrill Has Gone. This is B.B. King’s signature tune. King was a great singer, but an outstanding guitarist – one of those guitar players where you can tell who it is from just hearing a single note. The song is on a number of albums, but you can find it on a 2006 album of the same name, along with other great B.B. King numbers.

Muddy Waters: Hootchie Cootchie Man. Recorded in 1954. Muddy Waters is known as the father of Chicago blues. He was a Mississippi sharecropper who moved to Chicago in the 1940s and popularized electric blues. He has been a hugely influential figure on rock’n’roll, and the insistent riff that drives Hootchie Chootchi Man is one of the most famous in all blues music. Eric Clapton has a great version on his 1994 From the Cradle album.

Allman Brothers Band: Statesboro Blues on At Fillmore East from 1971 is an old Blind Willie McTell song. Bob Dylan has a famous song which says, nobody sings the blues like Blind Willie McTell. The Allman Brothers’ version has become a classic version of the song and rightly so, featuring Duane Allman’s fabulous slide guitar playing.

Larkin Poe: God Moves on the Water, on  2020’s Self-Made Man. Larkin Poe are two exceptionally talented sisters, Rebecca and Megan Lovell, both amazing guitarists and wonderful singers. They really bring the blues up to date with their own compositions and the way they cover old blues songs. And they are one of the most exciting bands you’d see live. God Moves on the Water is an amended version of an old Blind Willie Johnson song.

 

Joanna Connor: “The blues is honest music. There’s no pretense involved and that’s appealing.”

It’s time for everyone to sit up and take notice of Joanna Connor. And with her new album, 4801 South Indiana Avenue, produced by none other than Joe Bonamassa, it feels like an already successful career is opening up in new ways.

Those in the know have seen the YouTube videos that have gone viral, with her incredible slide guitar playing – check out Walkin’ Blues, 8m views and counting – and have listened with pleasure to some of the thirteen albums she’s released over the past 30 years. But 4801 South Indiana Avenue ought to bring her much wider attention.

Joanna Connor has been paying her dues for many years, plying her trade in the blues clubs of her adopted home town, Chicago. She moved there in 1984, and has played with, and learned from, the likes of James Cotton, Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. Shortly after arriving in Chicago, she began playing at the premiere blues club, Kingston Mines, where she has continued to perform three nights a week until the advent of the pandemic. She’s been a regular at major blues and music festivals worldwide, and those who know her music will hail her as one of the world’s best blues rock guitarists, with her innovative, jazzy, funky approach.

Of her early days in Chicago, she has said, “It was my university. I went out every night of the week. Within a month I had my first gig with the legendary Johnny Littlejohn. A few weeks later I became a part of Dion Payton and the 43rd St Bluesband. We were the house band at the Checkerboard Lounge, on the south side of Chicago, then owned by Buddy Guy. That’s when my schooling kicked into overdrive. I played with Buddy, Junior Wells, Otis Rush, Sammy Lawhorn, Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, Magic Slim, Son Seals, Lonnie Brooks, Koko Taylor, just to name a few. I was blessed.”

Her new album on Joe Bonamassa’s new independent blues record label Keeping The Blues Alive, follows 2019’s excellent Rise, and was produced by Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith at Ocean Way Recording Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. It’s an absolutely top-notch set of blues rock that clearly has a Chicago blues heritage, yet sounds completely fresh and modern. Connor’s killer slide guitar and vocals are augmented by some characteristically fine guitar work by Bonamassa and a tight-knit top-class band, consisting of Josh Smith (guitar), Reese Wynans (keyboards), Cavin Turner (bass), and drummer Lemar Carter (drums).

It’s superbly produced, but at the same time, it’s packed with raw, high-energy musicianship.

Down at the Crossroads got chatting to Ms. Connor about the album. I congratulated her on such a fine piece of work, and asked, first of all about the record’s title.

She told me she had been very pleased about the way it had turned out: “I mean, the whole time we were doing it, it felt special and it felt wonderful. So, in the whole process, I thought, Oh, this is going to be good! And now I’m very pleased that people love it.

“As for the title, 4801 South Indiana Avenue was the address of Teresa’s lounge, which went away in about 1986. I did actually play there a few times, but, you know, Teresa’s had Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and it’s really a historic place.”

Theresa’s Lounge was one of the best of the bars that had opened on Chicago’s South Side to showcase the emerging sound of Chicago blues after the Second World War. African Americans from rural Mississippi had begun to migrate north, in the hope of a better life, and the musicians amongst them adapted the Delta blues they had played to a new form of blues reflecting their new urban environment.

Theresa Needham

Owner Theresa Needham regularly booked people like Junior Wells and Buddy Guy, and quickly established the venue as one of the best places to see and hear the blues played. Over time its faithful local clientele was joined by people from all over the world attracted by the calibre of music being played.

Choosing to reference this iconic Chicago venue in the album’s title nails its colours firmly to the mast. Connor said it was the most bluesy record she’s ever recorded. I asked about the songs chosen – they are mostly covers of obscure blue songs.

“Well, Josh Smith, Joe Bonamassa and I sat there, and just went through maybe fifteen or sixteen songs and then kind of narrowed it down to the ones we chose. We all know a lot about the blues in terms of the history and the artists, but Joe is like a walking encyclopedia! So he really knows how to dig into some of the deeper catalogues.”

You do get the impression with Bonamassa, a self-confessed guitar and technology nerd, that he’s likely to dive deep into the history and background of any music he’s involved in. Just watch his recent movie, Guitar Man, where, at one point he claims not to really be a blues musician, but then later on he’s travelling around Mississippi looking for the roots of the blues. You can well imagine the man getting deep into the detail.

I wondered if there was any song that Joanna particularly likes on the album?

“It’s hard to choose because they all bring something different to the table. Some have got that Hound Dog Taylor boogie-type thing, some have great energy and some have got that slinky horn thing. But I do like the single a lot, I Feel So Good, I just feel like it’s got a lot of fire to it and I’m pleased with my playing on that too.”

I Feel So Good features some incendiary slide playing by Connor, taken at a tremendous pace with deadly accuracy. And as she says, her singing is fiery. It’s a song you can’t help moving to, or smiling as you listen. And it’ll be sensational when played live.

I also love the Albert King one, For the Love of a Man, where the horns give it huge sound. With horns and guitars blasting you might wonder about how the vocals fare – no problem for Connor, whose singing on this album is stellar. We expect a Joanna Connor album to blow us away with the guitar work, but her vocal performance here is maybe the best we’ve heard of her. On songs like I Feel So Good and Please Help, she sounds like she is really cutting loose. That, apparently, came with Bonamassa’s encouragement.

“Joe told me, people know you can really play the guitar, but the vocals are gonna surprise everyone. And that was Joe just pushing me, you know, pushing me to the limit of what I could do with my voice. So, he knew what he was doing, I think.”

Photo: Marty Moffatt

Bonamassa’s stamp is clearly on the album. So, how did it come about that Joanne and Joe started working together?

“He saw some of my videos – people post videos of me online, and Joe put one of my videos on his sites, on social media and he said something about my talent and that I deserve to be recognized – something like that. So I reached out to him through direct message. I’m like, Hi, this is Joanna Connor! And thank you. And this is my contact information, if you ever want to get in touch with me. And he did immediately. Like within few hours. Then it just started rolling. That was in May of 2019. And then, Joe said, we gotta get into the studio, I’d like to record a record with you. And so that’s how we started the conversation.”

The way the album has turned out, with such an evident definition, I asked Joanna if she and Joe had a clear vision for the record at the outset.

“I had no clue. He asked me, but then he said, listen, I have a vision for this record. I want to make a record – I’m being selfish – that I want to listen to. And he said, I want to bring out all your best qualities throughout the whole record. Then he asked me, could I trust him in the project? I’m like, sure, you have a great reputation and done so much. So I let him take control and I just tried to do the best that I could.

“Joe brought a lot of humor, a lot of very dry humor, which I like; a little sarcasm, which I can totally relate to. And so that helped. And he was just a straight shooter, you know?

“With the guitar stuff, basically we’d just try to get a sound. He would give me an idea like, Hey, why don’t you try to do a Hound Dog Taylor type thing, be real raw. And the other times he’d just let me play and wouldn’t say anything. But with the vocals, he was much more hands-on.”

In the liner notes, Joanna says that Joe painted pictures for her with each cut, and then she “fleshed those stories out.” I wondered what that really means?

“It was kind of like Joe was a movie director. Most of the songs are about men and women: so Joe painted a scenario to try to get me in the moment of the song – ‘it’s like you walk in the club and your man is there with another woman.’ Every song he’d make up a scenario for me.”

In working with such a top-class band and Joe Bonamassa playing guitar, I asked Joanna if – despite being a very seasoned professional, and successful, performer – she was at all nervous in that environment to start with?

“Oh, extremely! Beforehand, as the whole months would go by, I was like, is this really going to happen? I was thinking, Whoa, I’m walking into a huge platform here with these legendary players and top-notch studio people. Of course, I’ve done it, I’ve played with some legendary people along the way, but still, this was something brand new for me. And I kinda had to coach myself down the aisle when I was on the plane, you know! But you got to give it your best and let go of these nerves and just let it happen. But I’m kind of nervous about new situations anyways. People always say, Oh, I can’t tell that you’re nervous. Well, if you were inside my brain, it’s a zoo in there!

“But once I started laying down those grooves and playing, they were all such nice guys, they were very down to earth. You never know, because people like that might be condescending, but they were totally cool. And we just had a blast and we were all in one room so it was kinda like being on stage.”

I wanted to know a bit about Joanna’s blues background. As she told me, she’s played with some legendary blues artists and spent her career playing in Chicago blues clubs. What, I asked her, is the continual drawing power of the blues? Why is this music so powerful, and why does it still attract people?

“Blues is the music of the soul. It’s the music that came from pain, sorrow and suffering. But also joy, from a group of people that had to deal with the harshest of harsh things. And I think all great music, unfortunately, usually comes from that kind of suffering. I think it really just speaks to the human emotion. And then, you know, there are the rhythmic qualities. But I think what draws you in is, when it’s played right, it’s honest music. There’s no pretense involved and I think that’s appealing.”

We’d all agree with that. And that’s why I suppose, the blues have transcended its original context, and people all over the world and in different situations can respond to it. What drew Joanna Conner to the blues when she was younger?

“My mother was a huge music lover. She wasn’t a mainstream person – she loved jazz and blues and rock. My mother had me when she was 32 – in those days, kind of old. I was her first kid. She was born in 1930, and by the time I was around she could have been listening to show music or something really corny, but she was really up on everything. And she brought that to me and I heard it my whole life. So it was part of what I grew up listening to.”

The young Joanna Connor starting to play guitar, was also down to her mother. “I woke up one day and she’s like, there is something for you in the living room, you’re going to play guitar. Really? I never had asked her for one!

“I had a strange journey with the guitar because I started off playing classical. Then I played acoustic. I had a teacher that taught me ragtime, Piedmont blues, Delta blues, and then the slide. After that I switched to electric and started singing in a band. But I really could never solo, that escaped me, although I was always a very good rhythm guitar player. So eventually when I was 22 and moved to Chicago, I said, listen, I gotta really focus on how to solo. It all came in stages, but I think I always had a good feel for music. I was always playing an instrument and singing. It’s just in my DNA in some way. But I worked hard at it too.”

When you listen to Connor’s previous album, Rise, it’s much more varied musically than this latest one, quite jazzy and funky in places – you’ve got all those musical influences that she imbibed from she was a child coming through there. So although 4801 South Indiana Avenue is an out and out blues album, Joanna Connor is not simply a blues artist, she’s a musician capable of adapting her playing to a range of genres, when the need arises.

She’s had a long career and a successful one. I wondered how it has been for here as a woman operating in what is often a genre dominated by men?

“My younger brother and I were talking and he said, well, you know, you have a strong personality! I guess I do! So that was one thing that carried me through. I wasn’t timid about things – not that I don’t get nervous, but I feel like I will stand up for myself, no question about it. But it was kind of lonely, because it’s mostly men and you’re never quite in the boys’ club. So, you’re definitely walking a path by yourself. And especially when I started, there was really just less than a handful of women playing an instrument like that.”

Joanna Conner is an incredibly hardworking professional musician, playing around 200 shows a year. Before, of course, the pandemic stopped everything in its tracks. And she’s been doing that for an awfully long time. She clearly loves what she does. What is it about performing at this high level that excites her?

“You know, the first time I ever really played with a band when I was seventeen. I was freaking out for a few days before the gig, but as soon as the lights on the stage went on and the people were there and the band started playing, I swear, I said, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life! I absolutely fell in love with it.

“First and foremost, it’s playing with a great band that brings me the most joy. And then if the audience is there with us, then it could be really transcendent and special. But it’s first the band, that interaction of musicians that really brought me into playing music.”

Not having that over this past year, though, has clearly been a frustration. Although she and her band played a few outdoors, private-hire shows last year, it’s basically been over a year without performing.

“It’s been strange. I haven’t not played music for more than three weeks at a time in forty years. I’ve been through a multitude of emotions. Sometimes I play my guitar now and I want to cry. And then other times I’m like, well, it’s good to take a break. The thing that’s kind of disconcerting is there’s a lot of famous clubs that are not going to reopen all around the States. I mean, when you become a musician, there’s no guarantee of anything, you’re always living on the edge. And so that part I’m sort of used to, but I’ve never been in any situation like this. There have been economic downturns, there was nine-eleven and so on, but for all of us this is an unprecedented time.”

And it’s a great pity that Joanna doesn’t have the opportunity to take this record out on the road for the time being. These are songs that, with Joanna’s energy and commitment, will fire up audiences for sure, creating an electric atmosphere. But hopefully, with vaccines and good sense prevailing, we’ll get through this, and we’ll get to experience the exhilarating energy of a Joanna Connor performance. Until then, just get the album, turn up the volume and let these classic-but new songs bring the blues to life for you in new ways.

M.C. Records’ Mark Carpentieri is optimistic about the future of blues and roots music.

Mark Carpentieri is the man behind M.C. Records, which he started in 1991. Previously a radio presenter on a weekly blues program in New York, Mark started the label to record his own band, Somethin’ Blue, in which he was a drummer. After signing Mississippi bluesman Big Jack Johnson in 1996, M.C. Records has gone from strength to strength, distributing all over the world and being recognized for the quality of its recordings. Punching far above its weight, the label has made a big contribution to the blues scene, and has been nominated for six Grammy Awards, and has won or been nominated for over 30 Blues Music Awards. In 2006, M.C. Records received The Blues Foundation Blues Label of the Year Award.

I got talking to Mark recently to find out more about the work M.C. Records has done over the years. I started by asking Mark first of all what the focus of the label is, what his philosophy or approach to music was, and he told me that for him it has always been about trying to discover what the artist is really passionate about in what they’re doing, and trying to help them articulate that.

“So, you might have two different types of blues releases, from, say, a Joanna Connor, which is blues rock, and then a Kim Wilson, that’s really retro Chicago blues, and they’re quite different, but they both represent those genres in the best possible light.” Mark tries to facilitate his artists doing what they do in the best possible way. And he’s pleased about the reputation that M.C. Records has gained.

“We don’t release a lot of records. I like to say they are all killer, no filler! That’s really important to me – that whatever I put out, people would really respond to it. And people do tell me that. And I’m really happy when I hear that.”

And he’s been doing this for a very long time – over 30 years, quite a feat for an independent label in today’s music industry. This industry has changed beyond all recognition since M.C. Records started up, so I put it to Mark that there must have been times when he thought that the rate of change was just was too much, that it was all getting too hard.

“It certainly has been challenging, especially over the last ten years. Things have really changed a lot. It’s been helpful to have the right kind of artists that people love and the artists themselves are proud of the work that they do. And they tour a lot so they can sell their CDs on the gigs and that always helps.

“But I think, especially around, 2009, 2010, things became very difficult. Odetta passed away in 2008, and then another artist that I had worked with very closely, Marie Knight, passed away in 2009. We were about to go in the studio with her again, and I was going to be in her touring band, and I was really looking forward to it. We had had so much nice love for the Marie Knight record. That was a challenging time, I must admit. I think it was really around that time, I had to think whether I wanted to continue the label or not.”

Marie Knight was a gospel singer, born in 1920, who toured with Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the 1940s, before going solo as a gospel singer and then recording some R&B songs in the 50s and 60s. She returned to gospel music in the 1970s. Her album Let Us Get Together is an album of Rev. Gary Davis songs and features Larry Campbell doing wondrous things on guitar accompaniment, outplaying Gary Davis, if that’s possible. Campbell is an extremely talented multi-instrumentalist, who was part of Bob Dylan’s band for many years, and the combination of Knight and Campbell on this album brings out the very best in these songs.

“I was working with Marie. I had been her manager for years and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to record her because I was her manager.  So, I was trying to figure out what we were going to do, and she only wanted to do gospel. She didn’t want to do blues, she didn’t want to do any of that. And so, as I was looking around, the idea of Rev. Gary Davis came to my mind, and ironically, he’s buried in my hometown of Lynbrook New York.

“So I listened to these gospel songs and I sent them to her, and she loved them. And then it was about trying to figure out who could work with her. At the time she was booked by Concerted Efforts. And the owner, Paul Kahn, suggested I contact Larry Campbell. I didn’t know if that would be possible – Larry had worked with Bob Dylan, you know, he was a big guy! But he really wanted to do it. So, we ended up recording, and then Kim Wilson guested on two tracks. It’s a record that really stands up. I mean, I listen to it not just because I made it but because it’s really enjoyable. It’s really well played. Larry plays the guitar, and also plays the violin. Catherine Russell’s on that record too [Russell is a wonderful American jazz singer]. She sings two tracks with her, which is great.”

When Marie Knight made Let Us Get Together, she was getting on, maybe around 87 years old – Mark said she never would admit to her age! – but her voice sounds great, strong and confident, and she really imbues these songs with a great deal of life and joy. I asked him about working with Marie and how he’d met her.

“Well, what happened was we were doing the tribute to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Shout, Sister Shout, [a set of various top artists covering Rosetta Tharpe songs] and that was back in 2002. We were recording it and I forget who suggested it, maybe Maria Muldaur, and she said, you should contact Marie Knight. And of course, I said what everyone else would have said, is she still alive? Because she was a contemporary of Sister Rosetta. So I ended up getting a phone number and got speaking to her. But I was thinking, how do I know she’s going to be able to sing?

“Anyway, I talked to her and she didn’t sound weak or frail. She was cautious, but interested. She was very vibrant, so I just said, okay, let’s do it! Let’s see if this works. And I just took a leap of faith and she came down to the studio and she brought her piano player in, her piano player from the church. She was great, and a lot of people think that’s the highlight of the record; her version of Didn’t It Rain is so authentic.

“And then I was managing her, and she would do shows and she would take the bus and was determined to travel by herself! She was something else! So, it was really kind of amazing. I used to visit her in the hospital after she had her stroke. But the last time I saw her was in January of 2009, when we went to the BBC in New York City and she did an interview. Afterwards we had lunch and I said, I’ll see you later. And that was it.

“She was supposed to sing at Odetta’s Memorial service, and the day before we were trying to contact Marie. It ended up her sister called me up, saying that she had had a stroke, she’s in the hospital, and she never recovered after that. She passed away in August.”

I asked Mark if he had the sense that Marie had a strong faith?

“Oh, absolutely. She had a very strong faith. She really dedicated her life to God and she really felt that power. And I think that’s why she only wanted to sing gospel songs. She had some minor R&B hits in the fifties and early sixties but she just didn’t want to do that. She just didn’t feel comfortable singing those songs. I was glad I was able to find an outlet for her through Rev. Gary Davis.”

I was keen to hear about Mark’s experience with Odetta. Ian Zack has just written a terrific biography of Odetta (Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest), which brings out the absolutely massive contribution that Odetta made to American music, which is very often overlooked. Mark Carpentieri comes into the story and the book towards the end, with him working with Odetta when she was in her late sixties, long after her time in the limelight as an icon of the folk world had passed. Working with Odetta, Mark told me was “a joy and a privilege.”

“At a certain point around 1998, my wife and I had the idea of reaching out to Odetta. We were both big fans and I knew she had done a blues record before. That was back in the sixties. So I reached out and contacted her manager, Doug Yeager, and he was interested because I don’t think she’d formally recorded in the studio for years. We all ended up meeting – my wife and I went to see her and it worked out really well. We got along very nicely and then we put this idea together of an album of blues songs.

“We started to look for piano players, someone who would be an arranger and all that. And just like Ian Zack says in the book, I would get blues piano players, and Odetta didn’t like any of them! It wasn’t that she didn’t like their playing, she said, it was just ‘I know what they’re going to play before they play it.’ She wanted something else.

“Doug, I think, ended up suggesting Seth Farber, who is on all three records that we did together, and really did most of the touring with her during that time, and it worked out great. He came from a background of singer-songwriter, Broadway, things like that. And it was just fantastic. I would feed them songs and ideas, and then they would work out the arrangements and it just worked out really well. And, getting her her first Grammy nomination in decades was really great…I was so proud of that.”

With M.C. Records, Odetta recorded three albums, Blues Everywhere I Go, her first full-length studio recording for fourteen years and it featured Dr. John on a couple of tracks; an album of Lead Belly covers, Lookin’ For A Home and a live gospel album, Gonna Let It Shine, with the Holmes Brothers. These are excellent recordings, some of the best work that Odetta has done. The material really suits her, she’s in fine voice and two of them were recognized by Grammy nominations. Listen to the first blues album, Blues Everywhere I Go and you’ll realize you’re listening to what is a classic blues record.

Mark told me he had more material from the first blues album recordings that is as yet unreleased, some of it with Dr. John playing, but at the time unreleaseable because of contractual issues. Dr. John, who was a long-time friend of Odetta, had flown in from Australia the night before the recording and, said Mark, “he comes in and he just sits, and he would have played all day. But they actually just started making music. It was so wonderful working with Dr. John, you know, that was very special.”

Odetta clearly enjoyed the whole experience of making these albums at M.C. Records, but given her age and her health, it wasn’t easy, Mark told me. “It was tough for her. She would sometimes be very weak. But when she sang it didn’t matter. As long as she was there, once she started singing, that was it. There were no bad takes. So, it wasn’t like, Oh my gosh, she’s too tired. If she was going to sing, she was singing!”

Blues Everywhere I Go was nominated for a Traditional Blues Album Grammy, but, unfortunately for her and Mark, B.B. King won it that year for Blues on the Bayou.

Mark said, “It always seems rough when you’re up against B.B. King and you’re never going to beat him! But it was really exciting. We all went out together to the ceremony. And it was so nice to see so many people who hadn’t seen Odetta in years. It was just really wonderful, people congratulating her, and I think she was really proud of that.”

Mark was clearly proud of his work with Odetta and spoke very warmly of their relationship. “It was nice that we developed a friendship. I mean, my wife and I would always take her out to lunch around Christmas time. And she came to my house several times for dinner parties, her and her sister. They were hysterical – complete opposites. It was just great. It was like it was a show! Jimmy, her sister, and Odetta would just be poking at each other. Like they were little kids, it was a lot of fun. I wish I could have videotaped it. But it was just so wonderful to have that kind of relationship, not just the music, but on a personal level, and really, it was such a wonderful time of my life.”

I wondered who Mark was working with at the moment that he thinks is particularly noteworthy or exciting?

“Well, working with Joanna Connor has been wonderful. It was nice that she came back and we ended up releasing those two records [Six String Stories, 2016 and Rise, 2019]. I love working with Joanna and of course, Kim Wilson. He was my musical hero when I was 16. I bought that first Thunderbirds record in the seventies. So we just released Kim’s new album, Take Me Back, in October and it’s really doing well, and we have plans to do more work, which I’m really excited about. We have several projects that we’re working on different than what people would expect from Kim Wilson. And that’s what I’m excited about. And I’m hoping to work again with Guy Davis. I’m really honored to be working with these artists because they’re just great musicians.”

For a small label, M.C. Records has done exceptionally well in garnering multiple Grammy and Blues Music Award nominations, which is testament to both the fine artists Mark works with and the quality of the work they do.

“Back in 2000, after we’d recorded that Memphis Barbecue Session, with Kim Wilson and Big Jack Johnson, Kim said he thought he was being ignored by the Blues Foundation. And I said to him, listen, Kim, if you work with me, I guarantee you, I’m going to get you wins from the WC Handys, you got to trust me. And he did. And you know, the first two records we did, were both nominated for Grammys, and multiple Blues Music Awards. Now, ever since that, he’s always there every year, nominated or winning. So, I think people respect the work that I do. Because it’s about the music, it’s not really me per se. I think over the years people understand that when I release something, it’s thoughtful, it’s not just about, ‘I have to put out six records this year’ or anything like that.”

As Mark looks around the roots music and blues scene, he thinks there is reason to be optimistic, although he says it’s not always going to be necessarily straight blues. In terms of the blues, he says, “Yes, there’ll be people who will look want to play this music and play it at a high level. But you know, straight ahead blues is harder because it’s hard to beat the people who came before. So what we’re seeing more and more of is this roots sound coming along, people taking the blues and gospel and making it their own.”

But, he thinks, “there’s a limited pool of those kinds of things that can really transcend the blues genre. I think Kim Wilson is one of those. I guess Joanna again, combining the rock, putting that edge to it, but not forcing it – you know, just to try to sell records. And I think if you can do that, you’re going to be OK. If you try to force something, or chase after the next thing, it’s going to be really difficult.”

Finally, I asked Mark what he is looking forward to this year at M.C. records? He told me, beyond the record label, he’s looking forward to playing gigs again. Mark is a talented drummer who has been performing for many years. His band, Back On Bourbon Street, plays cool New Orleans’ inflected jazzy blues and he can’t wait to get back on stage with them.

“Emotionally, you know, music is about being with people. I think that’s what people miss most. But maybe we’ll have like a good end of the summer, if people just do the right thing and there’s a vaccine.”

Here’s hoping Mark.

 

Gráinne Duffy – rock’n’roll drenched with the blues and southern soul.

Gráinne Duffy is “a powerhouse of soul and inspiration mixed with desire and passion.”

Photo: Rob Blackham

She’s played Glastonbury, and concerts and major festivals in Europe, Africa, North America and Australia, and performed on stages graced by Keb’ Mo’ and Van Morrison. She’s a fine songwriter, a top-notch guitar-slinger and has a rock’n’roll voice drenched with the blues and Southern soul. She’s Gráinne Duffy, now with five excellent albums in her discography, and with Voodoo Blues, is winning new fans all over the world.

Ireland has given the world some top-notch blues and rock artists to enjoy over the years – think Rory Gallagher, Gary Moore and Van the Man – and in Gráinne Duffy from County Monaghan, we have another one. Her four previous releases are all worth your while checking out, but with Voodoo Blues, her talent bursts out big time in ten original songs that showcase the versatility and power of her vocals, her guitar chops, and the strength of her song-writing.

Down at the Crossroads got talking to Gráinne about Voodoo Blues. It’s had a lot of very positive reviews – Rock and Blues Muse, for example, hailed her as “an emerging blues star,” and said that the album “presents her to the world as a roots music creator with a fully-articulated vision that’s ready for the big time.” Rocking Magpie waxed lyrical about the “indelible impression” Duffy makes with this “powerful new release.”

Gráinne said that she was delighted with the positive attention the album has been getting, because she’d worked hard on this set of songs. The songs are co-written by Gráinne and her husband Paul Sherry, who is a sensational guitarist in his own right.

She said that the album was a return to her rock’n’roll roots. “I had done the blues album and the Americana album. And the third album was like a live album and the fourth album was a little bit of transition. We’d gone over to America to record it and it was a bit of a change of direction for us, so I feel like I was being pulled back all the time to my rock and roll roots. And it was very simple production this time, which suits me. We just went into the studio and played everything live, and it was just four of us – bass, drums, two guitars and vocals – just kinda the way rock’n’roll should be. You know, simple and straight up. And I think the fruit of the labour is that the tracks are not overly complicated, but they’ve got the essence of what I think really is me deep down inside.”

The album was recorded more or less live, produced by Troy Miller in his Spark Studios in London toward the end of 2019.

Said Gráinne, “We just had a really simple set-up. I’d been in touch some years ago with Troy Miller, who’s a brilliant producer, and also a really great drummer. He’d been Amy Winehouse’s drummer. And just recently, I thought I’d like to work with Troy again, so I got in touch with him to ask if he’d be interested in working on this album. He said, sure. So my husband, Paul – we write together, play together – and I, we boarded a plane and went over and went down to Troy’s small studio and we got it all done. Troy got Dale Davis the bass player who had played with him for years in Amy’s band on board.

“So we recorded for two days and then I came home and did another two days and it was all done. Yeah, it was great. We had to do some overdubs in Ireland because COVID came and we had been due to go over for a final session and with the whole madness, we weren’t able to travel for it. So the last track we recorded here in Ireland.”

I mentioned to Gráinne that I keep seeing reviewers who pick up on the Ireland connection and they refer to Celtic influences on her music. That’s something I never really hear and I said I wasn’t quite sure what they mean by that.

“Yeah, I’m in the same boat as I read that! I’d love to know what they’re hearing! I think it’s nice and it’s lovely that they’re hearing something Irish, but I’m wondering if nobody told them I was Irish, would they know it was Irish? But that has been mentioned quite a few times. Some people have even said, Oh, I get a sense of the Rory Gallagher here. But you know, that’s not intended. But it’s lovely that comes out – it must be just something in the sound, I don’t know.”

Gráinne Duffy’s music for me is very much American music – it’s grounded in the blues, and it’s got hints of soul and gospel, and that’s what you’ll hear if you check out (and you should!) any of her albums.

“Oh, definitely,” she said. “Because that is really the music I listened to growing up. Particularly the blues – I would have been listening originally to Fleetwood Mac and then from Fleetwood Mac I got into Peter Green, B.B. King, Albert King, and then on into Aretha and all of that sort of stuff. So, I mean, you keep backtracking. If you get into that style of music, you keep trying to delve further back, back until you find the roots. But I would definitely agree with you, it’s definitely coming from America, the style of music that has mostly influenced me.”

Some of the songs on Voodoo Blues, like the title track, Mercy, Tick Tock and Wreck It, are solid rock and blues rock, but there’s a nice variety to the album as well. Listen to the hints of soul, and bits of gospel in Don’t You Cry for Me and Shine It On Me.

Gráinne liked that I’d heard that. “Sometimes you when you do that, some people go, Oh, it’s too eclectic, there’s too much going on. But for me, I felt like it was still held together by the overall rock’n’roll sense of the album, even though there are other influences there. I do listen to a very wide range of music, but I think the rock’n’roll sound kind of underpinned the whole thing and that kept it together.”

Gráinne Duffy, over many years, has been a talented songwriter. But the evidence here in Voodoo Blues is that she is getting even better. These are well-structured songs, with strong lyrics, far beyond some of the simplistic song forms you get in a lot of blues rock. I asked her about her development as a song-writer.

“Well, it is a craft and I suppose craftsmen and women are supposed to get better the longer they’re at it, but sometimes it doesn’t work like that. You can start off on a high and you can just be like, the Mojo’s gone. But with this record, I was listening to a lot of old blues and I really tried to pare it back and make it really simple. And sometimes I think simple is best, but it can be hard to be simple! How often do you hear a big song and you go, that’s just three chords and it’s so simple, but it’s great. But sometimes it takes a long time to arrive there. Maybe with this record, I’ve finally been able to declutter and just try to go straight to the point. That’s what I tried to do. And, what helped the song-writing on this album was I had a good sense of where I wanted to go.”

The songs are all written by Gráinne and her husband and fellow band member, Paul. Gráinne is responsible for the lyrical content and they both collaborated on the music, as they have done for some considerable time. As usual on the album there is great guitar work from Paul, who is a very accomplished player. If you go to one of their live shows, you’ll see him really cut loose, with long solos and fast runs up and down the fretboard, but here on this album, he’s very supportive of each song. It’s restrained, tasteful, and works really well.

“Yeah. I have some friends who love guitar and, they were like, come on, give us more guitar! We want to hear more guitar! We did that in some of our previous records. But this album was maybe a little bit pared back. Maybe in some places we could’ve thrown in an extra guitar solo, but I think the guitar parts which are put down are just perfect.”

I asked if Gráinne had any particular favourites in the mix of the songs.

She mentioned Mercy. “It was one of the first ones that kind of kicked off the album and let me know where I wanted to go.” This is a great showcase for Duffy’s vocal power and control, with the lyrics articulated against an insistent guitar riff and some tasty organ work. “But,” she said, “You know, another one that I particularly like is Hard Rain,” referring to the track that finishes the album, a terrific rocker, which features some mouth-watering backing vocals supporting Duffy’s soulful singing. The song obviously gives a nod to Bob Dylan, a particular hero of Gráinne’s, who told me that Bob could do no wrong in her eyes and that she’d even named her son in honour of the man. She told me she loves Dylan’s current sound and style, which for her is a bit TexMex. “I love the sound that he’s gone for recently. I think it’s brilliant.”

I mentioned another song on the album which I really enjoyed, Roll It, and suggested that it recalled for me Sheryl Crow.

“You know what, I am a big Sheryl Crow fan. I think she’s a great.” But although Roll It might possibly recall Crow’s All I Want to Do, Gráinne suggested she probably had more Gerry Rafferty in her mind with it. Others have heard John Fogerty here. Mention of these other artists and songs simply gives you an idea of the sort of influences swirling around in the background, but Roll It stands on its own two feet. Said Gráinne, “Roll It was supposed to be kind of a fun chillout.”

I said to Gráinne how much I’d loved the organ work on the album, particularly in songs like Mercy, Shine It On Me, and Don’t You Cry For Me. It’s classic-sounding rock Hammond and works really well.

“It’s fabulous. That again, is that mega-talented man Troy Miller. He plays drums on the record, produces it and plays the organ and piano as well! I don’t know how that man fits all that talent into one body, but he’s brilliant. But I love that organ work too. It’s not over or under played, it’s just, to me, spot on. But it’s lovely to hear it being appreciated by somebody else, because sometimes that can just go a little bit unappreciated.”

The great thing about this album is how very upbeat and positive it is. It puts a smile on your face. I wondered if this reflects the sort of person that Gráinne is?

“I think so. My first album, Out of the Dark, was a lot slower and sedate and reflective, and people thought I was the most depressed person in the world! And I used to think, how do people think I’m a really sad person? And Ronnie Greer, a great guitar player from Northern Ireland, lovely man, whom I collaborate with, he would always say to me, Gráinne, this record is nothing like your personality! So, I think, yes, this record is more reflective of what I am actually like as a person. I want to get up and at it, I love playing rock’n’roll and have that positive outlook in life. But it’s funny you say that it’s upbeat because I read one review where it said, this gives us hope that the blues isn’t all sad!”

That the blues is depressing is a misconception that many people not familiar with the blues often have. But the blues singer is usually singing him or herself out of the blues. A song might bemoan the state of the world or the singer’s life, but actually singing the song is a way of getting beyond the bad state of affairs.

“Exactly,” said Gráinne. “And so often if you listen to the early singers, like Ma Rainey or Mama Thornton, any of those people, they usually have an awful lot of humour in their lyrics as well.”

I asked Gráinne about not being able to tour the album at the moment, which has got to be disappointing for her.

“Yes, it is. When the album came out, we were like, all right, what can we do to celebrate the release of the album? Normally you do press that day or that week. And you’d be going up to do a gig, a launch night, and then a few more shows. But this time it was just “Right, will we light the fire?” This is so strange. And, because we feel like we’ve arrived at a nice place with this album and it is quite up tempo, we felt it would have been exciting, fun to go out and play. So it really felt like a bit of a disappointment. But we’re hoping there has to be some sort of a silver lining to the cloud. We’re hoping that maybe people take time to actually listen to the record and get to know it, and when we go to play they’ll really appreciate us.”

I wondered if the band has any major events planned, at least tentatively, given the ongoing pandemic situation.

“Yes. Well, bookings have come in for festivals for this year, but they’re all saying with that they are still unsure. So we think it’s going to be the summer or September by the time we get back to play. We’re a wee bit nervous about booking things because we’ve had to cancel so many travel plans. So we’ll just take it one step at a time.”

One final thing I wanted to ask Gráinne about was that I noticed on the album sleeve they were supporting a charity called We C Hope. What is that about?

“I lost my sister-in-law to cancer,” she said. “So we decided to put We C Hope on there if people wanted to donate towards cancer. It’s a foundation we support.” We C Hope aims to help children who suffer from retinoblastoma, a highly curable form of eye cancer – unfortunately every 85 minutes, a child dies from curable eye cancer, mostly in economically less developed countries, where awareness and access to timely, appropriate medical care is very limited. We C Hope seeks to “create a bright future for all affected by childhood eye cancer.” Check out We C Hope at https://wechope.org/

Voodoo Blues is one of the stand-out rock and blues albums of 2020 and ought to bring Gráinne Duffy to the attention of music fans all over the world. She is a quite special talent, and you ought to hope she has the opportunity before long to demonstrate that on a stage near you.

 

 

Music Books for Your Christmas List

Christmas is coming, and if you’re a music fan, you’ll want to drop a few hints to Santa. Here are seven books you’ll definitely want in your stocking:

Michael Corcoran, Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music

What a sumptuous feast of a book this is. Coffee table sized, lavishly illustrated, and utterly engaging, it oozes quality from the standard of the writing to the beautiful quality of paper. With Corcoran’s engaging stories highlighting the careers and contributions of a wide variety of pioneering Texas musicians, you begin to realize how important and formative Texas is for American music. Top of your Christmas list. Read our review. Buy it here.

 

Annye C. Anderson, Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson

Memories of Robert Johnson from Annye Anderson, Johnson’s almost sister, which introduce us to the Robert Johnson we never knew. A wonderful evocation of a time and place. For any music fan, and particularly if you’re a blues fan, this book is a must-read.

Read our review here.

Buy it here.

 

Adam Gussow, Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of Music

Blues harp master and professor of the blues, Gussow, asks an important question of every blues fan – who do the blues belong to? Expertly and sensitively written by a man who has spent his musical career learning from and playing with black musicians.

Read our interview with Adam Gussow here.

Buy it here.

 

Ian Zack, Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest.

Ian Zack’s biography of Odetta is masterful, as he charts the life of this seminal cultural figure who helped spark the folk revival and became a vital part of the protest movements of the 1950s and 60s. She was on the front line of the struggle for equality in America, combatting racism through her music and actions. An important book and a great read. Full review to come.

Check out also Ian Zack’s excellent biography of Rev. Gary Davis, Say No to the Devil. Here’s our review.

 

Freeman Vines, Hanging Tree Guitars

Freeman Vines, born in 1942 in Greene County in North Carolina is the focus of a quite remarkable book, written by Zoe Van Buren and featuring a stunning set of photographs of Vines, his guitars and his environment by Timothy Duffy. The focus of the book is on one particular aspect of Vines’s life – his crafting of guitars from a tree near where he lived that had been used for lynching. Don’t miss the companion music album. Read our interview with Freeman Vines. Buy it here.

Gary Golio & E.B. Lewis, Dark Was the Night: Blind Willie Johnson’s Journey to the Stars

Another beautifully illustrated book (by E.B. Lewis), and cleverly written by Golio, guaranteed to engage the interest of small children. That’s no small feat, given the harshness of Willie Johnson’s life, a man blinded as a child, who lived in poverty and died penniless in the ruins of his burnt-down home. For parents who’d like their children to encounter something of America’s musical heritage, this, really is a must-buy. Highly recommended. Read our review. Buy it here.

Gary W Burnett, The Gospel According to the Blues

It’s been out for a while, but no matter – it’s mine and I’m gonna recommend it! “The Gospel According to the Blues is at once a primer in American music, culture, and race and religious history. Gary Burnett moves deftly from lyrics to theory and back again, from Blind Lemon Jefferson to the insights of contemporary scholarship. Highly readable, thoroughly researched, and with deep respect for the art form on every page. For best results, read with scratchy vinyl recordings of the masters as accompaniment.” An interview with the author and more details here.

Buy it here.

Vika & Linda – bringing some joy to iso(lation)

Vika and Linda Bull are two roots artists that may not have come across your radar. You ought to remedy that straight away! They are two sisters, based in Melbourne, who have been singing, harmonizing and rocking for many years, delighting audiences in their Australian homeland. Along the way, they’ve supported the likes of Billy Joel and have performed with Iggy Pop. The sisters are members of Paul Kelly’s band – Kelly is a hugely successful Australian rock music singer-songwriter and guitarist, whom a Rolling Stone writer claimed to be “one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard.”

Vika and Linda released a new album this year, called Sunday (The Gospel According to Iso, a fabulous album of rootsy, bluesy gospel songs and we got chatting to Linda about it.

But first of all, because a lot of people in the US and Europe may not be familiar with Vika and Linda, despite their success in Australia, I asked Linda how she would characterize their music?

“Well,” she said, “we’re very hard to pigeonhole. We love harmonizing together and singing together and we cover a lot of different genres. We don’t like being pigeonholed. But I think it’s basically roots music is where our heart is – and harmony. Vika and I have got very different tastes, Vika is more rock and I’m a bit more country. And in between we can cover blues, soul, R&B and gospel. And we love to do that. We love to just sing together – regardless of the genre, we just love singing together.”

Turning to the new album, I wondered what “iso” means. Turns out it’s Australian slang for “isolation.” Linda told me:

“Because we made the album in isolation in the first phase of lock-down in Melbourne, not knowing then that we would have two. The background of the record is that we’ve been singing gospel music for probably about 35 years now.” She and Vika have made a few gospel-tinged recordings along the way, but “this one in its entirety is kind of the next step. We had restrictions with lock-down, so we made it minimally. And I think gospel music actually works really well like that. It works really well when you have very few instruments.”

The album is something of a gem, really pared back, largely featuring the wonderful harmonizing of the two sisters, and backed mostly by piano with those lovely sort of gospel chords that you get with the piano.

“We have piano all over it, in every track, and our musical director, Cameron Bruce, is a beautiful piano player. We’ve worked with him in Paul Kelly’s band, and he took charge of everything with us, helped to select the songs with a lot of zoom meetings. Cameron arranged the songs and then sent them back to us as files and we sang over the top.”

The Gospel According to Iso has 13 gospel songs (with a bit of latitude, we’ll count Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and Chuck Berry’s Downbound Train as gospel!), mostly old traditional songs or spirituals like Sinnerman, Walk With Me Lord and Jesus on the Mainline. The album kicks off with a rockin’ version of Claude Ely’s Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down, and once you hear these two sisters harmonizing, and the bluesy vocals, you know this is an album you want to hear. The high quality is sustained throughout, and even though the arrangements are relatively sparse, there’s a nice variety to the way each of the songs is handled.

The album, Linda told me, all sprang from a weekly Sunday sing-song that she and Vika started to do when everything stopped in Australia early in the year. “I went out on Facebook and Instagram live every Sunday morning at 11:00am and we did one gospel song. That grew in popularity to the point where we thought we could make a record. We’d just ring a friend, they played guitar, we’d sing over the top, and we thought we could make a record like that.”

Why, I wondered, did they choose this particular selection of songs?

“We had lots of gospel songs in our back catalogue that we’ve been singing over the years, but we wanted to do something new. So I dug into the gospel collection that I had amassed over the years and we had about 70 songs from all different sources. Then we whittled it down and the focus was mainly just to do something that meant something to us and bring a bit of joy because it was pretty sort of sad over here – and everywhere.

“But we wanted also songs that people knew. So we have Bridge Over Troubled Water and Amazing Grace. But then there are other songs that we thought, we’ll just throw those into the pot because we love singing them – songs by Mahalia Jackson and so on. That’s how it came together.”

It’s a great selection of songs, but I particularly like Rosetta Tharpe’s Strange Things Happening Every Day. It’s got a very distinctive Rosetta Tharpe feel about it, with both the piano and guitar work echoing her original version. Linda said she liked Rosetta’s “rock and roll attitude. That’s kind of right up our alley.”

The other song I asked about was Elder Curry’s Memphis Flu. Curry was a singing preacher and guitar player who preached fiery sermons through his songs, backed by the barrelhouse piano of Elder Beck, and featured the stomping feet and clapped hands of his congregation. Recorded in 1930 for Okeh Records, Memphis Flu refers to the flu’ season of 1929 which was the worst since the 1919 pandemic. Death rates were very high, particularly in the Memphis region. The song is often thought of as the first rock’n’roll record and the original is a toe-tapping rocker all right. But Curry’s lyrics are pretty harsh. For Curry influenza was a manifestation of God’s wrath at sinners and there was little compassion for the large numbers of people who’d died as a result of the flu’.

Linda said that when she stumbled across the song, she thought how perfect it was for the current situation – but “the lyrics were very direct. So we tweaked them a bit in the choruses. It’s a gospel song of course, but you’re not going to die if you don’t go to church! But we thought the song was perfect for record. We weren’t sure whether people would love it or hate it!”

Actually, you can’t help but love Vika and Linda’s version, driven by a rollicking barrelhouse piano. The amended version of the song is well-chosen, actually, so timely, and with a great message talking about the epidemic getting the rich and the poor alike, and saying that it’s going to get a whole more if you don’t listen up and behave. Wear your masks people!

I asked Linda if there’d been any sort of pushback against science and wearing masks in Australia?

“There was a bit of a pushback. Yes, there were marches and demonstrations and anti-mask-wearing demonstrations, but all in all, you know, in the middle of all this, there was a black lives matter movement, and people were very observant of wearing a mask and they still went out and protested, so people in general were pretty good. No one loves wearing a mask or being told what to do – I get it, you know, but the result was good.”

Talking about black lives matter, the spectre of racism is something that we’re all increasingly aware of these days. What, I asked Linda, has been her experience in Australia, with her Tongan background?

“Well, yes, we have dark skin. So obviously we look different. So we have experienced a certain amount of racism, but nothing like our mother experienced.” The sisters’ mother came to Australia during the White Australia Policy, which from 1901 basically sought to forbid or restrict people of non-European ethnic origin, especially Asians and Pacific Islanders, from immigrating to Australia. It was only legally disbanded in the mid-1970s.

The racism encountered by Linda and her sister has been “nowhere near as much as the previous generation. So it’s getting easier in some ways, but we feel very strongly about being treated equally, and why shouldn’t we? We are respectful, but we are direct, so I always say we stand up for ourselves.”

The sisters are half Tongan – Tonga is a Polynesian neighbour of Australia, and it’s a heritage they feel proud of.

“Polynesian culture is very strong in our family. And the way they sing – when they sing in church, time pretty much time stops, it’s so beautiful. That’s how we were raised. We were raised listening to the Tongans sing in church, and that’s where we get our voices from. Because they taught us, our mother taught us.”

From listening to Linda and Vika, I’d sure love to visit one of those Tongan churches.

“Everyone we take cries when they see the Tongans fire up…as soon as you walk into the church and they start singing and they get into it, how can you help but not be moved?”

The album finishes with a beautiful, unaccompanied Amazing Grace. The slow tempo and the pure quality of the voices make it an appropriately emotional end to the album. There’s something about this song that seems to appeal to almost everybody, so I asked Linda what she thought it is about gospel music that has such a wide appeal even to people of no faith?

“I think that it’s uplifting and it’s one of those sort of genres that you can lean on when feeling a bit down, or when you could do with an uplift. It lends itself naturally to that sort of universal feeling. You know, we all want to live a little bit better sometimes. Although we grew up in a church and had a very religious upbringing, we think this music is for everybody. And I think that we love singing it because for us, it’s a release. I think it’s ultimately our aim with a gospel record to make people feel better, whether they believe or not.”

Sadly, with the restrictions still in place because of the pandemic, the Bull sisters haven’t been able to go out and play on the road. But, Linda told me, they can’t wait to sing these songs to a live audience. Hearing these two sing these songs live is going to be some experience. I just hope I get the opportunity to hear them.

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)

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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)