I had a conversation with some friends recently about the idea of personal responsibility and how that might apply depending on your circumstances, particularly if you happen to be poor. There’s no doubt that poverty limits your choices in life – most of us can’t imagine what it would be like to live, as so many do, on less than $2.50 a day. There are many things that can be said to be getting better in the world, but still – over three billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. And at least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.
Hard to imagine getting by on that, isn’t it? Your options for food, shelter, clothing, healthcare – the basics – never mind things most of us take for granted, like leisure, career, travel, entertainment – become pretty limited. Not only that but the lives of the poor become very precarious, because of the environment in which they live (subject to problems associated with climate change or subject to violence, for example) and the ruthlessness at times of those who are more powerful and wealthy.
I reflected on the issue of personal responsibility a while ago in a post about Blind Willie Johnson’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine. What I didn’t consider in that post was a very important point made by Rishawn Biddle in an article provocatively entitled Beyond the Personal Responsibility Myth. Knowledge, he says, is power, but also “the most-crucial tool for acquiring the financial and social resources needed to emerge and stay out of poverty.” Unfortunately, says Biddle, many people in poverty do not have the education and hence knowledge required to make good decisions or to make the best of good decisions made, and become trapped by their own situation and bad decisions. He concludes, “ thinking that bad choices alone explain poverty is as wrongly simpleminded as believing that impoverished people are too tied down by structural inequities to emerge from their conditions.” It’s not a straightforward issue.
However we think personal responsibility fits into the picture, those of us who are better off can’t let ourselves off the hook. More than ever before, our lives are interconnected, the world is getting smaller, we have responsibility one for the other, and each of us can make a difference. I was reminded in thinking about all this of Eric Bibb’s song Connected. The song isn’t about rich and poor, but it’s a powerful reminder that we are all part of each other, we are all connected. Someone famously asked a long time ago, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” A while later, but still a couple of thousand years ago, the answer came: “If someone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need but shows no compassion – how can God’s love be in that person?”
I listened to a great version of a song recorded in 1924 by Clara Smith called Prescription for the Blues recently on the Watkins Family Hour album. It struck a chord, having suffered some ill health recently myself – doctor’s prescriptions have been all too frequently part of life of late!
Of course the song isn’t really about treating physical health – it’s about the blues, what Robert Johnson called “an achin’ old heart disease,” the “worried blues.” W.C. Handy said that the “blues were conceived in aching hearts.” Prescription Blues is a clever, light-hearted, playful little song about being love sick, having a “heart disease” and asking the doctor for a cure:
All day long I worry all night I’m blue
I feel so awfully lonesome I don’t know what to do
And so I ask you doctor to see if you can find
Something in your sachet to pacify my mind
Oh doctor doctor write me a prescription for the blues
Let me tell you doctor why I’m in misery
Once I had a lover, but she went away from me
…Oh doctor doctor write me a prescription for the blues
And that’s what most of the blues are about, isn’t it – lost love, love gone wrong, unfaithful lovers, unrequited love, yearning and heart break. As Son House said, “Ain’t but one kind of blues – and that consisted in male and female that’s in love.”
Well, for sure that’s mainly the subject matter of most blues songs. But there’s more to it than that, and I think this is why the blues continue to resonate for us. The blues arose in black communities a century ago, in the hardship, toil, injustice and bondage of African Americans. B. B. King said, “The blues is an expression of anger against shame and humiliation.” And, as well as love, many of the songs address real life problems – not having enough money, illness, homelessness, bereavement, abandonment. You can easily think of songs like Victoria Spivey’sT.B. Blues (“I got a tuberculosis; consumption is killing me, It’s too late, too late…too late”), about a disease that is particularly associated with poverty, or Blind Lemon Jefferson’sBroke and Hungry, or Big Bill Broonzy’sStarvation Blues, where he sings about having no job, no place to stay and “starvation everywhere I go.”
Well, of course, there is a prescription for all this – we don’t have to tolerate injustice, racism, exploitation. They are all problems that can be addressed, if we have the will. The blues can keep on jolting us out of our safe, comfortable lives and alert us to the pain and ills of the world around. Will we be part of the problem or part of the solution? Which starts with the words of someone from a couple of thousand years ago: “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.”
The blues grew up in an environment of the most virulent racism and discrimination, perpetrated by white people on the black communities of the Southern States. Many of the early blues songs bear witness to the suffering endured by black communities. In 1930, Lead Belly sang Jim Crow, bemoaning the inequity he found everywhere he went: “I been traveling, I been traveling from shore to shore, Everywhere I have been I find some old Jim Crow.” Eleven years later, Josh White gave us Jim Crow Blues, where he complains he “ain’t treated no better than a mountain goat.”
Lead Belly also suffered racism in the nation’s capital. In Bourgeois Blues, he tells us about the ostracism he faced as a black person: “Well, me and my wife we were standing upstairs, We heard the white man say’n I don’t want no niggers up there.” Then:
“Well, them white folks in Washington they know how
To call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow.”
But those days are long gone, right?
Last week the news emerged that the police commissioner of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Robert Copeland, admitted to publically calling the president of the United States a “f***ing nigger.” In March Jane O’Toole overheard Copeland make the remark as she finished her dinner in a local bistro.
O’Toole complain to the town management, but Copeland was unrepentant, saying in an email to his fellow police commissioners, “I believe I did use the ‘N-word’ in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse. For this, I do not apologise – he meets and exceeds my criteria for such.” His loudly stated opinion, according to Copeland, was merely an exercise of his first amendment rights.
The sorry tale was compounded by the Chairman of the Police Commission, Joseph Balboni, saying he had no plans to ask Copeland to resign. He said of Copeland, “He’s worked with a lot of blacks in his life. . . . He said some harsh words about Mr. Obama, and here we are. This woman, she’s blowing it all out of proportion.” Mr. Copeland has now resigned.
There have been other incidents of expressions of racism recently. One Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher who is leading a ranchers’ dispute with the government over cattle grazing, recently wondered whether the “Negro” shouldn’t be back in chains. He recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids – and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch – they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do…And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
Bundy, the New York Times reported, has become a celebrity, “drawing hundreds of supporters, including dozens of militia members, many carrying sidearms, and members of Oath Keepers, a militia group, who have embraced him as a symbol of their anger and a bulwark against federal abuse.”
Then there’s the recent case of Donald Sterling, manager of the LA Clippers basketball team, who asked his girlfriend not to take pictures with black friends or bring them to games. “Admire him, bring him here, feed him, f*** him,” he said of former basketball legend, Magic Johnson. “But don’t put him on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me.”
Racism is alive and well on the other side of the Atlantic as well. The host of the BBC’s successful Top Gear programme, was caught on camera reciting a version of “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” from his childhood in which he is heard to mutter “catch a nigger by the toe.” Clarkson’s got form in this regard, of course, previously calling Mexicans “lazy, feckless and flatulent.”.
Perhaps this is just a few ignorant and well-known people getting caught saying some things they shouldn’t. In a recent Guardiannewspaper article, however, Gary Younge argued that racism is “a system of discrimination planted by history, nourished by politics and nurtured by economics, in which some groups face endemic disadvantage” and went on to say that, “The reality of modern racism is…the institutional marginalisation of groups performed with the utmost discretion and minimum of fuss by well-mannered and often well-intentioned people working in deeply flawed systems. According to a recent US department of education report, black preschoolers (mostly four-year-olds) are four times more likely to be suspended more than once than their white classmates. According to a 2013 report by Release, a UK group focusing on drugs and drug laws, black people in England and Wales are far less likely to use drugs than white people but six times more likely to be stopped and searched for possession of them. In both countries black people are far more likely to be convicted, and to get stiffer sentences and longer jail time.”
The blues, forged as they were at a time of deep distress and racial oppression, continue to be a howl of protest and a stark warning about the racism that, sadly, often seems to be just under the surface.
The second biggest bike race in the world, the Giro d’Italia swung into Belfast for two days this weekend. It was a big deal for the city and country which was festooned in pink (the race’s official color); people turned out in their hundreds of thousands to cheer on the riders as they whizzed past, all colourful lycra and bulging thighs. For once we were united, old grievances forgotten in a haze of sporting, multi-colored, cycling fever.
It reminded me of that old 12-bar blues song, C.C. Rider or See See Rider, or possibly even Easy Rider, recorded by a great many artists over the years, first by Ma Rainey in 1924. It’s hard to know exactly what or who this See See or Easy Rider was. Theories vary, from it referring to a person with easy going sexual morals, to it being an itinerant bluesman with a guitar slung over his back or a “county circuit” preacher, to Big Bill Broonzy’s tale of a local fiddle player named See See Rider who taught him the blues. Seems to me that “see see” and “easy” sound pretty similar and that the term most likely refers to an easy lover, man or woman, someone who was habitually unfaithful – the subject of many a blues song.
The song has been recorded by a host of artists, including classic blues artists such as Big Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt, Lead Belly and Lightnin’ Hopkins, as well as artists like Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Animals and Elvis. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s also been covered by Bruce Springsteen, appearing on the Boss’s “Detroit Medley” contribution to the 1979 No Nukes Live album.
Film director Martin Scorsese counts Lead Belly’s version of the song as formative for him: “One day, around 1958, I remember hearing something that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before…The music was demanding, “Listen to me!”…The song was called “See See Rider,” [and the] name of the singer was Lead Belly… Lead Belly’s music opened something up for me. If I could have played guitar, really played it, I never would have become a filmmaker.”
High speed racing
Whatever exactly the easy rider of the song means, there’s nothing easy about what these professional cyclists do. It’s a punishing sport with riders clocking up hundreds of kilometres of racing day after day, in all weathers, up and down mountains and across countryside and urban landscapes. Now that the sport’s cleaned itself up after decades of drug abuse culminating in the shameful Lance Armstrong years, the sight of the peleton whizzing past at speed or the pain endured by the riders on the upper slopes of high mountains is a thing of wonder. Easy it’s not.
But I guess that’s true for almost everything in life. As author Scott Alexander says, “All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.”
Hans Theessink, is one of the fiercest acoustic players in Europe and one of the top acoustic blues stars worldwide, a man who has played with the best and is one of the best, American or European, black & white, old and young, since the 1960s.This guy is the real deal, simply a blues master who is as good as it gets on every level. www.thecountryblues.com
Photo courtesy Beate Sandor
DATC: Hans, you’ve been playing the blues, releasing albums and entertaining people for over 40 years now. It’s clear from listening to your music that you have a deep appreciation and love for the blues – how did this all start, how did this music come to make such a deep connection with you? – particularly for someone from the Netherlands and not some Southern USA state!
HT: Actually I’m celebrating “50 Years On The Road” this year! My musical journey started when my dad gave me a mandolin. A few years later I got my first guitar and just loved it. I liked the songs that I heard when the skiffle craze hit Europe. Exciting music; later on I learned that they actually were adaptations of southern folk and blues (Leadbelly e.g.). I didn’t know of the existence of the blues as a musical genre; just loved to play around with what I knew. One night I heard Big Bill Broonzy on the radio – a revelation to me that touched me and sent the shivers down my spine. Great guitar playing and a voice full of emotion. Big Bill Broonzy set me off on my blues journey.
Over the years I’ve met quite a few colleagues in different parts of the world that had a similar key experience. It’s probably just about having your feelers/antenna out and tuning into the signal! For a kid from the Netherlands this music was exotic, new and exciting. I suppose that if you grew up around it somewhere in the south, it was more like a common everyday kind of thing. Maybe the guy next door was a great bluesman but you probably didn’t think too much of it unless you had your antenna out and were tuned into that certain something. Of course I travelled to Missisippi and other southern states to experience the blues in its original surroundings. That was like blues heaven to me – I sucked it all in.
When I started working with African American tuba player Jon Sass, I played my kind of blues to him, and he said: “My grandfather in W.Virginia used to play like that.” That was his natural family connection, but musically he had classical training and was much more into James Brown, Steely Dan and jazz. The blues came back to him via Europe so I suppose it’s a two-way system.
DATC: The blues arose in the context of black experience and suffering in the Southern States in the early part of the twentieth century. How aware are you of that as you sing the songs you sing? How straightforward is it for a white European to perform the blues?
HT: Of course the blues hails from southern black context where hardship and suffering was a daily experience but that’s most likely also the reason why this music is so vibrant and appeals to people all around the globe who have had their share of troubles too. Most people can relate to a person/musician that survives all the hardships helped by the power of his/her music. The feel of the music is glorious and comes across to anybody with some sort of sensitivity. Maybe people in Europe (and N. America for that sake) sometimes tend to romanticise the black blues experience. I’ve met and played with lots of blues old-timers over the years; they all had one thing in common: a great sense of humor and their own kind of philosophy and wisdom about life. Great people to be around.
For all of them “Blues is a feeling” – it’s not about a million notes but about the feeling and the emotions in the music and their performances were a 100% all the time. If you feel it and are earnest about it, you can do it; black, yellow or white, young or old.
I’m not a Mississippi sharecropper or Louisiana cotton picker – I’m alien to that side of the blues experience but there are many other aspects of human condition, love, death, hardship, joy etc. that I do understand very well as a common human experience. So I got plenty of things to sing about from my own experience and use the country-blues vehicle as a musical art-form. I just love the sound of the blues. It got a hold of me when I was a kid and heard Big Bill Broonzy on the radio – a key experience to me – so I suppose that I just do the music that I love and enjoy doing. Since the early nineties I’ve had collaborations with Terry Evans – one of the great american voices – who hails from Vicksburg MS and is old enough to still have had the cotton picking experience. On our latest duo album Delta TimeTerry does a haunting version of J.B.Lenoir’s“Down In Mississippi” that silences audiences all over the world; people sense the truth and feel the urgence of hard times and prejudice that the song relates.
DATC: How often do you get to play in the US and how you been received there?
HT: Some of my earlier records were released on the Flying Fish label out of Chicago in the late eighties. (Unfortunately Flying Fish stopped their activities after the untimely death of record boss Bruce Kaplan). These records made some impact and I got really good reviews that led to invitations from clubs and festivals in N.America. I’ve made regular trips to N.America ever since that time. The reception has always been really good and for me it was a real bonus to bring American style music back to the US by Europe. Playing at the New Orleans Jazzfest and the Chicago Blues Festival were highlights and a wonderful experience for me.
DATC: As you look around, how healthy is the blues in Europe – in terms of both performing artists and in terms of the appetite of audiences?
HT: I think it looks pretty healthy. Blues societies get established in many places and do a great job spreading the news. Also lots of younger musicians seem to be drawn to the blues or a blues based kind of music. There’s an audience there, especially if you – like me – have built up a following throughout the years. Young musicians probably may find it a little harder to make a name for themselves. My brand of acoustic blues-based music attracts audiences that listen carefully. The music takes center-stage – be it in small intimate clubs, concert halls or big festivals.
DATC: I’m sure you’d say there have been many influences on your music and your guitar playing – are there any in particular that stand out?
HT: There are so many but I should probably mention Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt, Yank Rachell (mandolin), Sleepy John Estes, Fred McDowell, Brownie McGhee, Mance Lipscomb, Blind Willie Johnson… I’ve had the pleasure of spending time and playing with Yank Rachell, Honeyboy Edwards, Louisiana Red, Champion Jack Dupree, John Jackson, Sam Chatmon, Odetta, Wilsson Pickett, Luther Allison, Bo Diddley, Son Thomas, Taj Mahal, Henry Townsend to mention a few. I suppose they’ve all influenced me more in the sense of feeling and understanding the music than guitarlines and notes. But of course you pick up things left and right. I’m self-taught and learning to play wasn’t easy in the east of Holland in the early sixties – no teachers, books or videos. Brownie McGhee was the first bluesman that I saw live in concert. I sat in the first row and watched carefully what he did – my introduction to fingerpicking: thumb + 2 fingers. All of a sudden I was able to figure some things out – a real eye-opener that gave me a direction.
DATC: You always make playing the guitar look so easy and effortless. Any advice for aspiring acoustic blues players?
HT:Play, play, play – that’s all I can say. Go to see other good pickers play and play with other people. If you’re dedicated and have the love for the music and your instrument, someday it will fall into place.
DATC: Hans, congratulations on your album, Wishing Well. About half the album is traditional songs and the other half has your own compositions – some of which, like Early This Morning Blues, sound like traditional blues songs. Tell us a bit about your song-writing, Hans – is that something that comes easily, naturally to you?
HT: Actually I already have another album 65 Birthday Bash recorded live in 2013 and released in april 2014!
Wishing Well is from last year and a pretty laidback kind of album. Songs that have accompanied me throughout my musical career (e.g. Brownie McGhee’sLiving With The Blues that I picked up when I saw Brownie at my first ever live blues experience – or Wayfaring Stranger that I picked up from Johnny Cash at a dressing room session before a concert – I was the support act). Songwriting comes quite naturally to me. I don’t write all the time but I’ve probably written 3-400 songs over the years and whenever I get some good idea or have a certain experience that’s worth a song, I get going. I suppose that’s a good way too to find your own personal expression. I’ve included a few lyrics: Big Bill’s Guitar (about hearing Broonzy and playing his guitar in Chicago) and Mississippi (written after my first trip to the state). [Click here]
DATC: You seem very much at home performing and recording gospel blues songs or songs with spiritual content – your album Jedermann is full of such songs, whether it’s Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down, or Oh Sinner Man or Way Down in the Hole; and some of the songs from your collaborative album with Terry Evans have a gospel feel, not just Heaven’s Airplane. How do these songs fit in the overall blues genre? And how well do you relate to them?
HT: Musically it’s more or less the same idiom and both are closely related. Gospel puts “God” or “The Lord” where the blues puts “My baby” – just about. Bluesmen like Fred McDowell used the same musical vehicle to play and sing gospel style material and blues.
I especially like the vocal aspect of the gospel sound – with its emotional output and great harmonies and spirituality. Especially on our latest collaboration Delta Time where, besides Ry Cooder on guitar, we were backed by Willie Greene and Arnold McCuller with their great gospel blues voices we got a gospel inspired sound. I think it has a lot to do with the voices and 3- or 4 part harmonies. Terry, Arnold and Willie all sang in church when they came up and know how to wrap their voices around a song. We’re not trying to put a religious viewpoint across though – just enjoy singing together and I think it really fits well with the blues. In my band I work with 3 singers from Zimbabwe – a similar thing: rich harmonies with an African twist. To me the human voice is the greatest instrument and singing with others is an inspiring and glorious experience.
The Jedermann Remixed album is more explicit with its spiritual content. I was asked to do the soundtrack for this film based on an old medieval morality play where religion and the fight between good and bad, “God” and the “Devil” play a big role.
DATC: Finally, Hans, what does the rest of 2014 hold for you?
HT: Just had my 66th birthday on April 5th – where we had 2 great “Birthday Bash” concerts with myself and musical friends here in Vienna (where I make my home). I’m trying to work a little less as I get older but it’s hard to say no and I’m still playing many concerts all over Europe in 2014. I play lots of solo gigs but also duo’s and bandgigs – keep it interesting and varied. There are no plans for N.America this year but I may come over in 2015.
Key to the Highway is a Big Bill Broonzy song which has been covered by everybody from Sonny Terry to the Band to B B King to Eric Clapton. It’s a classic, “I’m outta here!” song:
I got the key to the highway,
Billed out and bound to go
I’m gonna leave here running
Because walking’s much too slow
It’s typical of a lot of the early blues songs – the ramblin’ bluesman who can’t stay in one place too long, needs to be on the road again and can’t commit to any relationships.”You ain’t done nothing babe, Except drive a good man from home,” says the singer, putting all the blame on his woman. When in reality, it’s his own itchy feet that are making him want to pack up and hit the road again – “I’m gonna roam this old highway, Until the day I die.”
There were lots of reasons for blues artist moving around – it may have been the threat of lynching in the Jim Crow South; it may have been the need to make a little money – then as now, the professional musician can’t just keep playing his material to the same group of people over and over again; it may have been failed romances; or just a restlessness, a need to get up and go, see a few different places. Whatever the reason, many of these guys didn’t have much of a home, not one they could feel contented in anyway.
Robert Johnson said he had “ramblin’ on my mind,” again, blaming his “baby,” because she treated him so “unkind.” Muddy Waters sang “I’m a rambling kid, I’ve been rambling all my days,” but his baby, “she want me to stop rambling.” Johnny Shines’ version goes, “Woke up this morning, reached down for my shoes, Reason was, baby, I got them old ramblin’ blues.”
But, hey, we love listening to these songs, don’t we, because there’s something just a bit rebellious in them, something that makes us feel alive in our soft, comfortable lifestyles. Problem is, though, home comforts are pretty good, and we don’t really want to change anything, because change can be unsettling, and, quite frankly, “leavin’ here runnin” is way too much effort. We get settled pretty easily these days, don’t we?
Interesting, isn’t it, that Jesus might be termed a “ramblin’ man?” Once his ministry got going, he never stayed in one place too long. He moved about the countryside with a bunch of followers, men and women, had little in the way of possessions, and said at one point that animals like foxes and birds had dens and nests, but he had no place to call home. He was, and is, an unsettling character – even though the Christian church tames and domesticates him.
Jesus never really fitted in with his contemporaries. The people to whom he preached got excited and saw in him a new political leader who might take on the occupying Romans (John 6.15); many of the Jewish leaders were deeply troubled about his version of God’s coming kingdom; his disciples seriously misunderstood the nature of his leadership, bickering about who would be top dog beside him. He made people who came to him terribly uncomfortable about his attitude to wealth (he told a “rich, young ruler” to give away his money to the poor) and he was prepared to symbolically attack the very centre of Jewish political, economic and religious life, the Temple in Jerusalem. And, of course, so upsetting and threatening was his vision for all things new, for changing the status quo, he ended up being tortured and executed.
Would be Jesus-followers can’t expect a life of quiet comfort and ease. He promised his followers harassment for pursuing justice and reviling by people who misunderstood them. Problem is, by making this word that Jesus used – justice (Matt 5.10) – into a nice-sounding religious word “righteousness,” we’ve taken the heat from Jesus’s life and message. We’ve probably never heard of people being persecuted for “righteousness” sake; but we’ve certainly heard of people being persecuted for pursuing justice. And there’s where things start to get uncomfortable for us – how far are we prepared to go, as Jesus-followers, to pursue justice? Some of us can’t even be bothered finding out what’s going on the world, or signing that petition against modern day slavery or whatever, never mind taking to the streets to make our voice hear on behalf of the voiceless and the oppressed. Our Christianity has become too domesticated, too calm, too cosy. We need to find ways to get radically connected to the poor, the weak, the oppressed of the word, or else we’re just playing at it.
The followers need to start to look a bit more like the one we’re following. Walkin’s much to slow – we need to shake ourselves down and be prepared to do a bit of running. Only when we’re prepared to change ourselves can we hope to change the world.
DATC: Gary, tell us what Document Records is and what makes it special?
Gary: It is rather unique! I was a CD reviewer when I first encountered it. From the 1970s onwards there were labels that were reissuing pre-war country blues. Artists’ works were being released in chronological order – labels like Matchbox, RST, Wolf and so on. Johnny Parth was involved in some way with these labels. He was producing albums for a few different labels, both here and in Austria. Johnny did a tremendous amount of work on different projects and he was able to get access to a large bank of original recordings. Eventually he realized he had so many recordings he could mass them together and put it under one umbrella, one label. And so Document Records was born.
And he started releasing these recordings at a prolific rate – he actually was releasing about 100 CDs a year! He’d struck up a very good deal with Arhoolie in San Francisco whereby they agreed to take and pay for 250 of any CD that Document released. That’s any record label’s dream! It’s usually sale or return. So that financed Document in the early days.
And the first 200-300 releases of the catalogue were very strong sellers and are still popular today. But eventually Arhoolie had to implore Johnny to stop sending CDs, as they began to cover much more obscure areas that were not so popular with the record buying public – these included old preachers and sermons! Johnny didn’t take any notice of this request. So it got to the point where the Arhoolie warehouse was stacked full of Document CDS!
DATC: You got involved about 12 years or so ago?
Gary: Yes. What Johnny had done in releasing the works of artists like Blind Willie McTell chronologically was unbelievable, really. It took a certain type of person. After doing the reviews, Johnny desperately needed someone to write some booklet notes on four volumes of Ma Rainey and he asked me. And no matter what you did for Johnny, he would pay you in CDs! 10 CDs for a set of booklet notes, so I was amassing quite a bit of the catalogue – my idea of heaven really – I don’t know whether he went down to his local supermarket and offered to pay for his groceries in CDs or not!
This was around 1997 and it was at the beginning of people having PCs in their homes. And it occurred to me – a website would be great to reach out to all the fans of pre-war blues around the world. Perhaps you could make a kind of online shop – so I called Johnny and put this to him, but he just wasn’t interested. But he said – why don’t you have a go at it? And then he said, would you like all of Document? And I assumed he just meant that I could have the rest of the catalogue I didn’t have. But it soon became clear that what he meant was that he wanted me to take over Document Records.
So we talked about a deal and I said yes.
DATC: And you took over the business at that point and have seen it through the whole sea change of CDs through to downloads.
Gary: Actually I couldn’t have taken it over at a worse time – the timing was appalling! But I had committed myself to it. And it’s not like selling a commodity – there’s a much bigger weight of responsibility on our shoulders because we are acutely aware that what we have is as good as a kind of museum, with lots of precious stuff inside it. If the door was closed on it and the key thrown away, it would be a huge loss. Independent record companies have always been a bit of a thorn in the majors side. If companies like Document finished, the majors are not going to their vaults and say, we simply must do a boxed set of the Rev. J M Gates, or Frank Stokes. These companies are not interested in licensing anything unless it’s likely to sell up to 20,000 copies. The money side of it doesn’t particularly bother me, but what might keep me awake at night, is thinking – if Document wasn’t around, who would take up the challenge of this precious repository of material?
Often we get orders from universities in the States and we have this curious and ironic situation where the University of Texas is ordering pre-war recordings of Texas blues artists from a little sleepy hollow in the south west of Scotland. And they need this not only for music studies but African-American social studies and so on. But what if Document weren’t around?
DATC: So if you had to articulate what is it about this early blues music that is so important, so vital?
Gary: I think that Jack White summed this up quite well a few weeks back, when he said that this was really the first recordings of ordinary people singing about their own very personal thoughts and feelings. Before that you had vaudeville, music hall songs, minstrel singers and so on – they were not personal songs. It was this or classical music. So this idea of people singing about the fact that they have money troubles of love troubles…blues music was so individual, so personal.
DATC: How have you found interest in the blues over the past, say ten years? What’s been your observation?
Gary: I think it’s still pretty much where it was in the late seventies. Up until 1961, it was black music for black consumption. Live performances, whether in a Chicago club or a juke joint down south – it was black performers for a black audience. More often than not these audiences wouldn’t just sit in their seats and clap politely – one of the first blues records I remember hearing was White, Brown Black by Big Bill Broonzy and I made the wrong conclusion that a lot of this stuff was going to be political. But it’s not, they are songs about love. Some of it is incredibly romantic, some of it absolutely brutal. But nearly all of it was danced to. You’d go into the juke joint and you’d have some couple doing some sort of grinding dance in the shadows to something like Charlie Patton’sHammer Blues.
For us something to dance to needs to be energetic – it’s hard for us to get our minds around the fact that a lot of the pre-war music would have been danced to.
DATC:Elijah Wald makes the same point in his book Escaping the Delta, that whatever else you want to say about the blues, it was music to dance to. It was entertainment. It was a way to escape the hard week of cotton picking and then into the juke joint to be entertained.
Gary: Going into town on a Saturday night to the barrelhouse or the juke joint, drinks, hot evenings, people dancing, people talking in the shadows. Now the black record buying public follow the trends just the same as anybody else did. For them it was blues, then swing, then R&D, the boogie-woogie stuff, the swing stuff, then the powerful Chicago electric stuff – they were moving with the times. It was over for pre-war blues recordings and they moved on. And they moved on from the electric blues to soul. And then it became all the more sophisticated. So the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters – fantastic as they are, and despite how you and I might appreciate them, by the end of the 50s it was becoming old music. And by the time Tamla had got a hold by the sixties, they were done, more or less, they only appealed to the older generation which had grown up with that music.
But then of course we have the Rolling Stones and the Animals, the Yardbirds, Cream. And they, unwittingly, brought another audience to this music. The record companies – like Chess – had been approached regarding artists going over the Europe to tour. All you’d had before that was Bill Broonzey, Lonnie Donnegan, and Leadbelly who went to France – and although they’d been well received, it wasn’t a major turning point for the artist. So the only one that said he’d give it a try
Sonny Boy WIlliamson
was Sonny Boy Williamson. When he came over, there is this classic photo of him down in London, with a mini-skirted young lady sat on his knee with the bee-hive and so on, and Sonny Boy looking very pleased with himself. So he took these photographs back and showed them to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and with that they were all queuing up at the airport to come over! Sonny Boy said, you wouldn’t believe how they treated me over there, I was like Elvis. So over they came in their droves. And they started to appear with some of the British bands like the Yardbirds and so on. But by this point there’s a compromise starting, the black blues performances started to make concessions for white audiences, and at the same time you had white musicians desperately trying to sound like their idols. And so you got this blend, and with that there were sacrifices – but they had to do it to appeal to a new found audience, because their old audience was away buying Junior Walker or the Supremes. So the music got diluted – and some of it I like, some of it I don’t really.
DATC: Do you have any contemporary blues artists you particularly like?
Barbeque Bob
Gary: No, not really! When you’ve been listening to this stuff all your life, probably for several hours every day… When I started off with this, to go into a record shop with a blues section would be very unusual. And one of the things about the music back in the day was that it was very obscure, and when I was at school, the other kids would have things like T-Rex and Sweet written all over their school satchels, whereas I had things like Barbeque Bob and Peg Leg Howell! Those times were very lonely experiences! So I’ve been into this for such a long time, and when you hear something new, you’re saying to yourself, is this is just like so and so, and as the years go on you end up with these massive references you can make. So it really takes something to make me sit up and listen. But it’s nice when you hear someone these days go down, not the Buddy Guy route, but more the down home route. That’s what I like.
DATC: Is there a typical Document Records customer?
Gary: [laughs]. Yes, they’re very scary and frightening! No, actually there isn’t – when I’d had Document about 4 or 5 years, somebody said, do you remember the Blues and Gospel Train? It was a programme on Granada TV around 1963 or so, with Sister Rosetta Thorpe, Muddy Waters, Sonny Terry and Brownie Magee, and a few others. And they used to commandeer this disused railway station just outside Manchester and turned it into something out of Mississippi. And it might have worked, but it was the middle of winter and all the artists were wearing these heavy coats looking frozen! So they were doing this evening all about the programme, with the original producer and so on. So I went, and I thought, is this just going to be a few old guys with big beer bellies? And I could imagine a lousy PA system giving feedback and so on. But when we got there, it was absolutely packed and yes, while there were people there of my age and older, the biggest number of people were students, and they thought it was fantastic. And at the end of it when I went into the loo, this guy said to me, what are you into then? And I said, well I like the blues. And he said, who’s your favourite? Oh, I don’t know, there are so many, I replied. And he said, well my favourite’s Memphis Minnie. And I thought, that’s a surprise. And then from another part of the Gent’s loo came this voice saying, well I love Peetie Wheatstraw, and then another one popped up, but you can’t beat Blind Blake. And I was really taken aback. And then my mate told them that I owned Document Records and they all knew about it and were all delighted – so they followed me outside and wouldn’t let me go.
So, as far as your question, who’s the typical customer of Document? Well, I’d only had it a few months when I had this strange call from someone who wanted to tell me how much he and his mate loved country blues, all sorts of blues music – it was all me and my mate like this, that and the other, and we love Document. But just at the point when I was thinking, I really must get back to work, he told me that they wanted help with a project – it would involve a book and a TV documentary and a CD. And then he told me his mate was Bill Wyman! So Document ended up doing the album, Bill Wyman’s Blues Odyssey.
At that point, I was astonished to find that the Document label was known beyond the serious blues enthusiast and collector. And the book and everything was launched down at Sticky Fingers Cafe down in London and the people that were there at the party – I was stood in the middle of this, thinking, what is going on? And people I spoke to were very, very knowledgeable about the music and they loved the music. And that was everybody from David Bowie to Bob Geldoff. Bob Geldoff said to me, Ah yes Document, I love it! The whole thing was astonishing to me.
And we have now have licensed a lot of stuff to other labels and have licensed stuff for film and advertising and documentaries. And what amazes me is that the requests are very specific, for the most obscure recordings.
And again, with regards to who likes Document? Well, one of them rang me up a couple of years back – and it’s Jack White.
DATC: Yes, this is very interesting. How did this contact come about?
Jack White
Gary: Well, a couple of years ago Third Man emailed and said Jack White would like to speak to me. So after quite a while, when I had just about forgotten about it, my wife answered the telephone and said, Jack White’s on the phone. So we had this great conversation, talking about what we both were about, talking enthusiastically about the music and so on. And Jack said what an influence Document had been on him and his music from when he was a teenager. Back then he’d walked into a record shop near his home and bought a large number of Document vinyl records, and he gave himself a crash course in vintage country blues.
DATC: So with the Jack White project, you’re doing Charlie Patton, Willie McTell and the Mississippi Sheiks?
Gary: Yes. At first I thought he was going to ask for “best ofs” so I was very surprised that he wanted to commit himself to the whole Document approach of issuing the music in chronological order.
People used to argue about how much you should restore these old recordings. Some collectors felt that the original records shouldn’t be touched – and, of course, sometimes when restoration is done, there is the possibility of taking out important frequencies that contribute to the music itself, as opposed to simply removing scratches and clicks. So retaining the integrity of the music of the original recording is a delicate business. I have eventually learned how to do all of this and I knew that what Jack was trying to do was something very, very special. So I took a long time over making sure we got this right.
Our ultimate goal was that these LPs would get into the hands of newcomers to the music. We wanted people to look at the covers and then start to listen and then begin to take that journey that we’ve been lucky enough to take. If a young Jack White walks into a record shop and gets interested in this music, then that would be great.
DATC: And the covers of the new albums look absolutely fabulous.
Gary: Yeah. I must admit, when I saw the Patton one at first, I was shocked. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. And now I think they’ve really captured the character of the music.
DATC: I think they’re fabulous – they really capture something of the original artist. But at the same time they are very contemporary.
Gary: Yes! They really did create something of a wow factor when they were first shown.
DATC: So the albums are available on vinyl and download?
Gary: Yeah. At first I thought Jack just wanted to keep it to vinyl. But then he said, if you want to use the artwork for your own CDs, that’s OK. And in the end we agreed that we could use the artwork for downloads from Document.
DATC: How have the LPs sold?
Gary: The albums sold out. The first pressing was 3,000 of each and they sold out within a week. And so the first set of albums are being re-pressed and the second volume is now out. There have been a few delays – with us, and also because Jack never stops – there’s always something going on, with his touring, or films or whatever. I remember saying to his lawyer at an early stage of the project, I can’t imagine this is Jack’s biggest priority, but she said, no you’re absolutely wrong, this is Jack’s main priority. And then she paused and said, but everything that he does is his top priority!
But he’s done so many interviews about Document and banged on about it! So Document has had its moments – the Bill Wyman moment, and another one with Paul Simon – things to keep us interested – but this…it’s not been the same since, it really hasn’t.
DATC: So presumably that has driven the online sales for you as well?
Gary: Oh yeah. It’s been unbelievable. It’s quite interesting – we started our Facebook page in August 2011 and my wife, Gillian, keeps that updated every day. And we were getting 5 or 6 likes a week, but when this collaboration with Third Man came along, we suddenly went up to 2,000 likes. And phones were ringing, people wanted interviews, we started to sell out of CDs. In some ways it was great and in other ways it was quite alarming!
DATC: So the second volumes are now available?
Gary: Yes, they’re available and people can buy them through our websites.
DATC: Thanks so much, it’s been a fascinating conversation!
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