Rory Block on the power of music: Part 2 of our Interview

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“Every night I do a show and I meet people afterwards and they tell me their own stories. When I get off-stage, they thank me for songs I’ve written. They tell me that this song saved their life; that song saved her dad’s life…”

Rory Block is a multiple Blues Award winner, an exceptional acoustic guitarist and has been playing the blues for the past 50 odd years. In this terrific interview, she told us she feels inspired, motivated and like she’s just getting started. In Part 1 of the interview, she talked about getting her Acoustic Blues Artist of the Year award, her celebrated “mentor series” of tributes to the country blues legends, and the making of her new album of Bessie Smith songs, A Woman’s Soul. In Part 2, below, she talks about Robert Johnson, overcoming stage fright, and reminisces about meeting Son House and Rev. Gary Davis.

Gary When you’ve been taking on an old blues song, whether it’s a Robert Johnson song or Mississippi John Hurt song, I guess you’re always trying to make it fresh for a modern audience. You’re capturing this style, something of the essence. But how do you go about that, you know taking a one of those guy’s songs and making it fresh?

Rory Well I don’t think it’s something that you that you consciously do. I don’t consciously say, I better do this a little different. With the Robert Johnson tribute, that was an example of where I didn’t want to do it differently. For me Robert Johnson is the top of the mountain. He is the master of that style. It doesn’t get any better than that. So it’s not like somebody is waiting for me to do it my way.

And that doesn’t diminish me as an artist. It just means that I’m not going to come up with a better way. So, I wanted to get right down to something that I felt I really understood. I heard him first in 1964 when I was 14 years old and I immediately knew that he was the top of the mountain. I mean it was so great. So, I said, I’m going to crack this code – from I first heard his music, I had some kind of a connection to it and I was very focused on it. I want to talk about that again in a second, where I had an interesting background that I think gave me a certain edge when it came to being able to play something very close to what he was playing.

And so I just said, I’m going for the way he did it, both vocals and guitar. I wanted it to be accurate and measure by measure. I think there’s not a better way than his way – I started with that. I’m not going to create a better way than his way. I’m going to do it his way. What does that evoke? Remember with the classic painters of yore. They started their careers by copying the paintings of Masters stroke for stroke because that taught them. You need to know to the best of your ability how to do what they did. So that’s how I approached Robert Johnson. I said, he’s the top and I’m the student. So, I approached it that way.

So that leads to, why do I think that I could do that? Well, the first type of American roots music that I was exposed to was Appalachian. This early mountain, country music later evolved to bluegrass and later evolved to today’s country music. The earliest mountain music had a style of banjo playing called claw hammer. And my dad played that.  My father was also a country fiddle player – that was Irish music, music from the British Isles from Ireland, Scotland and England. All the people who came over here brought their music and their music evolved and changed and grew. But much of it was as written in the old style.

So there was my dad playing this really wonderful old mountain style of banjo playing called frailing, and there’s a lot of old timey music players who know exactly that style. Plucking up and slamming down was part of it. Chicka-boom, chicka-boom, chicka-boom, and it was a very unusual hand movement. Well, that translated totally into Robert Johnson, because my dad had shown me how to do that when I was a kid. So, there I was going chicka-boom, snapping up and thumping down. My dad had a thumping style on guitar and on banjo, but he played fiddle very beautifully. But his banjo playing as he showed it to me was a huge help for me when I started playing this percussive style, like when I watch Son House hitting the strings, hitting the guitar with his whole hand. Wham! You know, like a drum. And that style was completely comfortable for me because of what I had learned from my dad. And so, I feel like that gave me an edge. Because I was able to play the percussive style that a lot of those blues players were playing, in a very comfortable way. It was right there for me because I had been working on that already since 1964.

Then after Robert Johnson came Son House, and on those two recordings I felt very much like I wanted to capture the original formats of the songs. But then after that I began to do it a little different. Oh you know I was really having a lot of fun! It was starting to feel like, if I wanted to put an overdub on that wasn’t part of the original arrangement, that was okay, and you know, it got a little looser with Skip James, with Fred McDowell, Mississippi John Hurt. I started putting slide solos on top of songs and then that really opened up the idea that the arrangements could be what whatever I felt I wanted to do. With Robert Johnson I had to do it like him. With Son House. I wanted to do it like him too, but maybe with a little more variation. But after that, I thought, well this could really open up and just not be in the expected direction all the time.

Gary That’s very interesting.  Now the music that you play, Rory, is mostly nearly a century old and is from a different time, a different social context. What would you say is the enduring power of the blues? What makes it still relevant?

Rory Well, first of all if you took away all of our electrical stuff and all of our technology, we’d all just still be like the people we’ve been over the thousands and millions of years – you know, essentially still all human. We all cry, we all laugh, we all hurt. We all are excited and happy. We all are essentially the same. We’re all from the same seed – everybody. So, if you take away the trappings of what makes this century and what makes it that century, then nothing has changed. It’s essentially the same message, the cry from the soul, you could say. It’s all the same deep emotions. Look at the Irish and English, and the ballads from that part of the world from years and years ago passed down through the centuries and the ages, and they’re all about the same things that we feel and care about now and today and same thing – blues. Same thing with all forms of music that have a storyline. We’re still talking about the same stuff that we all understand.

Gary So along the way and all the ups and downs of your career as a travelling musician, did you ever think about giving up, just thinking this is too hard, especially in the early days.  I can’t do this anymore.

Rory All the time! [laughs] Except now. Yeah, it’s like every time I went into the studio – and I’m thinking it happened very much with Mama’s Blues which is before the mentor series – where I just thought, I’ll never sing again. You know that feeling has come over me so much. Not really now, I just have to say, I’m on my stride! I don’t question myself that much now, but there was that day where I went into the studio to do a vocal on the next record and I thought, well all that stuff I did in the past was just by accident. Yeah, but I’m never gonna be able to do it again. And I had that feeling every time, and every time things wouldn’t go well. Look, I’ve been in a field of music that has been so marginalized for so long and all I ever heard was, you’re never going gonna make it singing blues. It’s a curiosity but it’s a thing of the past. Wake up! The message is, become a commercial artist, that’s where the career is, that’s where the money is, that’s where the success is. What you want to do, you’re never going to make it. A lot of people told me that and I felt very discouraged. But I kept on – music is all I know how to do; I couldn’t have gone off and chosen another career because music is what I know how to do. And why did you choose blues? Because blues is what I love.

But that was kind of why I kept on and kept on. But I always felt discouraged. I felt like I’m nowhere, nobody. I’m never going to be a thing, you know. And then there would be these surprises that would happen that would just make me feel like this could this could work. And these little joyous moments, moments where I said this is working, this is great. When Stevie Wonder came and played in the studio on my record a million years ago now, I said, this is the finest moment of my musical existence, if nothing else good ever happens! I’m content with this one. It was so sweet, it was so great.

And it’s still great to this day. Bonnie Raitt played on my record…Mark Knopfler – there are some wonderful people who’ve been generous and just were willing to appear on one of my recordings and that meant the world. So good things would suddenly happen out of the blue. And then I would get nominated. All of a sudden, I start getting nominated. You never know! But there was much discouragement, but always a tremendous amount of love for the music just sort of kept me on the straight line. I did band and songwriting stuff for a while – no problem there. I love that too. And then there was the Lovin’ Whisky song that became a hit record in Holland – I have a gold record for that – and then it kind of spread around different parts of Europe, and then it became much more well-known in the United States as a kind of ricochet across the ocean. [Check out the story behind the song below]

Gary And presumably what you get from your audiences when you’re performing is a big thing as well.

Rory It’s huge. I had to overcome fear and stage fright that was really debilitating. I was the worst, fearful.  I have a book about my life called When a Woman Gets the Blues which is now completely totally politically incorrect from start to finish and I’m sure I’ll have to hear about it sooner or later, but when I wrote it, it was what was on my mind at the time. But I have a chapter on stage fright where I say that having been raised feeling that I was like the Little Match Girl, I just didn’t feel like I was anybody that anybody would care about. I was very insecure and that’s part of my story. I was told that I was not worthy. I went out into the world knowing that I was attached to this music and that I had capabilities and that people went, wow, when I was just a teenager, how did you learn that? Where’d that come from? I knew I had this talent, but I also had this terribly unworthy feeling as a person. So, I went on stage in the beginning totally terrified. I felt like I was just going to completely mess up and I just was so afraid and for about five years I never opened my eyes. I just shook with fear on stage and it was always humiliating and embarrassing, and I’d get off stage and I would think, Man that was horrible.

Then I had like a series of revelations about it. One of them was, wait a minute, what are you putting yourself through? The people in the audience didn’t come there because they hate you! They came there to hear your music, so that sort of means they like you! And I had this whole realization that I was like a little kid kind of hiding behind my mother’s aprons with fear and I was bringing this fear onto the stage and it was misplaced. So, I thought, well,l this is just my office. This is where I go to work every day or every night or every weekend. What reason do I have to be any more afraid of going to my office than all the other people who go to work every day in their office and they’re not, you know, cowering in fear. So, I had this revelation that these people in the audience were my friends, and I was able to come out of that debilitating stage fright and come to a point where I felt I’m in a roomful of friends, a really wonderful safe place and I can talk to them. And that’s how I relate to my audiences and they’re wonderful people.

By the way, every night I do a show and I meet people afterwards and I go, wow, people are so much more wonderful and real than you think looking at the news. When you’re face to face, person to person with the real people that are out there, you realize people are still good at heart, they’re wonderful, and people tell me their own stories. When I get off-stage, they thank me for songs I’ve written. They tell me that this song saved their life; that song saved her dad’s life. It could be anything. When people come up to me, they get real, they go, “thank you for writing Lovin’ Whisky – I stopped drinking two weeks ago.” And I go, thank you for telling me.

And somebody would write me about such and such a song, and say, I was going to kill myself…but I changed my mind. Oh man, if I’ve done one thing like that! So, I got to the point where before going on stage I had no routine – I didn’t do any deep breathing, I didn’t do anything – but I thought, if I could just do one good thing for one person, I’m good with that. I just wanted to be used to do something good for someone. And every night someone or multiple people in the house would verify that feeling that they didn’t feel alone because I wrote an embarrassing song about my own life and decided that it didn’t matter if I was embarrassed by it in case it helps someone else. And it always does, because our stories are universal.

Gary Fabulous. I really wish we could go off on a number of different tangents here it’s been very, very interesting. But I guess we’ll probably have to come to a close or else we could be here all day! It’s been absolutely fascinating. But I can’t let you go and not ask about the Reverend Gary Davis who is a particular favourite of mine. He’s just a wonderful guitarist and yet Rolling Stone magazine had no room for him in its list of 100 greatest guitarist, which is absolutely amazing.

I read Ian Zack’s Say No to the Devil. I don’t know if you’ve read that biography of Davis – it’s very, very good. Actually it’s a heart rending story, seeing Davis’s struggle and poverty, and yet seeing the level of his expertise and musicality. So, tell us a little bit about going to see Gary Davis for guitar lessons and what your impressions of him were.

Rory I was absolutely blinded with admiration with every one of the original blues players whom I met. Every one of them – it was like the light shining, reflecting from them, beautiful light that was beyond blinding and amazing. And Reverend Gary Davis was no different. I mean I just was in awe.

I was 15 and I was not a student by the way. Stephan Grossman was my first boyfriend and he would take me all these places because he knew everybody – all the record collectors, all the musicians. In Europe they were starting to play some really cool songs. There was Eric Clapton who was playing Robert Johnson stuff and including country blues influences. The Beatles were doing it, and so we knew that on the other side of the ocean people were aware of the blues, but you could count us on two hands – the record collectors, the people looking for the early blues players, and the people playing, you could count on maybe a hand or two. So anyway, Stefan knew all these people and he would take me everywhere, we’d go backstage to meet them every time someone was rediscovered because he would know about it. We would end up doing things like going to Mississippi John Hurt’s home and that sort of thing, and Son House would come and visit Stefan at his parents’ house and I was there too.

So we went to Reverend Gary Davis’s apartment in the Bronx and sometimes David Bromberg would be there too. Only a handful of people were there. Roy Bookbinder, Woody Mann, a few others. Jorma [Kaukonen], told me and he didn’t actually meet Reverend Gary Davis but he just immersed himself in his music which is also a deep and real way to get to know the music. Like me and Robert Johnson. So anyway, Reverend Gary Davis was awesome and beautiful. He was witty, he was funny, sharp, quick. He was a phenomenal player, as you know. But he didn’t stop and say, you put the second finger of your index finger on the third fret and so on. He didn’t teach you anything like that, he just played. And he and Stephan would just sort of roast each other. I mean when Gary Davis would start, you had to keep up with him if you wanted to be his student, and he would just play and he would be, I think correctly, saying, I’m showing you my hand. You see what I’m doing? Now do it. So that was like the hard knock school of great guitar lessons and then he would sort of really tease Stefan, if Stefan didn’t pick it up immediately. He was so funny and he’d rib Stefan, but Stefan kept up with him, and they would go back and forth. Stefan learned it that way, and so did David Bromberg and Roy Bookbinder.  That’s how they learned. That was really being an apprentice, I think.

Gary Fantastic. Thank you Rory. Thank you for being so generous with your time.

Rory No problem, Gary.Thank you.

 

 

Rory Block is just getting started: Part 1 of our Interview

“I feel like I’m on a roll. I know what I’m doing here. I’m focused. I’m excited about it, I’m on the road and I know what my destination is. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that as clearly as I feel it now.” Rory Block

Rory Block is one of the world’s greatest living acoustic blues artists. She’s been honing her guitar skills since she was a teenager in 1964 in New York City, and has devoted her life and career to performing the blues. Her talent has been recognized many times by WC Handy and Blues Music Awards in the US, as well as gaining accolades and awards in Europe. She has just won Acoustic Artist of the Year in the 2019 Blues Music Awards.

Over the years Rory has performed with a host of other top artists like Keb’ Mo’, Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Wonder, Taj Mahal, Mark Knopfler, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Jorma Kaukonen…the list goes on. As the New York Times put it, “Her playing is perfect, her singing otherworldly as she wrestles with ghosts, shadows and legends.”

Rory Block grew up in the New York of the 50s and 60s, in the world of Bob Dylan, Maria Muldaur, and the folk revival which saw country blues artists like Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Rev. Gary Davis, Fred McDowell and Son House rediscovered. Her personal encounters with these influential blues masters of the 20th century left an indelible mark on her and has inspired her music and performances ever since. Not least in her highly acclaimed set of tribute albums to Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Rev. Gary Davis, Fred McDowell and Son House. In these she has masterfully recreated the music of these seminal artists, reinterpreting the songs for a new generation.

Down at the Crossroads was delighted to get talking to Rory, and found her undaunted by the prospect of getting older, as inspired and excited about her music as ever, embarking on a new multi-album project which pays tribute to the woman blues artists of yesteryear, and generally loving life.

We talked to her about her life in the blues and her new album A Woman’s Soul: A Tribute to Bessie Smith. So interesting and wide-reaching was the discussion, we’ve split in into two parts. Here’s Part 1 –

Gary Rory, Congratulations for having won that Blues Music Award. But I know of course that you’ve won many blues music and W.C. Handy awards and others over the years. How satisfying is that sort of recognition for you?

Rory It really does mean a lot. I think it’s fabulous to be nominated. Actually, it’s a shock! When I was first nominated, I couldn’t believe it. It was just so you know – so justifying – it makes me feel like my work, it means something. People are noticing, people care. Sometimes we can get in a bit of a low spot where we think nothing that you’re doing adds up to anything. Anybody can have that feeling. And so, a nomination in itself tells you that you shouldn’t be discouraged, that something is going right.

But I used to tell myself, don’t worry, because I had been nominated a number of times before winning the first time, and I was pretty much satisfied with that and I wasn’t expecting to win. But I secretly wished that someday I would! But I kept telling myself not to think about it. And when I did win, it was a sweet thing and it did really make me feel joyous and happy. And then most recently I thought, well, I’ll never win again, I’ve got my five awards. That’s more than enough. So, I was going to the awards fully expecting not to win because I’m not that much of a social media person and these days you just really need wide reach, lots of attention given to social media and I’m not so great at that at all. I mean, I don’t post anything myself.  Without my husband nobody would see anything! But I just thought well, I’ll just be so happy with the nomination. And so, when I heard my name in the distance, I didn’t even know my category had been called. And I thought, Oh my God, I think I might have just – could it be? And I thought I better go and see! So, I kind of went up the back steps to the stage and then they were all looking towards me coming up and I thought, this could be that I just won – it was so far from my mind at that point! It was as if I just thought that’s part of the past.

So it’s really meant a great deal to me because I felt like somehow it was really a validation of my work – that it is being appreciated. I think that’s the beauty of it, honestly, it is a good feeling.

Gary Yeah. All these years in your long career and it is still being appreciated.

Rory Nice. I feel energized and so does my husband Rob. In fact, I feel like I’m just getting started! Even without the award I feel like I’m on a roll. I know what I’m doing here. I’m focused. I’m excited about it, I’m on the road and I know what my destination is. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that as clearly as I feel it now.

Gary Well that’s absolutely fabulous, because as people get older, sometimes they just kind of drift a little bit. They think it’s all behind them. But you know I think what you’re saying is fantastic, that you feel you’re on a roll, that you’ve a lot more to do. That’s brilliant.

Rory Yeah. I mean, honestly, that’s the whole thing about “older or younger” whatever it may be – when it really comes down to it – 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? For me, it’s just like I feel more secure. I’m more clear that this is what I was put here to do. You know, really, I see it that way. I was put here to do it. 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.

Gary Well that is fantastic. That was very refreshing to hear you say that. And congratulations on the Bessie Smith album which has been very well acclaimed and very well received. Tell us a bit about why you wanted to make this album.

Rory Well, you know that my previous project is the mentor series. I have to back up and just talk about that if I may, for a second, because it makes the other thing make more sense.  I was raised in an environment and in a family where you didn’t talk about your accomplishments. It was not OK. Whatever that moral system is where some of us were raised to go, “Don’t boast, don’t tell anyone.” And I never spoke about the people that I knew in person and I never spoke about, “well you know I actually spent time with Son House” – I never spoke about anything from the past. And then one day it just hit me, like, I really want to talk about this! I thought I ought to tell my story a little bit and that’s when I started writing my book. And I ought to record records that celebrate the people that I knew in person. So, after the Robert Johnson tribute, which was however many years ago and won Acoustic Album of the Year, I thought it really should be followed by Son House. Whom I knew and had spent a fair amount of time with. And then I thought, you know, I really should try and explain that this is someone who inspired me in person, because in retrospect, how rare is it to have spent time with him? I just thought well, everybody spends time with someone else, and everyone spends time with Reverend Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt! But it really turned out that good fortune had put me into the right place at the right time and I was able to briefly meet these absolutely phenomenal, influential founding masters of blues.

So that led to the mentor series – six CDs to blues masters whom I met in person. And it was nothing to do with whether they were women or men. These were the blues people who were rediscovered and brought in to Greenwich Village where I lived. If they had brought Bessie Smith back (she was deceased at that point) – I would have been overjoyed to meet her too. But with no choice on my part, these were the blues masters who I was introduced to as a young teenager. So those six CDs concluded the mentor series.

And everyone was saying, What are you gonna do to follow up? And then I thought, this really needs to be about my favourite women of blues, and so “the power women of the blues” is my new theme. And it was a no-brainer to start with Bessie Smith. No, I didn’t meet Bessie Smith but that’s not the criterion of this new series. It is those who I dearly loved who were a huge part of inspiring me. And I don’t even know who I’ll pick from here because there’s such a broad range of names and great artists. You could do tributes just about for the rest of one’s life and never run out of inspiration. But to choose Bessie Smith was easy for me because I grew up listening to her music.

Gary Actually it was the women blues artists in the first instance that were the really big stars even before the men wasn’t it?

Rory You know that’s a good point and I’ve heard nobody say that, but I think you’re right. Yes, there was Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie, all who actually attained real name recognition. They toured the world with bands – Bessie Smith was playing with Louis Armstrong and she played for luminaries around the world and she was a big star. So yeah, I think that’s that is a good point.

Gary Then you get through to somebody like Sister Rosetta Tharpe who maybe isn’t exactly blues but I mean she was a big star.

Rory Yeah. That’s totally correct. And one of my challenges is how modern do I get? Bessie Smith was still recording, maybe overlapping in some of the years of the early country blues acoustic artists.  But then there were the ones who are even beyond Bessie’s decade and I’m going to I have to limit this to 1940, 1950, 1960. So that’s a challenge that I haven’t yet sorted out. I suppose it really shouldn’t matter that much and I should just pick my favorites!

Gary Yeah, it’s very interesting. All those wonderful tribute albums you’ve done to the country blues guys – they were all fine guitarists and I guess this is an understandable thing for you to do to pay tribute to them by picking up something of their style and at the same time making it your own. But I guess the process is really rather different with somebody like Bessie Smith who sang with a big band. How much of a challenge was it and how did you go about reinterpreting the songs?

Rory I’m glad you asked because that was a huge challenge and I was thinking I really wouldn’t manage it very well. But I figured it out! But in the beginning, I thought, How will I play all these jazz chords because I’m not a jazz player? And I started listening to it and I thought, this isn’t going to come out right. This is never going to work, it’s not going to have any credibility. And I started trying to do the basic tracks which come first on the album. As I started working on them, I thought, I can’t get these chords, they’re over my head. But then, somehow or other it began to fall into place.

I start with a simple rhythm track that I do myself, by the way, with little boxes and Bongo things – mostly boxes and tubs, an oatmeal box, literally, and serving spoons and wooden spoons. And I create a basic track which gives it a much more alive feel than a generated click track. I wanted a more organic sound. So, if I make my own click track that translates into a much more natural feel in the end. I’ve discovered this and it’s really my thing. It’s a way to make it sound more organic, because there’s gonna be the human variation on the beats and they’re not just computer generated. So then I play the acoustic layer of the chords to the best of my ability. And then I put on overdubs, once I get that.

So, the challenge was to get the chords right. And I was scratching my head, wishing I’d had jazz training, but I managed, and all of a sudden, it got easier!  And then I would move on and put the bass part on. I was listening to the parts of the band members on her great tracks and the bass player is astounding! So I tried to do that and I followed along, translating what I could, and I think I did a pretty much a note for note type of translation in the beginning. And then after a while I stopped doing that. It was perfect for the first few tunes to use as much as possible the actual notes played by the bass player. Then after a while I just started getting the bass groove to my guitar down and I just started playing and it felt like this is working. So after that, it just opened up and I thought, I can do this! And then I would layer on my slide parts. And then once it gets rolling, then it’s like, this is fun!

Gary So you basically did everything on the album yourself by the sounds of things?

Rory Completely, yes! There’s nobody else but me! That’s the way it’s been for a while and I’ll tell you why I started doing it. And there is no other good reason other than that in the beginning we couldn’t afford anything. Back in the days when they were making big L.A., New York records, if you look back at the budgets for a star from the 70s, we’re talking like, a half a million dollars to make an album. And then times changed and those little acoustic artists came along and we’d make albums at studios that weren’t charging three and four hundred dollars an hour, but maybe 40 dollars an hour. We’re like, oh this is so great! But I had one day in the studio with luminary players where a band came in – the soul people from Philadelphia and so on – and it was a ten thousand dollar day! You know, I mean, my goodness people don’t have that kind of budget money anymore now.

At one point I used Stevie Wonder’s backup singers on a certain record but that was back when people were giving me budget money to pay for that stuff. But then it just kept getting less, and it wasn’t because you were becoming less known or because people didn’t care about your music or your career wasn’t growing, it was because everything was restructuring. Record companies’ budgets went down, down, down. Everybody I know has had the same experience. So, in the end I said, I’m going to sing these myself, I’m going to play this myself. It was literally you had to do it if you wanted to have a band sound in this little niche that I’m talking about. So, I just came up with it and it right away felt like it could work. And so, I’ve stayed with that and now it’s like it’s what I do.

Gary Now you just mentioned singing. People will always remark that on your fantastic guitar work and your slide playing, but in listening to this album, I must say, I was very taken with your singing. Obviously, you couldn’t try to imitate Bessie Smith – but the singing on this is terrific. What had you to think about in your approach to the singing?

Rory Getting the right amount of soul. You know, it’s really about the soul and putting yourself into it the whole way. I had to add power. But listen, I’ve been singing Mississippi John Hurt, I’ve been singing Reverend Gary Davis, I’ve been singing Robert Johnson, so I understand that you can’t do a weak vocal. I have to give my all because these artists are just so amazing that I really don’t want to miss the mark. I know I have to give everything that I’m capable of and so that’s how I that’s how I approach it – I go, you better get this right! This is not about getting by. This is about giving everything you can give. And as you said earlier, you also have to put something of yourself in there, otherwise you’re trying to be someone else.

Gary Yeah. And every occasion, whether it’s a Robert Johnson song or Mississippi John Hurt song, I guess you’re always trying to make it fresh for a modern audience. You’re capturing this style, something of the essence. But how do you go about that, you know, taking one of those guy’s songs and making it fresh?

Rory Well I don’t think it’s something that you consciously do. I don’t consciously say, I better do this a little different. With the Robert Johnson tribute, that was an example of where I didn’t want to do it differently. For me Robert Johnson is the top of the mountain. He is the master of that style. It doesn’t get any better than that. So, it’s not like somebody is waiting for me to do it my way.

And that doesn’t diminish me as an artist. It just means that I’m not going to come up with a better way. So, I wanted to get right down to something that I felt I really understood. I heard him first in 1964 when I was 14 years old and I immediately knew that he was the top of the mountain. I mean it was so great. So I said, I’m going to crack this code – because I knew about the guitar playing, I feel like I’ve known from the time that I first started listening to him and tried to play the music, I had some kind of a connection to it and I was very focused on it. I want to talk about that again in a second, where I had an interesting background that I think gave me a certain edge when it came to being able to play something very close to what he was playing.

Check out Part 2 of our interview with Rory Block here, where she talks about meeting the seminal country blues artists, dealing with stage-fright, and sitting in guitar lessons with Rev. Gary Davis.

Robert Johnson – got to keep moving.

Robert Johnson is an almost mythical figure in the history of the blues. The chronology of his life is somewhat hazy – we are unsure even of when he was born but it was probably around 1911 in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. The circumstances of his death have been much discussed, along with the question of where he was buried, but it is likely he was murdered in 1938  – poisoned – by the jealous husband of a woman Johnson had taken up with. We know the date of some of the recordings he made and we have a legacy of 41 tracks he recorded of just 29 songs. And yet, for all his short life and mediocre recording output, Johnson is probably the most influential of all the Delta bluesmen – undoubtedly because of his inventive, versatile and masterful guitar playing and his energized singing, which included growls, shouts and tuneful falsetto. And, because Johnson was able “to transform the blues into marketable popular music” (Ted Giola).

Johnson was relatively unknown in his own lifetime and for some decades after his death, but after the reissue of his recordings in 1961 on the LP King of the Delta Blues Singers, he became a blues star, admired and popularized by blues and rock performers from the Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck to Jimi Hendrix. Clapton said of Johnson, “At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever heard. After a few listenings I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man’s example would be my life’s work.” In his book Chronicles, Bob Dylan said, “When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.”

One of Johnson’s most influential songs has been Hell Hound on My Trail, recorded in 1937. It was the first song recorded during Johnson’s last recording session in Dallas, Texas on Sunday, June 20, 1937 and the first single released from that session. Inspired by earlier blues songs, it is considered one of Johnson’s “best known and most admired performances—many would say it is his greatest” (Giola).

The theme of the song is a familiar one for bluesmen of the time – “rambling”, never staying too long in one spot:

I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving
Blues falling down like hail
And the day keeps on worryin’ me
There’s a hellhound on my trail.

The theme seems similar at first to another song Johnson recorded, Ramblin’ on My Mind – I got ramblin’, I got ramblin’ on my mind / Hate to leave my baby but you treats me so unkind. Like many of his contemporaries, Johnson was in constant motion, moving from town to town around the Delta and greater Mississippi. And from woman to woman. David “Honeyboy” Edwards said of Johnson, “He loved whiskey and he loved women. That’s two things he was crazy about”. But maybe there’s more to Hellhound than the itinerant bluesman who never likes to stay in one place too long, who is unfaithful to his woman and just wants to catch the next train.

The blues, says Adam Gussow in his book, Seems Like Murder Here, “are a way of symbolizing what unconsciously oppresses the black blues subject – the ever-pressuring white gaze, periodic eruptions of ritualized mob-violence, the blackened knuckles and pickled fingers strewn across the lynching South.” He suggests that the blues are a way of expressing the feeling produced by all that, even though the lyrics may not directly address it.

For Gussow, an understanding of the blues starts with the lynchings and violent realities of African American life in the Jim Crow South. Although “most of what might be called “lynching blues” …are semi-obscure and remain arguable,” and most blues lyrics do not intentionally refer either directly or indirectly to lynching, they do, however, “express the pressured, nightmare-strewn subjectivities that it was the intention of white southern terror to produce.” The blues, Gussow argues, was a creative, artistic response to the oppressive environment around black artists. Lynching, he suggests “casts…a broad shadow across the blues lyric tradition.”

In the Jim Crow South, there was an ever present and real threat of violence against the black community, and the spectre of lynching hung heavily over it during this period. Lynching became a means of terrorism of whites towards blacks, used to defend white domination and to intimidate and control blacks. It was usually done by hanging, but also by burning at the stake. By conservative estimates, 3,500 African Americans were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920. Lynching was widespread and common in the South during the Jim Crow period and blacks lived in terror of their lives because of the capricious nature of lynching. Looking at a white woman the “wrong way” or acting in a way that was perceived “uppity” were sometimes all it took to begin inciting whites to form a lynch mob. Bluesman Skip James said simply, “They’d lynch you in a minute.”

The daily confrontation with this threat, then, argues Gussow, gave rise to the blues which were a means of processing and dealing with that threat – speaking back to it in song. We’re beyond the territory of mere loneliness and restlessness here – we’re in the area of people trying desperately to assert their humanity, their being, in the context of a broader society that wanted to proclaim their non-being.

The other way that black people did that, of course, was through their faith. The Bible, like the blues, proclaims life in the midst of death and humanity in the midst of forces of evil that seek to annihilate that humanity. The book of Psalms howls out the blues of the oppressed:

“I am distraught by the noise of the enemy
Because of the oppression of the wicked
For they bring trouble against me.”
Psalm 55. 2-3

But continues to hope for God’s deliverance:

“But God will never forget the needy; the hope of the afflicted will never perish.”
Psalm 9:18

And then, there’s Paul’s letter to Christians in Rome in the 1^st century, themselves poor, some of them destitute, all under pressure:

“And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow– not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.”
Romans 8:38

The hell hound, whatever that may be, may be on our trail, but we can still proclaim our humanity and still be confident in the encompassing love of God.

Larkin Poe talk blues, the soul of a song, and making authentic music

Larkin Poe are the Lovell sisters from Atlanta, Georgia. “I’m not Larkin, and she’s not Poe,” quipped Rebecca Lovell during their sold-out gig at Inchyra Arts Club near Perth, Scotland, where Lins Honeyman from the Gospel Blues Train and Gary Burnett from Down at the Crossroads had the opportunity to talk to these hugely talented artists.

Larkin Poe, actually, is an ancestor of the sisters and relative of the famed author Edgar Allan Poe. The pair launched the band in 2010 after a few successful years as a bluesgrass group along with their elder sister, Jessica, and have developed their own distinctive sound, a unique, blues-based Americana rock, which draws deeply on the well of traditional blues but adds their own very modern, high- energy take, featuring gorgeous harmonies and exhilarating electric slide guitar. American Songwriter said of them: “This isn’t your basic Stevie Ray Vaughan-styled blistering blues rock. It’s far more primal, malicious, and unsettling.” That’s true, but what’s also true is the warmth and good humour that’s folded in, which makes their performances massively appealing. [check out our review of their concert here]

The sisters have performed triumphantly at Glastonbury Festival in England, featured on T-Bone Burnett’s Lost Basement Tapes, been nominated for a Blues Foundation Award, and released four studio albums, the most recent of which, Venom and Faith, has reached number one on the Billboard Blues Album Chart and met with considerable critical acclaim.

Lins and Gary sat down with Megan and Rebecca prior to their gig to talk about the blues and their approach to making music, and found two highly articulate young women brimming over with enthusiasm for their music and life generally, and who had thought deeply about their musical heritage. Lins began by commenting on how well Venom and Faith has been received:

Rebecca: Oh yeah. I think this is one of the first tours that we’ve been out and folks are showing up really powering for the lyrics and a lot of the songs off the album. So in that respect it feels like it’s been well loved so far. We appreciate that!

Lins: Yeah, we’ve played quite few tracks on the show as well. And I know, Gary, it was certainly one of your best albums of 2018.

Gary: Yeah. We feature a “best of” album list at the end of every year. Venom and Faith definitely had to feature in our top few albums. It’s a great album, really, really good.

Rebecca: Thank you! We’re very proud of the way it came out. You know self-producing has been a fairly recent affair for us and it’s definitely been very natural. I think Megan and I enjoy the process of, you know, being siblings in the studio, just sort of allowed to have our own private language and to work really lean, mean and fast.

Megan: Absolutely. And Peach, our previous album to Venom and Faith was also produced by the two of us and we’ve just so enjoyed the freeing experience of it being just the two of us in the studio. It’s been so much fun to make these albums.

Lins: And being sisters, it must work for you and against you in certain ways?

Rebecca: Absolutely. I think that we have very limited experiences when it doesn’t work for us. Obviously having a sibling dynamic can be a very volatile and powerful relationship! I think it’s meant that over the years we’ve learned how to treat each other with respect and care, and, you know, I think of the Black Crowes who are not touring together because they have such big feuds and things like that, and we will not have that happen.

Gary: Well, tell us about the album’s title. It seems a little strange – Venom and Faith – conjures up for me strange religious sects handling snakes or something in the Appalachian hills!

Rebecca: Absolutely! That was that was part of the inspiration and it’s drawn from the lyrics of one of the tracks, Honey Honey. Yeah…I do like the juxtaposition of the two words and the fact that it does conjure up those images of a southern American Gothic type. Yeah, backwoods country church, where you’re sort of rolling the dice and…there is something, I think, in our music that summons up some of those sort of feelings. And, you know, some of the flavors of our music go from the dark to the light, tabbing some beautiful moments but also some grungy moments. So, it’s trying to represent that light and shadow, and Venom and Faith I felt was the right title.

Gary: Yes, it’s fabulous. And you’ve done some fantastic versions of old blues songs along the way – the Skip James song, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues on this album is probably the best cover of that song that I’ve heard. The Skip James version is very dark, but somehow, although you keep to the tradition, you manage to bring something fantastically fresh to it.

Skip James

Rebecca: That means so much! That is really one of our favorite songs that we’ve ever run across. We heard that song and we were just immediately obsessed, and the fact that it’s so modal, and major and minor, and it just it makes you feel a very specific way. And so we wanted to pay tribute to that.

Megan: And Skip James is one of the first blues guys that we really, really fell in love with. He’s definitely a mutual love of Rebecca and me.

Gary: And how do you go about choosing some of these old blues songs that you’ve done? You’ve done a few of them – some Son House and Robert Johnson and so on. How do you go about choosing and how do you go about interpreting a song?

Megan: I love this question. The answer to both those questions is kind of a gut feeling! Like, well we’ll stumble across a song that just feels right!

Rebecca: I think also it’s songs that we wish we’d written, like when you stumble across something that feels akin to something that you would have made up yourself. And so, then, the true nature of what the song should be or how we should interpret it – it just sort of feels like you’re rewriting it yourself. And to me that’s part of the beauty of American roots music – the fact that this is a very historic and, by American standards, ancient genre and yet you know there is so much shared feeling. The fact that it is one hundred years since the song was written means nothing. It still feels as relevant to us as it probably did to the people that were writing it. And so that’s really special.

Lins: And these songs, as you say, are ancient in American terms. But a hundred years is quite a sizable chunk between the original and doing a cover version. What makes these songs stand the test of time in your opinion? Because something must be great about those songs.

Rebecca: This is something Megan and I have talked about quite a bit – and that is, that the songs lyrically deal with matters of the human condition. You know, there is very little artifice in a lot of traditional blues tunes, just very raw emotions, very laid bare struggles of how to deal with your humanness, how to deal with sorrow, how to deal with being down and out. And I think that in our own specific ways, we can all relate to those feelings. So, to me, what really stands the test of time is a song that doesn’t deal too much with, you know, synthesizers or pop production, it really is about just the soul of the song.

Lins: Yes. It’s just getting down to the basics, isn’t it? It doesn’t mince its words. One such song which as far as I’m aware is not on any of your albums but I came across it on your Facebook feed, is a version of Blind Willie Johnson’s Soul of a Man. That was an incredible performance from the two of you. Any plans to put that on an album?

Megan: You never know! I guess it’s always unwritten and that that’s what’s exciting about the future.

Lins: And another song that we should mention – I think it’s from your Peach album – was John the Revelator and that recently got played at the end credits of the Fox TV series Lucifer.

Rebecca: It was very exciting! Again. I think it’s great to let these old songs, that have meant so much to so many people, have new lives in such unexpected ways. You know, I will admit though, we hadn’t watched the Lucifer TV show, and so of course we were hop-skipping into this one episode and telling our parents to watch it and not really knowing the premise of the show, and it’s a bit of a twisted kind of crazy show! But that was really fun. Just to see our music presented in this unexpected way.

Lins: It’s a great version as well. I mean, there have been so many versions of John the Revelator – every blues artist is probably done a version, but yours is up there!

Bessie Jones

Gary: I love the first song on Venom and Faith, Sometimes, the Bessie Jones song. The song sounds very up to date, but when you go back and listen to the original, with the clapping and so on, you’re tapping right into the whole spirit of that. What drew you to that song?

Rebecca: Well just the energy, I mean. And also, the power of her voice and the claps. It’s captivating, you know, and it’s a field holler, man, where you can feel the purpose of that song. And also, just wanting also to represent a Georgia girl – Bessie was from Georgia. And there was something we liked about that as well. It’s just a feel-good song.

Gary: Yeah, great song. I was also thinking about, you know, when we think of the blues we often think about the male artists, but of course in the history of the blues, the women were some of the biggest artists. And they’ve been ignored at times. How true is that still today – is it still difficult for women in this industry?

Rebecca: That is that is a complicated question with a complicated answer! And I think that different people would answer it in different ways. But I do think that you’re right, you know, historically women were absolutely the pioneers of blues and pop music, and they were some of the biggest pop stars of their time, at the turn of the century. And it does feel distinctly unfair that they are forgotten. That the role that they played in terms of pioneering the genre gets waylaid with time.

But, you know, we have had a very positive experience. I think that our parents raised us to kick the door down and do what it is that we want to do. And I think that that has served as well in the industry. Not willing to compromise. I mean, yeah you know, you can’t compromise who you are because that’s all you’ve got, right? Who said that? Janis – Janis Joplin. I like that’s all you’ve got, so you might as well just stick to your guns and by hook or by crook make the media that you want to make. And I think if more artists took that stand they’d be better – male or female.

Megan: Bottom line it’s hard to be in the industry, regardless of gender!

Rebecca: Yeah, and it’s so competitive. The music industry is so intensely competitive that you have to be willing to show up and work hard and be very tenacious. Extremely. Yes, so I think the short answer would be we haven’t felt our gender has had too much of a sway on our career thus far. And I think that that’s how it should be, that the art should speak for itself regardless of class, color, creed, gender, all the above. It should just speak to people and that should rise to the surface.

Lins: And what comes across is that the music is authentic – we’ve touched on that earlier on, that really with all your albums, the music comes across as being really, very real. Is that a specific thing in your head when you set out to record an album – that you’re gonna have to be as real as possible? Or does it not enter into your head and you just do it naturally?

Rebecca: No, it has entered our heads! I think that we have made records that we didn’t feel like they sounded like us. The studio can be a bit of a void sometimes. You can get in there and know who you are, but then technology allows you to try and create this hyper-perfect-ized robot version of yourself that’s auto tuned half to hell and everything’s grid aligned. And that doesn’t feel human anymore. And I think that we’ve made a distinct decision over these years to try and under-produce our records in order for the humanity in who we are as individuals to show through.

Megan: Which is part of the reason why we decided to self-produce because we definitely had that specific goal in mind. So, we knew going into it that we weren’t going to pick ourselves apart and that what we loved about discovering the blues was the raw nature of it and to try and keep some of that in the music. Leave the humanity in if possible.

Lins: And there are some great moments because you’ve also introduced some electronic elements later on the album which is great – just takes your kind of music into sort of a different level as well. Now, we’ve talked about our sort of favorite songs on the most recent album. What about yours?

Megan: Depends on the mood. But I’ve really, really enjoyed playing Bleach Blonde Bottle Blues every night. Because Rebecca brought that song very late in the recording process. In fact, I think it was written while we were in the studio. One of the last ones to show up and I just knew immediately when I heard that song it was gonna be one of my favorites. I was so excited to record it, so I would definitely put that as a top contender for me.

Rebecca: Thank you! I think that probably in terms of melding the old with the new, my favorite would have to be Fly Like an Eagle because that does feature a lot of the pop production. You know, we love Tom Petty – Tom Petty is one of the top pop guys ever, because he was a dude that could punch you straight out with a verse and then, bam, you’re into the chorus, and it’s that pop song structure. And I think that that’s been a big marker for us in wanting to do the blues, but also to marry it with more of a pop arrangement, and introduce, you know, a more modern-day sound palette, And Fly Like an Eagle was really fun – we’re from Atlanta, the home of hip hop, so you gotta throw it in!

Gary: But that’s the thing that I think is very appealing about your music. You’ve got this traditional blues underpinning, but you’re bringing the all these modern sorts of influences to bear. I was talking to Bruce Iglauer from Alligator Records recently and he was saying that what he looks for in an artist these days is that traditional base, but really bringing their own stamp to it. And it seems to me that you’ve really been able to do that these last couple of records.

Rebecca: Well I think just by not wanting to be in a time capsule is very important. Because there is zero, zero interest in us in being puppets of something that has already been. Because this is music that has been very real to people for a very real reason, and it served a very distinct purpose, and we don’t want to just piggyback off that. You know, we feel a deep respect for the blues and the masterful artists that pioneered the genre but we have to make it in our own way in order to, you know, not be talking out of our asses, pardon my French. But it’s true, you know, we’re growing up in the 21st century as white women and we want to be as authentic in that way with our own story as we can. Innovation is required!

Lins: Let’s talk about the guitar side of things. Megan, did you get it as a Christmas present as opposed to Rebecca, or how did you end up playing the slide? It’s an amazing sound and along with the voices, it’s what defines the Larkin Poe sound.

Megan: So yeah, we grew up listening to Alison Krauss and Union Station, and that’s of course featuring the legendary Jerry Douglas. So I definitely grew up with that kind of earworm. That sound in my head. And when we quit our classical violin lessons in our teens, we heard bluegrass for the first time and we decided we wanted to quit our classical lessons and hop over onto some acoustic instruments, y’know.

And I tried to play guitar and banjo and mandolin, but I guess me and fretted instruments don’t go well together! So I saw a dobro being played and that’s when I made the connection between the sound that I grew up listening to and what that instrument was. And it was dobro, so I start playing dobro, and later on when we started Larkin Poe, we wanted to experiment more with an electric sound.

Rebecca: So the lap steel just made sense, and kudos to Megan because you were, what 14 when you picked it up? It’s a very awkward instrument to play in just about every way, and the fact that you typically play it seated. And so Meghan, you’ve been very innovative in the way that you’ve repurposed slide – and she had this little contraption built so she can stand and walk around and rock out while playing the slide, and do it very effortlessly, especially considering just how challenging an instrument it is to play.

Megan: It’s not a very common instrument. I don’t know why, because it’s such a versatile instrument and it’s so expressive. What I love about it is the vocal quality of the instrument. I love to sing with Rebecca, I love to sing harmony. You know, we grew up singing harmony together, but I consider my voice to be the lap steel, not necessarily my actual voice!

Lins: And there’s something special when your voice intertwines with the lap steel, that’s just so much special.

Megan: It’s very fun. We certainly enjoy it especially a song like Good and Gone from the record. You know we so enjoy twinning together.

Lins: Fantastic. Excellent. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you!

A Blues Odyssey, Part 3: The Mississippi Delta

I stood beside the Blues Trail Marker for the sharecropper’s shack that Muddy Waters grew up in, in what was Stovall’s Plantation just outside Clarksdale, and gazed over the landscape. The vast fields were ploughed but unplanted, the alluvial soil brown and fertile. The sun was low in the sky but shone brightly against the bluest sky imaginable. And it was cold – a dry, bitter cold that chilled your bones.

But it was strangely warming to have reached this point in our blues pilgrimage. It was here in 1941 that Alan Lomax found McKinley Morganfield and recorded his Burr Clover Blues, a song he’d written at the request of Colonel Stovall, who six years previously had invented the burr clover seed harvester. Muddy Waters’s house also served as a juke joint where Waters entertained field hands. Waters left the plantation in May 1943 after the plantation overseer refused his request for a raise from 22 and a half cents to 25 cents an hour. The rest, of course, is history, Muddy going on to become a preeminent Chicago blues artist and a musical inspiration to subsequent generations of blues and rock musicians.

Cotton Field, Mississippi Delta

The Rich Soil of the Delta

If you head on out past the famous Crossroads at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49, you’ll soon come to the Shack Up Inn, on the site of Hopson Plantation. In 1928, this plantation had over 3,500 acres and was farmed by black sharecroppers and mules, working from 4.30am until 6 in the evening. You can get a sense of plantation life here, as you wander round the sharecropper shacks, with their tin roofs and Mississippi cedar walls (now available as (basic) hotel accommodation), the original cotton gin and seed houses and other outbuildings. I was taken by the old rusting vehicles, including old cars, a tractor and a derelict fire truck. An ancient railway line runs through into the distance, giving a further sense of timelessness to the place. As does the Bottle Tree, with its host of blue bottles, traditionally used to ward off evil from the family home.

Sharecropper Shack

Old Car & Cotton

The sense of poverty exuded by the sharecroppers’ shacks was very tangible and striking. Sharecropping was a system that came to dominate agriculture across the cotton-planting South from the end of the nineteenth century. Black families would rent small plots of land from white landowners, to work themselves. Often, the landlords or nearby merchants would lease equipment to the renters, and offer seed, fertilizer, food, and other items on credit until the harvest season. At the end of the year, tenant and landlord would settle up, often with the sharecroppers owing more to the landowner than they were able to repay with the sale of their crops. It was an exploitative system that resulted in debt and poverty from which the sharecropper found it difficult to escape. It was out of this situation that the blues began to emerge in the early part of the twentieth century and it’s no surprise that many of those we now consider blues legends worked the land themselves.

If you go to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale itself, you’ll see Muddy Waters’ shack reassembled inside, a kind of shrine to perhaps Clarksdale’s most famous son. Not that Muddy was the only legendary blues artist from round these parts – born and raised nearby were John Lee Hooker, Son House, Ike Turner, Sam Cooke, Junior Parker, and W. C. Handy. In addition, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, and Charley Patton are all associated with the town, stopping by in their constant traveling. All of this history is preserved and these artists celebrated in the Museum, which makes for an excellent visit.

Talking of blues museums, on the way down from Memphis, we’d stopped at the Tunica Gateway to the Blues Visitor Centre and Museum. Set in an old, refurbished train depot, this is a fabulous introduction to the land of the blues – great exhibits, well displayed, which tell the story of the origins and development of the blues in the Mississippi Delta.

Blues Museum, Tunica

Back in Clarksdale, right across the road from the Delta Blues Museum is Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero Blues Club (Clarksdale being the blues’ “ground zero”). We stopped by for lunch and enjoyed the general vibe, though sadly, there was no live music. We were wonderfully served by Stella, who took one look at my scrawny looks and said, “Well now, a’body’s momma wanna take him in an’ feed him up. Mmhnnn”. I had the barbeque pork in a spicy pancake – absolutely delicious, but laced with a thousand chillies which quickly had my mouth on fire.

On down the street and you come to Blues Town Music, owned by the inimitable Ronnie Drew, who welcomed us warmly and regaled us with stories of visits to Europe in days gone by. I enjoyed playing one of his acoustic guitars and then chatting to Ronnie’s good friend, an older gentleman, an ex-bass player, with long seventies-style hair and a droopy moustache to match, who intrigued me with tales of visiting New York City as a boy and watching the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field.

And then, right across the road we found the treasure trove that is the Cats Head Delta Blues and Folk Art store and had the pleasure of chatting to proprietor Roger Stolle. I was interested to meet Roger, having read his excellent book, Hidden History of Mississippi some time ago, and being aware of his work to help regenerate Clarksdale. The store is quite unique, selling everything from books to posters to art to CDs, vinyl records and DVDs, all with a blues theme. Even if you don’t buy anything (but please do! My Cat Head poster is now framed and hanging in my office!), it’s a fabulous place just to browse around in.

And Roger’s such a nice guy, full of positivity and enthusiasm, and wondrously knowledgeable about the blues and the Mississippi Delta. Glad to say he agreed to a follow-up interview, which will appear before long here at Down at the Crossroads.

Actually, once again, I have to comment on the welcome and friendliness of everyone we encountered in Mississippi. We were quite charmed. We got on our way in the early evening, unable to take up Roger Stolle’s suggestion of staying for the show in Red’s Lounge later on, and drove back to Memphis on the legendary Highway 61, Mississippi saying farewell to us by means of a spectacular sunset, the sky changing colour dramatically as the sun sank below the horizon.

As somebody famously once said, “I’ll be back!”

David Honeyboy Edwards “I’m Gonna Tell You Somethin’ That I Know”

David Honeyboy Edwards  I’m Gonna Tell You Somethin’ That I Know (CD/DVD), Pro Sho Bidness

David “Honeyboy” Edwards was born in Mississippi in 1915 and lived a long life in the blues, which he called “a leading thing.” Son of a share cropper (“Papa didn’t make no money,” he says in his 1997 autobiography), and working in the fields from he was nine years old, Edwards became an itinerant bluesman, playing all over the Delta in juke joints, river boats and good-time houses, first recording in 1942, and eventually settling in Chicago as the blues went electric.

His friend and acquaintances in those early days read like a who’s who of the blues – Charlie Patton, Tommy Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson, Son House, Memphis Minnie and Robert Johnson. He experienced first hand the 1927 Mississippi River Flood, the Depression, Southern vagrancy laws (Honeyboy was imprisoned for a time working on a cotton farm for hitching a ride on a freight train), and the racial and economic problems of the Black community due to Jim Crow. Honeyboy Edwards really was the last living link to the early blues.

He recorded extensively, was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1996, and won a Grammy in 2007 for Best Traditional Blues Album. This CD and DVD set, entitled I’m Gonna Tell You Somethin’ That I Know, was recorded in September 2010, just eleven months before Edwards passed away. It’s a remarkable piece of blues history.

The disks capture around an hour of a performance by the bluesman, accompanied by Jeff Dale and the South Woodlawners, and Michael Frank in the G Spot in Los Angeles. The CD has 9 songs, the DVD 10, plus about 20 minutes of Edwards reminiscing about his early experience of the blues in the Mississippi Delta. This is priceless. He talks about playing with Robert Johnson when he was 21 and goes into Robert’s life and death in some detail. Johnson “was crazy ‘bout two things,” says Honeyboy, “women and whiskey.” His narrative about Johnson’s sad death speaks volumes about the situation of African Americans in the deep South at that time. “Same doctor that would come to a mule would come to you then.” Anyone who got seriously ill would likely die, for want of decent healthcare. Honeyboy’s own mother died at 32 of “dropsy” – or edema, often associated with malnutrition, and both preventable and curable.

We get details, too, about Charlie Patton (“a hell raiser”) and about Honeyboy’s own career –  “been all over the world, Japan, Paris France…Turkey…can’t recall all the places I’ve been.” At 95 Edwards was both lucid and showed a remarkable memory for people, places and incidents long past.

His performance in the gig is quite something as well. He launches into each song with a guitar introduction, whereupon the band joins in, sings with feeling and gives a short guitar solo on his Gibson Les Paul each time. Quite something for a nonagenarian. The DVD is nicely shot, with a kind of sepia tinge and the sound quality good. There are songs by Robert Lockwood Jr., Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and St. Louis Jimmy – a fine collection of classic blues. Sweet Home Chicago is part of the mix, usually attributed to Robert Johnson, but claimed by Honeyboy himself.

“The guitar kept me rolling a whole lot,” says Honeyboy. And it kept him rolling for over nine decades. “God learned me music. He gave me that gift…There ain’t no harm in playing blues, that’s a gift God gave me.” If you’re a blues fan, you don’t want to miss this performance of Honey Boy Edwards’ gift right at the end of his life.

 

Prescription Blues

I listened to a great version of a song recorded in 1924 by Clara Smith called Prescription for the Blues recently on the Watkins Family Hour album. It struck a chord, having suffered some ill health recently myself – doctor’s prescriptions have been all too frequently part of life of late!

Of course the song isn’t really about treating physical health – it’s about the blues, what Robert Johnson called “an achin’ old heart disease,” the “worried blues.” W.C. Handy said that the “blues were conceived in aching hearts.” Prescription Blues is a clever, light-hearted, playful little song about being love sick, having a “heart disease” and asking the doctor  for a cure:

All day long I worry all night I’m blue
I feel so awfully lonesome I don’t know what to do
And so I ask you doctor to see if you can find
Something in your sachet to pacify my mind
Oh doctor doctor write me a prescription for the blues

Let me tell you doctor why I’m in misery
Once I had a lover, but she went away from me
…Oh doctor doctor write me a prescription for the blues

And that’s what most of the blues are about, isn’t it – lost love, love gone wrong, unfaithful lovers, unrequited love, yearning and heart break. As Son House said, “Ain’t but one kind of blues – and that consisted in male and female that’s in love.”

Well, for sure that’s mainly the subject matter of most blues songs. But there’s more to it than that, and I think this is why the blues continue to resonate for us. The blues arose in black communities a century ago, in the hardship, toil, injustice and bondage of African Americans. B. B. King said, “The blues is an expression of anger against shame and humiliation.” And, as well as love, many of the songs address real life problems – not having enough money, illness, homelessness, bereavement, abandonment. You can easily think of songs like Victoria Spivey’s T.B. Blues (“I got a tuberculosis; consumption is killing me, It’s too late, too late…too late”), about a disease that is particularly associated with poverty, or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Broke and Hungry, or Big Bill Broonzy’s Starvation Blues, where he sings about having no job, no place to stay and “starvation everywhere I go.”

Well, of course, there is a prescription for all this – we don’t have to tolerate injustice, racism, exploitation. They are all problems that can be addressed, if we have the will. The blues can keep on jolting us out of our safe, comfortable lives and alert us to the pain and ills of the world around. Will we be part of the problem or part of the solution? Which starts with the words of someone from a couple of thousand years ago: “do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.”