The First British ‘Blues Boom’…of 1923!

An invited blog post I wrote recently for the British Library on the arrival of blues music in 1920s Britain.

A large part of my research over the past few years has examined the British reception of the blues before the ‘blues boom’ of the early 1960s that kicks off most histories of the genre’s international spread. For my PhD, I’ve had to keep the time period of my research quite firm to avoid overstretching myself, meaning I have focused primarily on the postwar period. But recently I have had the chance to look a little further back, thanks to the generous support of the British Library’s Edison Fellowship scheme.

In the Autumn of 1923, ‘the blues’ seems to have suddenly invaded British popular music. While we tend to think of the genre arriving on sound recordings, the 1923 blues invasion was a multimedia phenomenon: the blues could be heard in concert, on the theatrical stage, on record, through sound recordings, and on the dance floor. This latter venue was particularly important, as the blues of 1923 signalled both a style of music and a style of dance.

By looking at one particular piece of music held in the Library’s collections, I reflect on what British audiences found most appealing about the blues, how they incorporated it into existing social dancing culture, and how reactions to the genre reflected contemporary ideas around music and race.

My guest post can be viewed here, on the British Library’s Sound and Vision blog.

Screaming Guitar and Howling Piano? (Part 1)

Muddy Waters’s 1958 UK tour is one of the landmark events in the history of blues in Britain. In this post, I offer a brief glimpse into a paper I’ll be giving on 16 July at Continental Drift: 50 Years of Jazz from Europe, at Edinburgh Napier University.

It’s been a long time without an update! My previous post was made all the way back in October, before I took up a research fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The fellowship was productive, stimulating, and incredibly immersive – so much so that I easily spent several months in the Library, six days a week…and still not find time to keep my blog updated.

Being back in the UK is a big change. It feels like I’ve skipped out the first half of 2016, and I still find myself realising that I’m doing something for the first time this year (first proper bacon sandwich, first hill walk, first Sunday roast, etc). So my ‘new year’s’ resolution will be to make sure that I keep this blog updated more often! Look out in the coming weeks/months for more posts on research I conducted in the USA, and the work I’m currently doing back on this side of the Atlantic.

Something I’m excited to be able to share is some recent research I’ve been doing on the first UK tour of Chicago blues musician Muddy Waters, who played a series of concerts across Britain with his regular pianist Otis Spann in Autumn 1958. I’ll be giving a presentation about this research on 16 July at Continental Drift: 50 Years of Jazz From Europe, a conference organised between Edinburgh Napier University and the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival. There’s a lot more on this to come over the Summer, but here is a brief promotional video I’ve made about my paper, and about why I think events like Continental Drift are so important:

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Capitol Hill Blues: Upcoming Research at the Library of Congress

I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded a four month research fellowship at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. I start there in January 2016, as part of the British Arts & Humanities Research Council’s International Placement Scheme. I’ll be based at the John W. Kluge Center, working with archives and experts at the Library’s American Folklife Center and Music Division.

During my research into blues in Britain, something that has become increasingly apparent to me is the degree to which blues appreciation and performance was bound up with two other musical worlds: jazz and folk. More specifically, blues, jazz and folk listening and performing often coalesced around the concept of ‘revivalism’. Enthusiasts sought to inscribe particular aspects of American music as the authentic ‘voice of the people’. Fearing that these genres would soon be engulfed by the savage tide of commercialism, performers, critics and listeners set out to document, preserve and promote the music they deemed to be culturally significant.

Although this ‘revivalist impulse’ appeared throughout jazz, blues and folk music between c.1930 and c.1960, both in the US and the UK, enthusiasts of these genres were by no means united in their motivations and activities, or even in their understanding of what ‘people’s music’ actually was.

Consequently, my research at the Library of Congress aims to explore three distinct moments in the history of musical revival. I will start my fellowship looking at how emerging jazz criticism and folklore studies in the 1930s intersected at Carnegie Hall, during John Hammond’s 1938-39 ‘From Spirituals to Swing’ concerts. Hammond relied in part on folkloric representations of the blues as a rural ‘folk’ music, which would otherwise suggest an antipathy towards ‘high art’ culture. Yet his concerts borrowed the trappings of western ‘art’ music, and asserted that the blues was a common thread that lay throughout African American music. In this way, the blues acquired early cultural significance through being associated both as part of – but also in opposition – to ‘official’ American culture.

Revivalists’ advocacy of jazz and blues as ‘people’s music’ often stemmed from leftwing sympathies, a position that has often been dismissed as simplistic and overly dogmatic. Yet the period I am researching witnessed one of the most politically cataclysmic events of the century, the Second World War. Examining the writings and broadcasts of folklorist Alan Lomax during and immediately after the war, I consider the extent to which Lomax was responding to contemporary events, repurposing notions of leftwing ‘solidarity’ in more populist terms. By promoting shared amateur traditions of music making across national and racial boundaries, Lomax increasingly eschewed Marxist-inspired critiques of race and class-based exploitation in favour of emphasising African American music’s conciliatory potential.

Another issue I frequently encounter during my research is the question of how music’s dissemination determines its reception. Many accounts of blues music in Britain focus on the arrival of American recordings, each wave of new music received on British shores as strange, unfamiliar and exciting. Yet the way music was disseminated was often more complex, problematising how our understandings of this process are often wedded to national, social and cultural boundaries. In particular, my research at the Library will focus on the way folklorists and jazz revivalists used radio as a ‘transnational space’ where these boundaries were often blurred. In doing so, they successfully negotiated the many simultaneities of revivalist understandings of the blues: African American yet international, historical yet contemporary, ‘art’ music yet ‘people’s music’.

Now I just have to work out how many harmonicas I can fit in my hand luggage…

New World Jukebox Blues Part 1: Messenger’s

{Click here to read some background on Lewis W. Jones’s List of Records on Machines in Clarksdale Amusement Places.}

To kick off this series, I’ve assembled a playlist based on Lewis Jones’s list of records on the jukebox at Messenger’s Café and Pool Room. Today, Messenger’s is more or less in the same spot it was in 1941, at 133 Fourth Street, which has since been renamed Martin Luther King Boulevard. Now managed by George Messenger, the venue is the oldest continually-operating business in Clarksdale, and is also the oldest African American-owned business in the city!

Messenger’s today

And here is the playlist of the music Jones heard at Messenger’s:

You can also open this playlist using this link, and you can download a pdf of the jukebox list here.

Edit: Tragically, George Messenger’s wife, Myrtle Messenger, was killed earlier this year. I’m sure that many blues fans, both locally and further afield, will be thinking of the Messenger family at this difficult time.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

New World Jukebox Blues

In this series of blog posts, I explore the music and venues documented by the Library of Congress/Fisk University Coahoma County Study, 1941-42. Each post features an exclusive playlist, holding the records played on jukeboxes in the city of Clarksdale during September 1941.

Like many blues fans, I’ve long been fascinated by the Mississippi Delta, and the role it has played in blues history. Many legendary musicians lived and performed in the area, giving birth to a unique and evocative style, exemplified in the work of Muddy Waters, Son House, or Charley Patton – to name only a few.

Although these musicians are probably the most well-known ‘Delta blues’ performers, it would be a mistake to think that this was the only style listened to or performed in the region. In fact, scholars such as Elijah Wald, Marybeth Hamilton, and Paige McGinley have long called attention to the musical diversity of the area, particularly in urban centres such as the city of Clarksdale. During the first half of the twentieth century, Clarskdale had a vibrant African American cultural economy. It was a regular stop on the ‘tent show’ circuit for blues singers such as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey in the 1910s and 20s, and by the early 1940s the city’s African American ‘New World’ district boasted (according to one survey): 51 food stores, 22 restaurants, 20 general stores, 8 radio and electrical appliance stores, 9 juke joints, 9 drug stores, and 10 churches (Adams 2005, 229-230).

These survey figures come from one of the most well-known blues research trips, the Library of Congress/Fisk University Coahoma County Study, 1941-42. Conducted by renowned folklorist Alan Lomax (Library of Congress), the musicologist John W. Work III (Fisk), and sociologists Samuel C. Adams (Fisk) and Lewis W. Jones (Fisk), the Coahoma County Study is famous for capturing some of the earliest recordings of Muddy Waters, Son House, and David ‘Honeyboy’ Edwards – all iconic ‘Delta blues’ performers. Yet the wider aims of the project have been largely forgotten. On the trail of not only blues but also work songs, spirituals, toasts, children’s games, and popular song, the LoC/Fisk team sought to understand what was happening to ‘traditional’ African American culture in a region that was swiftly being colonised by mass ‘popular’ culture from northern cities, in particular Chicago and New York (Hamilton 2001).

As well as making field recordings, Lomax’s research team made surveys of musical tastes and listening practices amongst their informants, and in some of the businesses of the New World district. The survey I’m especially interested in is a list of the recordings that were held on the jukeboxes of five Clarksdale ‘amusement places’, compiled by Lewis W. Jones during September 1941. Although Lomax (1993, 38) would later refer to the jukebox as a ‘neon-lit, chrome-plated musical monster’, researchers like Jones appeared to have viewed it as a barometer of cultural change. His list provides a fascinating snapshot of what some of Clarksdale’s African American residents were listening to during this period.

Jones’s lists provided only song titles and performer names, but I’ve spent a while digging around to find out exactly which recordings these were. And over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting Spotify playlists of the recordings that could be heard at each venue.

So grab a beer, kick back, and click here to listen to the sounds of the first venue in this series: Messenger’s Café and Pool Room…

References

Samuel C. Adams, ‘Changing Negro Life in the Delta’, in Gordon and Nemerov (eds.) Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 226-291.

Marybeth Hamilton, ‘The Blues, the Folk, and African-American History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2001), 17-35.

Alan Lomax, Land Where the Blues Began (New York: The New Press, 1993).

Lewis W. Jones’s lists are held at the Library of Congress, in the American Folklife Center’s Alan Lomax Collection (AFC 1941/002, folder 31). They have also been published in Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2004), and Gordon and Nemerov (eds.), Lost Delta Found, 311-314.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Blues on Film: Errol Linton

Tonight I’m off to hear Brixton-based blues musician Errol Linton at the Green Note in Camden. Linton has been singing and playing harmonica all around London for over twenty years. I even have vague, childhood memories of hearing him busking in Oxford Circus tube station!

Linton was featured in a two-part BBC documentary in 1993 entitled ‘Two Generations of the Blues’. The first part focuses on Linton, including in-depth discussion and some really evocative performance footage. The second part examines Big Bill Broonzy’s 1951 visit to the UK.

Check out ‘Blues South of the River’, below:

The blues community’s silence on Ferguson.

Blues audiences the world over recognise the genre’s origins in the oppression of African Americans under slavery and segregation. But when it comes to racial tensions in the present day, blues blogs, websites, and facebook groups are surprisingly silent.

The time difference between the US and the UK being what it is, I went to bed last night with that all too familiar heaviness; the feeling you get when you know you will wake up to bad news. My radio, set for 6am, punctured the morning gloom with the words I that had been hoping not to hear for several weeks now – that a Grand Jury has failed to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for shooting unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown, Jr. (1996-2014). Brown, who was eighteen years old, was shot six times, including twice in the head, on 9th August.

As I logged on to social media this morning, my various news feeds loaded up the various topics, groups and voices that reflect my three main internet reading habits: a healthy dose of populist left-wing writing; a number of prominent African American and black British cultural and political commentators; and numerous blogs and groups devoted to the blues.

What struck me, however, was that the first and second groups – the left-wing writers, and my snapshot of ‘black Twitter’ – were talking about roughly the same thing: Ferguson. My blues groups, on the other hand, chugged away as usual, blithely unaware of recent developments. One account tweeted a well-known blues lyric, another reviewed a recent CD, another posted a series of grainy photos to mark the anniversary of a bluesman’s birth.

So why don’t the talking points, posts, likes, shares, and retweets of the blues groups I follow not match up more with those who discuss African American culture and politics in the present day? Why is the blues community so silent on Ferguson – or, for that matter, on the recent deaths of Jonathan Ferrell (1989-2013), Tamir Rice (2002-2014), or Aiyana Jones (2002-2010) at the hands of the police?

I should make clear at this point that I do not wish to question the legality or the outcome of the Ferguson grand jury. As President Obama has pointed out, we have to hope that the grand jury assessed the evidence presented to them in a fair and just manner, and that the evidence itself was a fair and reliable account of the event. Nor am I interested in getting into a discussion about the precise events that took place; there are so many conflicting accounts, and many people more qualified than I am to assess their legal implications.

What I am concerned about is how victims such as Michael Brown have been presented in the media, and the atmosphere of suspicion and fear that causes armed law enforcement to make the terrible and irreversible decision to end someone’s life. I am concerned that the blues community makes few connections between modern day depictions of African American society and culture, and those of the past that we celebrate in the blues.

Very soon after Michael Brown’s shooting, many media outlets started to question the young man’s integrity. Some commentators suggested that Brown may have had marijuana in his bloodstream, and evidence emerged showing Brown taking some cigarettes from a local store in the hour prior to his death.

Again, I do not seek to cast doubt on these claims – although it is worth stating that neither theft nor narcotics use are punishable by death under US law. Instead, I want to compare them to some of the common depictions of blues musicians that are regularly celebrated by the music’s fans.

Stories of blues musicians’ substance abuse are ubiquitous. They appear in many songs, from Big Bill Broonzy’s ‘When I Been Drinking’ to Muddy Waters’s ‘Champagne and Reefer’, and in musicians’ biographies. Robert Johnson is famously thought to have died from drinking poisoned whiskey given, continuing to drink more and more despite the protestations of his friends.

Likewise, bluesmen’s petty crimes are often treated as a simple fact of life, sometimes even necessary to their success. Harmonica player Junior Wells often recalled how he acquired his first instrument, in a story eerily reminiscent of Brown’s. After saving his pennies as a teenager, Wells found himself short on the price of a Hohner Marine Band. Exasperated, he threw what pennies he had on the counter, and took the harmonica. Brought up before the judge a few days later, Wells admitted to stealing, because he ‘just had to have that harp‘.

‘Can you play that thing, boy?‘ questioned the judge.

Wells blew a few choruses. When he was finished, the judge tossed the shop owner 50 cents, and shouted ‘case dismissed!‘

Blues history also valourises the apparently aggressive and dangerous nature of the African American entertainment scene. Many blues musicians were renowned ‘hotheads’; there is a memorable scene in the 2008 film Cadillac Records, where harmonica player Little Walter calmly shoots an imposter taking advantage of the success of his song ‘My Babe’.

‘Which one of you motherf*ckers is Little Walter?‘ demands Walter.

‘I am, fool!‘ retorts one.

Walter turns, pulling a revolver from his waistband, and fires. The imposter drops to the ground. Returning to the car, Walter coolly draws on his cigarette.

Blues fans tolerate – even celebrate – their heroes’ excessive, immoral and criminal tendencies. Broonzy’s drinking songs match the singer’s own enjoyment of liquor. We reminisce over Muddy Waters’s womanising. We chuckle at the overzealous store clerk who took a young Junior Wells to court over a 50 cent debt. We present Walter’s aggressive streak as integral to his image and to his uncompromising, innovative harmonica style.

And yet Michael Brown, who appears to have dabbled in rap music, was a ‘thug’. Newspapers adorned their front pages with photos of the teenager in a hoodie, ignoring many of the more childlike photographs available. This tactic is commonplace and has prompted the social media campaign #iftheygunnedmedown, where young black men and women highlight the multiple personas presented in their social media photo albums.

‘They wouldn’t show the smiling girl who graduated abroad at one of the best schools in the country. The media would portray me as a hard and mean-looking girl who was asking for it.’ states one contributor.

‘They wouldn’t honor the life I had lived, but rather justify the reason I was dead.’

As blues fans, the stories we tell about our favourite musicians often justify their misdemeanors and misfortunes. Robert Johnson ‘couldn’t help himself’; Junior Wells ‘just had to have that harp’. Little Walter’s own, violent death is seen to be symptomatic of a mean-talking fast-shooting aggressive life, lived at double speed.

But it would be incorrect to say that these depictions of our favourite blues musicians are simply voyeuristic fantasies. Blues audiences know their history. We know that the reason why Junior Wells worked a dead end job for a whole week and yet only made $1.50 was because African American workers were routinely paid less than their white counterparts, or had their earnings docked to pay for the equipment they used. We understand when we read the story of how Bessie Smith died after being denied treatment at the local ‘whites only’ hospital following a car accident (although this story is now thought to be apocryphal). We know that the emotional intensity of the blues was a response to the oppression of its performers by their white oppressors.

And yet we tell jokes about ‘proper blues deaths’: ‘If it occurs in a fleabag hotel or in a shotgun shack, it’s a blues death. Other blues deaths: being stabbed in the back by a jealous lover…You cannot die a blues death during a tennis match or while getting a liposuction treatment…Persons with names like Sierra, Sequoia or Chauncey will not be permitted to sing the blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis‘.

Of course, it’s a joke. But it’s a joke that happily ignores the many instances where blues and jazz musicians have suffered at the hands of police brutality. It ignores the fact that Junior Wells might have come off a lot worse had he stolen his first harmonica from a shop in twenty-first century Ferguson.

I am not saying that the blues community is responsible for, or complicit in, the many vindictive slurs against Michael Brown’s character. Neither am I saying that Brown was a saint, but then neither were any of our favourite blues musicians. I simply have one question: why is the blues community – for all that it does to recognise the historical achievements of its idols – not more vocal in condemning the many aspects of American racism that are still alive and well today? The silence is deafening.

#BlackLivesMatter

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The many versions of ‘How Long, How Long Blues’: Leroy Carr’s lyrics together for the first time online

Leroy Carr’s ‘How Long, How Long Blues’ is one of the most famous and most covered blues songs of all time. First released in 1928, the song was so popular that Carr recorded five further versions of it between 1928 and 1932. This post presents and discusses the lyrics to Carr’s biggest hit.

Singer and pianist Leroy Carr (1905-1935) was one of the most popular African American blues entertainers of the 1920s and 30s. In contrast with some of the more famous blues from this period, Carr’s performances held none of the raw, rural feeling of some of his contemporaries, such as Sleepy John Estes or Charlie Patton. Carr, and his longtime musical partner Scrapper Blackwell (guitar), were masters of the urbane and sophisticated ‘race records’ market; their records sold well throughout African American communities across the United States.

[An advert for Carr’s first ‘How Long, How Long Blues’, Chicago Defender, 8th September 1928]

Despite Carr’s relatively short career, his records have had a massive impact on blues history. Many of his songs have become standard repertoire for blues bands, such as ‘Blues Before Sunrise’, ‘Midnight Hour Blues’, and of course ‘How Long How Long Blues’ – which Muddy Waters said was the first blues song he ever learnt. Perhaps most famously, Carr’s classic ‘When the Sun Goes Down’ became the model for Robert Johnson’s ‘Love in Vain Blues’.

I could say much more about the importance of Leroy Carr’s style, but Elijah Wald has already done a great job of this on his website, and in his book Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. What I want to address in this blog is the lyrics to Carr’s ‘How Long How Long Blues’. With each successive recording, Carr substantially reworked the song’s lyrics, even while keeping the melody and the instrumental accompaniment almost exactly the same. Yet, despite the fact that ‘How Long How Long Blues’ remains a staple of blues recordings, gigs and jam sessions the world over, it’s remarkably difficult to find the lyrics to the song online; a quick google search – even including the name ‘Leroy Carr’ – mainly throws up links to Eric Clapton’s cover from his 1994 album From the Cradle. Moreover, it’s especially difficult to find the lyrics to any of Carr’s five other versions of the song!

So, for the first time online (I think!), here are the lyrics to all of Leroy Carr’s ‘How Long, How Long Blues’. As well as a brief discussion of what I find interesting about each version, I’ve also included information as to the matrix number, recording date, and the original Vocalion 78rpm issue, and if you click on the title of each version it will take you to a recording of that particular version.

[Note: as with any transcription from an old 78, it can be very difficult to hear the words Carr is singing. Similarly, there are often words at the beginning of each line that are intentionally mumbled, such as ‘Well’, ‘But’, ‘For’, ‘And’, or ‘Baby’. So please leave a comment below if you hear the lyrics differently!]

How Long, How Long Blues (IND-623-A)
Rec. June 19 1928. (Vocalion 1191)

How Long, Baby How Long
Has that evening train been gone?
How Long, How how Long, Baby How Long

Well, I asked her at the station:
Why’s my baby leavin’ town
You were disgusted, nowhere could peace be found
For how long etc

I can hear the whistle blowin,
But I cannot see no train
And it’s deep down in my heart baby, there lies an aching pain.
For how long etc

Sometimes I feel so disgustin’ and I feel so blue
That I hardly know what in this world baby just to do
For how long etc

And if I could holler, like I was a mountain train
I’d go up on the mountain and I’d call my baby back
For how long etc

And someday you gonna be sorry that you done me wrong
But it will be too late, I will be gone
For so long, so long, baby so long.

My mind gets a ramblin’, I feel so bad
Thinkin’ about the bad luck that I have had
For how long etc

This is Carr’s first recording of ‘How Long’. Note how he squeezes in a slight change to the refrain ‘how long’ in chorus six, where he sings ‘so long’ instead.

---

How Long How Long Blues – Part 2 (C-2688-A)
Rec. December 19, 1928 (Vocalion 1241)

How long, baby how long?
Must I keep my watch in pawn?
How long, how long, baby how long.

I going to the pawn shop
Put my watch in pawn
I don’t want it to tell me
That you have been gone
But so long, so long, baby so long.

I’ve had some trouble up lately
I got locked up in jail
I sat and called you, baby
To come and go my bail
For how long, etc

I’m going down to Georgia
And up to Tennessee
Don’t look me over baby
That’s the last you’ll see of me
But so long, so long, baby so long

The last time I tried to love you
You were so very cold
I thought that I was standing
Holding the North Pole
For how long, etc

I can look and see the green grass
Growing on the hill
But I ain’t see the greenback
On a dollar bill
For so long etc

I haven’t any money
For a ticket on the train
But I would ride the rods baby
To be with you again
For how long etc

In this version, Carr incorporates the ‘so long’ refrain into the rest of the song, alternating it with the regular ‘how long’ version. Interestingly, too the lines about ‘the green grass’ and the ‘greenback’, which are common in modern versions of ‘How Long’, seem to stem from this version of the song. I also like how this version incorporates a number of comedy lines, such as ‘holding the North Pole’, that don’t fit modern performances of this song. Although we now hear ‘How Long Blues’ as heartfelt and quite mournful, it is clear that Carr also intended the song to be heard as jokey and satirical.

---

How Long How Long Blues – Part 3 (C-2689-A)
Rec. December 19, 1928 (Vocalion 1279)

How long, babe how long
Must I sing my lonesome song
How long, how long, baby how long?

I have been waiting
But the mail man leaves no mail
I’m just drifting
Like a ship without a sail
For how long etc

Sometimes I think you love me
And I feel so glad
But you stay away baby
And then I feel so bad
For how long etc

I guess some day you’ll find me baby
Six feet under the ground
And you’ll always be cross you’ve quit me
For I’ll have my face turned down
For how long etc

You went and left me baby
And I do the best I can
But if you had to quit me
Why steal some other woman’s man?
For how long etc

Last night I heard a hound dog babe
And I felt so blue
Cause I dreamt he was in the graveyard
Looking down at you
For how long etc

Sometimes I get to dreaming
That you’re coming back
And I go down to the station
Stand gazin’ up the track
For how long etc

[Final chorus is a piano and guitar instrumental]

In this version, Carr appears to continue to inject some satire into the proceedings, by referring to the popularity of his own record at the start: ‘how long…must I sing my lonesome song?’ Also interesting in this version is that there are far more explicit references to death. In the first version, Carr sings about his love coming back ‘too late’, by which time he ‘will be gone’; this might not necessarily imply death, just that Carr has moved on (to a new place or a new lover). In this version, however, Carr sings specifically about being ‘six feet under ground’, but about his lover being dead and buried, too. I find the final sung chorus very evocative, too, as Carr’s description of going ‘down to the station [to] stand gazin’ up the track’ is far more weighty than simply saying that he ‘couldn’t see no train’, which are the lyrics we’re more used to hearing. Finally, this version is also notable because it is the first to incorporate an instrumental chorus.

---

The New How Long How Long Blues (C-4031-A)
Rec. August 12, 1929 (Vocalion 1435)

How long, baby how long
Do you think I’ll let you do me wrong?
How long etc

If you don’t want me baby
Why don’t you tell me so
I know you love someone else baby
And you can go
For so long etc

And I will tell you
Tell you to your face
That when you’re gone baby
Someone else will take your place
For so long etc

No I ain’t going to cry
Ain’t going to waste no tears
For if you go away baby
I hope you stay a thousand years
For that long, yes that long, baby that long

You are a dirty mistreater
And you ain’t no good
And I wouldn’t [drive?] you back again [inaudible]
Even if it was good
For how long etc

Don’t start that jive baby
Just you leave me alone
Or you’ll be [setting?] up daisies [inaudible]
Round some cold headstone
For so long etc

So go on baby
And just let me be
If I never see you anymore
That’ll be too soon for me
For so long etc

I struggled with hearing several words in this version, so please do let me know if you hear something that I haven’t. In Carr’s ‘New How Long Blues’, he alters the melody of the final phrase – perhaps this is what makes it ‘new’! The refrain alternates a lot more here, from ‘how long’ to ‘so long’ (as we’ve seen earlier), but also to ‘that long’ in chorus four, which is another example of Carr’s use of humour. Like the previous version there is a reference to death in chorus six, only now it might be read as more threatening. Is Carr saying that he will kill his lover for messing him around, or is this another reference to dying from a broken heart? (That is, Carr’s lover will have to arrange the flowers around his grave after he has died.)

---

New How Long How Long Blues – Part 2 (C-7221-A)
Rec. January 16, 1931 (Vocalion 1585)

I think I’ll drop
My baby a line
And let her know
About these hard luck times
For how long etc

I wonder how long
Will these hard times stay
I’ll be so glad
When they go away
For how long etc

And it’s tight up the country
It’s tight in town
I can hardly make it
No matter where I am
For how long etc

Women walk the streets
Wear no boot and shoe
And if a woman can’t make it
What can a poor man do?
For how long etc.

I used to get a dollar
Before I could catch my breath
Now I can’t get a dime
I talked myself to death
For how long etc

Now all of my things
Are all locked up in pawn
How long will these hard luck times hang on?
Well how long etc

I used to have money
Everyday that passed
Now these hard luck times
Got me on my “yes yes yes…”
For how long etc

In this version, Carr does not start with the usual refrain of ‘how long’; instead he deliberates over contacting his absent lover – the only time he does so in any of the ‘How Long Blues’. There’s also a sense in this version that a significant amount of time has passed since the first ‘How Long Blues’: not only does Carr specifically discuss the passing of time in several choruses, but also his choruses are more reflective and observant of the world around him. As with earlier versions, too, there’s an element of humour when Carr censors himself in the final verse!!

---

How Long Has That Evening Train Been Gone (11494-a)
Rec. March 15, 1932 (Vocalion 1716)

Mr. Engineer-Man
Turn your train around
My baby’s on there
And she’s southern-bound
For how long, has that evening train been gone?

She left me standing
Throwing up my hands
Said she was moving
Back to [an?]other man
How long, has that evening train been gone?

[Chorus of guitar and piano]

Now here I stand
All blue and sad
Thinking how much I loved her
Ain’t that too bad?
How long, has that evening train been gone?

If I had known
She was gonna leave me that way
My poor broken heart
Would have to pay
How long, has that evening train been gone?

[Chorus of guitar and piano]

Well she’s gone
There’s nothing for me to say
But maybe she will come
Back to me someday
Well how long, has that evening train been gone?

This final version of ‘How Long Blues’ is very interesting, not only because Carr introduces the song without the normal ‘how long’ refrain, but also because he dispenses with it entirely at the end of each chorus – preferring instead ‘how long has that evening train been gone?’ Guitarist Scrapper Blackwell takes a slightly more prominent role here too, in the two instrumental choruses. What is more perplexing, though, is that Carr seems to talk about his lover as though she is actually on the train, having recently departed, even though it is clear in other versions of the song that he has been alone for some time. Does this mean that she has recently come back, only to leave again? I’m also interested in the fact that Carr says his baby is ‘southbound’, as this has significant implications for where he (and in turn his audience) are positioned both literally and metaphorically. While narratives of the blues’s development often highlight the movement northwards by African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, here it is clear that Carr and his soon-to-be ex lover are somewhere northern already, and that she is going ‘back down south’. This is a further reminder that, as Guthrie Ramsey has argued, the act of travelling south was just as culturally important in midcentury black America as travelling north was; indeed, large numbers of the population did so frequently. Muddy Waters, who settled in Chicago in 1943, had already made several temporary visits to the city before moving permanently, each time returning to Memphis or the Mississippi Delta.

So there you have it – all the lyrics to all of Leroy Carr’s ‘How Long Blues’. There are many layers to these lyrics, and I think that spending some time thinking about what they might mean, and what the successive versions of the song might mean when compared to one another, is very important. We’re very used to this idea that the blues – particularly the ‘country blues’ – is made up of ‘stock phrases’, drawn on by early performers in the spur of the moment. Yet it is clear from Carr’s recordings that he wanted to develop certain themes in particular, and I think that audiences would have listened to later versions of ‘How Long Blues’ with the earlier versions in mind. That Carr had this sort of interaction between himself and his audiences in mind is, I argue, what distinguishes him as such a professional – and is perhaps part of the reason for his success and influence.

One final thing bugs me, however. It is clear that none of Carr’s original recordings match the lyrics most of us now know for ‘How Long Blues’. Sure, many of the same phrases and choruses are there, but the transcriptions above show that the version of ‘How Long Blues’ performed today is in fact a ‘collage’ made up of Carr’s multiple versions. So who recorded the first ‘modern’ version of ‘How Long Blues’; that is, the particular selection of these choruses in that order? By the 1950s, performances by Big Joe Turner (1956) and Lonnie Donegan (1956) follow the ‘modern’ order we know well, yet earlier versions such as Jimmy Rushing’s (1939), or Jimmy and Mama Yancey’s (1943) are very different.

Further Reading

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hiphop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Elijah Wald, ‘Leroy Carr: The Bluesman Who Behaved Too Well’

Elijah Wald, Escaping The Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2004).

Stefan Wirz, ‘Illustrated Leroy Carr Discography’

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Whose Blues? How we risk destroying blues music’s heritage even as we try to celebrate it.

The blues is a landmark of African American culture, and has become popular around the world. Yet efforts to celebrate the importance of this music often ignore its most vital messages.

Today is ‘International Blues Music Day’. Around the world, but particularly in the United States, blues fans are getting together to listen to, perform and celebrate a style of music that is widely recognised as one of the most influential cultural achievements of the twentieth century. If you’re at all familiar with the genre, you’ll know of its history: from humble beginnings amongst African Americans in the segregated South of the early twentieth century, the music moved north to Chicago as postwar African Americans searched for a life away from Jim Crow. And then to 1960s Britain: a generation of young musicians and listeners successfully brought the genre back into the public eye through the popularity of blues-tinged rock by groups such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Yardbirds.

The worldwide recognition of the blues has since continued apace, especially since the United States Congress declared 2003 the ‘Year of the Blues’, in light of the music’s influence on subsequent genres, and its role as an international ‘ambassador’ for American culture. I’m writing this blog post from the Orkney Islands, surrounded by fishing boats and sea birds off the northern coast of Scotland. In September, they’ll hold their annual Blues Festival.

Yet while the success of the blues across the globe is undeniable, I don’t think that emphasising the music’s worldwide acclaim is necessarily the best grounds for celebrating the genre. Rather, there is a more immediate value in the music: its historic role in twentieth-century African American culture.

Most readers will probably be rereading the sentence above; it sounds obvious, doesn’t it? More to the point, we already know and recognise that the blues was born of the social experiences of African Americans. In this blog post, however, I want to demonstrate how well-meaning people and organisations are actually neglecting this aspect of the blues’s importance.

Take a look at this video about Muddy Waters below, published by the Mississippi Blues Commission (hereafter MBC) in 2010.

It begins straightforwardly enough, highlighting Muddy Waters’s role in the transformation of rural ‘Delta’ blues into ‘electric’ blues. As Living Blues founder Jim O’Neal points out, this development coincides with the journey that Waters and countless others made to industrial cities in the north, such as Chicago, in search of better employment prospects. In Waters’s words: ‘I felt like I was good enough to get on record, and where I was living I didn’t have a chance.’

The film then highlights the popularity of Waters’s ‘urban’ sound with Chicago’s black audiences, and its influence on other blues musicians such as B. B. King. At this point, the film turns to the first impressions of British musicians Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin) and Bill Wyman (Rolling Stones) on hearing Waters’s music. Their responses are innocent enough: they give us an idea of what it must have been like to hear for the first time a genre that, in Plant’s words, provided ‘a window into a culture that we had no idea about’.

Yet it is Bonnie Raitt’s statement that becomes slightly problematic:

…and then some little kid in California, or Elvin Bishop, or Paul Butterfield, or the Rolling Stones, get to celebrate and somehow relate to the universal call and the power of this music, and to blow it out into rock n’ roll. And then to turn around and be able to give Muddy what he deserved, which was worldwide acclaim.

As far as the MBC’s film makers are concerned, Raitt’s words are the icing on the cake: the blues has gone from a music of the African American south, to Chicago, to (white) Britain, and then to the world. The blues has more than just global appeal; it has ‘universal’ power.

I want to look more closely at this transformation from rural South to ‘universal power’. The blues has always meant something to its performers, because of its connection to the performers’ direct experiences of the society in which they lived. For Waters this was to do with his own journey from the Delta to Chicago; for Robert Plant it was discovering a new form of cultural expression that offered something different compared to his existing worldview.

But is it right to interpret the blues as having ‘universal’ appeal when the music originated in a society so affected, so determined, by the institution of segregation? The idea that the blues is ‘universal’ often draws our attention away from really understanding what the blues meant to communities under the hand of Jim Crow, both in the south and in Chicago.

Many modern blues audiences understand the music to have originated as a form of authentic African American ‘folk’ music, immune to commercial influence and set apart from other types of music. While thinking of the blues as ‘folk’ music is a good way of demanding recognition for the genre (i.e. it is important cultural heritage and needs preserving), the category of ‘folk music’ ignores the complexity of the blues’s meanings for its original audiences. African Americans in the 1930s, 40s and 50s heard the blues as popular entertainment, where the boundaries between what we would today call ‘jazz’, blues, and ‘rhythm and blues’ were considerably more permeable. We would be surprised, for example, to learn that the semi-professional Muddy Waters (still living in Mississippi) enjoyed listening to Fats Waller, Louis Jordan, Count Basie, and even Gene Autry.

That the urbane, sophisticated sounds of these musicians were readily available in the Delta gives lie to the narrative of rural ‘Delta’ blues becoming urbane ‘electric’ blues when Waters moved to Chicago. What would be infinitely more interesting to explore, of course, would be the ways in which ‘urbane’ and ‘rural’ sounding styles of blues coexisted in both the Delta and Chicago, or that Waters’s more direct and ‘downhome’ style actually follows on from the more sophisticated sounds of contemporary rhythm and blues.

Thinking along these lines would lead to a further investigation of what the distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ meant in postwar African American culture. As historian Adam Green has pointed out in his book Selling the Race, the postwar period saw the growth of a nationwide black American sense of identity with a markedly cosmopolitan outlook. Musicologist Guthrie P. Ramsey has also highlighted the reciprocal nature of cultural exchange between northern and southern states at this time, showing how people, music and performers circulated far more freely than our current narratives allow. What, then, does ‘downhome’ mean, if people ‘downhome’ were listening to music from the urban north, and if musicians from the urban north were frequently traveling back down south?

*

The story of the blues we’re most used to hearing – where the music develops in tandem with its movement from the American south, to the north, and then out into the world – has been set up with this end point in mind. Promoters, critics, listeners and performers alike want to recognise the ‘universal’ appeal of the music, setting up a narrative of the blues’s growth that leads towards this goal.

But this has serious implications. By taking the blues’s universal appeal as evidence of its cultural worth, we are effectively saying that the music’s role in African American culture isn’t enough to grant the music recognition. Understanding what the blues meant to black Americans throughout decades of racist oppression is held to be less important than recognising the blues’s adoption by people around the world, who have often not faced racist oppression.

Under the watchful eye of Jim Crow – Clarksdale MS (1939)

The MBC video does not tell us why Muddy Waters was important to African American audiences, aside from that he ‘updated’ the sound by adding harmonica, electric guitar, and piano (he wasn’t the first to do any of these – but that’s another story). But what is impressed upon us when watching the video is that Muddy Waters’s music meant something to white people. As Bonnie Raitt points out, the Rolling Stones ‘[turned] round and gave Muddy what he deserved, which was worldwide acclaim.’ This implies, as blues scholar Ulrich Adelt has pointed out, that a blues musicians’ popularity with his original African American audience is viewed as only incomplete success.

The MBC video could have validated the blues by focusing on the music’s meaning for the African Americans who lived through the decades when American white supremacy was at its most ugly and most untenable. Instead, the video validates the blues by focusing on how important it is to everyone else. The genre’s ‘complete’, ‘worldwide’ of ‘universal’ success is granted – apparently – by white people’s acceptance and recognition of it. Does this suggest that African American cultural value on its own isn’t important enough?

So, on International Blues Music Day, let’s take a rain check on applauding the blues’s ‘universal’ or ‘worldwide’ acclaim. Let’s ask ourselves how important it is to hear the blues as an international music if, by doing so, we omit to hear it as part of African American history, society, and identity. This does not invalidate white American or white British enthusiasts’ deep-felt love of this music (I include myself here). But I do think we should stop pretending that the best way to honour the blues is to celebrate its supposed universality, as though recognising its historic meaning for black Americans isn’t sufficient. To do so isn’t to celebrate the blues – ‘the soul of America’ – at all; rather, we celebrate only one part of it, and continue to ignore the African American history that has always been ignored.

Further Reading

Adelt, Ulrich, Blues Music in the Sixties: A Story in Black And White (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010).

Gordon, Robert, and Bruce Nemerov (eds.), Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005).

Green, Adam, Selling the Race: Culture, Community and Black Chicago, 1940-55 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Miller, Karl Hagstrom, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

Ramsey, Guthrie P., Race Music: Black Cultures From Bebop to Hip Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

What if the ‘Godfather of British Blues’ was actually a woman?

The ‘godfather’ is a familiar honourific in popular music. Tap in ‘the godfather of soul’ into google, and we can be pretty sure whose picture is going to appear – James Brown. ‘Godfather of funk?’ That’s George Clinton. ‘Godfather of house?’ – Frankie Knuckles. In some genres, the jury seems to be out on this question; the title ‘godfather of punk’ has been variously attributed to Joey Ramone, Pete Townshend, and Iggy Pop.

Who holds this title is always a matter of consensus or debate, but it’s clear in every case what qualities these musicians have in order for the title of ‘godfather’ to be conferred upon them. They’ve been around since the start of the genre, and put in years – if not decades – of hard graft. James Brown is a case in point: he’s also known as the ‘hardest working man in show business.’ As a result, his influence extends beyond those he worked directly with, informing the activities of generations of subsequent performers and listeners.

In this post, I want to explore some further implications of the ‘godfather’ title, particularly with regard to the way it makes us think about the history of musical genres. First, the ‘godfather’ title is often used to identify the musician as one of the first people to play in that style. Calling James Brown the ‘King of Soul’ makes him sound like ‘the best’ or ‘most successful’ soul musician amongst many others. Yet calling him the ‘godfather‘ means that he was there at the beginning, setting the standard for others to follow.

This use of the ‘godfather’ title is particularly common when talking about British Blues. The holder of the title ‘Godfather of British Blues’, judging by a search through google pages and twitter hashtags, seems to be John Mayall, but both Eric Clapton and Alexis Korner get a look in too. This seems well deserved; each was a highly influential figure on the British popular music scene of the 1960s, not only turning generations of young British listeners onto the sounds of American blues, but also acting as mentors for countless other British pop and rock musicians.

Too often in the case of British Blues, however, we think that these ‘godfather’ musicians were the first people to start listening to and performing the blues in Britain. This simply isn’t true. Many British jazz musicians of the 1940s and 50s were interested in the blues, such as Chris Barber, George Melly, Sandy Brown, George Shearing, Tony Short, Vic Lewis, Cyril Blake, Humphrey Lyttelton, Harry Parry and many others. Indeed, Alexis Korner, who is best known for his performing activities in the 60s, was actually a founding member of the ‘Blues and Skiffle Club’ at the Round House pub on London’s Wardour Street in 1955. Earlier than that, too, Chris Barber recalls playing blues numbers in a trio with Korner and Trinidadian bassist Brylo Ford in 1949.

In fact, the further you dig into the jazz scene of 1940s and 50s Britain, the more blues you find. Blues performance was often marked out as a specific segment of a jazz concert; a smaller collection of musicians from the main band would accompany a singer. This programme from a 1951 concert in Leicester is indicative. New Orleans-style jazz repertoire is interspersed with more bluesy numbers, performed by smaller groups. Both Cy Laurie and Mick Mulligan’s groups feature a guest singer for blues numbers. George Melly is even advertised as ‘Britain’s Great Blues Singer.’

As far as I can see, the ‘blues singer’ label is not uncommon at this time. Adverts in Jazz Music magazine in 1955, for example, invited readers to Bath’s ‘Club Dixie’ to hear Joe Brickell’s Jazzmen ‘every Tuesday night,’ featuring the well-known clarinettist Terry Lightfoot, and the ‘blues singer’ Pam Coster. Later that year in the same magazine, an advert alerted readers to Manchester’s Rainy City Jazzband performing at the Wheatsheaf Hotel. Again, it made sure to highlight the appearance of ‘Blues singer-guitarist Chris Holroyd.’ Indeed, it seems that many jazz bands contained one or more musicians capable of singing the blues as a matter of principle.

So why are we not more familiar with any of these earlier British blues performers? Why does one of them not hold the title of ‘godfather of British blues?’ The answer has to do with a shift in the relationship between blues and jazz in the 1960s. As blues-influenced pop music became more popular both in the UK and the USA, its performers and audiences came to relate less to the jazz scene through which earlier listeners had first encountered the blues. It’s partly a matter of generation: to audiences growing up in the 1960s, ‘traditional jazz’ was often what your parents listened to. Consequently, younger British blues fans legitimised their own tastes by distinguishing them from their parents’ – even if in many cases both older and younger generations shared an awareness of the blues’s cultural value. This transition is revealed in the liner notes to the 1962 LP R&B from the Marquee by Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated. Although the Marquee Club was swiftly becoming the go-to venue to hear British blues, the liner notes describe Korner’s band as ‘One of the most exciting innovations on the British jazz scene.’ Furthermore, the liner notes also make it clear that the Marquee Club is owned and managed by the National Jazz Federation.

Since the early 1960s, British ‘traditional’ jazz has come to be seen as the hackneyed cousin of the more authentic, hard-hitting British blues scene, even though ‘traditional jazz’ provided British audiences with their first taste of the blues over a decade earlier. The musicians we know today as ‘godfathers’ of British blues (Clapton, Mayall, members of the Rolling Stones, etc.) had yet to pick up their first instruments – let alone be old enough to go to a jazz club – when the likes of George Melly were performing as ‘British blues singers.’ While their influence on popular music is unarguable, this does not mean they were the first British blues musicians.

So who, from the earlier crop of British jazz musicians, might be awarded the accolade of being the ‘godfather of British blues?’ Several critics have identified trombonist and bandleader Chris Barber for this prize, and of course there is Alexis Korner, who was active both before, during and after the 1960s. Yet our appreciation of Barber and Korner has so far been quite selective. They are appreciated solely for having ‘set the stage’ for the 1960s: Barber for inviting American blues musicians such as Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee to perform with him in the 1950s, and Korner for his late-1950s activities, mentoring teen-aged musicians of the later ‘British blues boom’.

Recognising a 1950s musician purely for their influence on the 1960s does not tell us what their contemporary listeners thought of them. Many attendees at Chris Barber’s concerts with Muddy Waters in 1958, for example, came to hear Barber’s band just as much as they came to hear Waters. As blues scholar Roberta Schwartz has pointed out, the success of Waters’s 1958 tour – playing in large theatres all across England – was due in no small part to the fact that Barber’s band was the only jazz band capable of attracting such a large, nationwide audience.

Perhaps calling Chris Barber the ‘godfather of British blues’ is appropriate, as long as we qualify that this is just as much because his own band played the blues (from as early as 1949) as it is about the African American musicians he toured with in the late 1950s. Yet, even here, I’m not sure we’ve got it quite right. The reason here is to do with a further implication of the ‘godfather’ title, one that is perhaps more damaging than the first.

Not only does ‘godfather’ title imply that its holder was one of the first musicians of influence, it also provides a model for successive musicians. In the case of British blues, all the candidates for ‘godfather’ are male. In my research, however, I’ve found that there seem to be just as many – if not more – female British blues musicians before the 1960s as there are male. Fans who know their early British blues might have heard of Alexis Korner, George Melly, or even Cyril Davies, but very few are aware of Ottilie Patterson, Beryl Bryden, Neva Raphaello, Doreen Villiers, Rita Marlowe, Pauline Hinchcliffe, Pam Coster, or Joan Roberts.

This imbalance between reality (who was performing) and history (who we judge to have been the most important performers) is again to do with the blues’s changing meanings in the 1960s. In the process of reducing the genre’s connection to the British jazz scene, 1960s audiences also began to prefer the sounds of male guitarists, in particular those we now call ‘delta blues’ musicians. Bluesmen such as Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, and Son House came to be regarded as the most authentic and most influential African American musicians, meaning that British fans began to model their playing after them. Because we now hear these 1930s and 40s male guitar players as the most influential, it’s tempting to create a lineage of important blues musicians in later decades consisting of more male guitar players.

In contrast, British blues performers and listeners before the 1960s heard female blues vocalists such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Ida Cox from the 1920s and 30s as the best examples of the genre. This is due to the fact that many important jazz musicians, (e.g. Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson) had accompanied these singers on record. Moreover, contemporary jazz critics such as Max Jones and Iain Lang recommended recordings by Smith, Rainey and Cox alongside those of New Orleans-style jazz in their reviews.

In view of 1940s and 50s listeners’ preferences for female blues singers, perhaps the candidate for ‘godfather of British blues’ should be female. One name that springs to mind is that of Ottilie Patterson, vocalist with Chris Barber’s band from 1955 until the mid-60s, when health problems forced her to retire from performance. Patterson was born in Comber, Northern Ireland in 1932, and began performing with Barber’s band after sitting in with them during a gig in London during the summer of 1954. By the new year, she was with the band full-time, with her renditions of ‘classic’ blues repertoire such as ‘Careless Love,’ ‘Reckless Blues’ and ‘St. Louis Blues’ attracting rave reviews. Critic Gerald Lascelles reported that ‘more than any other British singer has she got to the heart of the blues idiom,’ while another reviewer declared her to be ‘the nearest thing to a real blues singer to emerge this side of the Atlantic.’

It is also arguable that the Barber band’s success was down to Patterson’s presence. Barber identifies the period 1955-61 as the height of the band’s popularity, selling out venues such as the 3,000 seat Newcastle City Hall five times in one year, and attributes this to Patterson’s own popularity with audiences. He recalls in is autobiography ‘we were not like…other jazz musicians. Once Ottilie was singing with us full time from January 1955, we became very different from other traditional bands because we started to play the blues regularly.’ In turn, when Patterson’s health problems caused her withdrawal from the band in the early 60s, Barber recalls that ‘promoters…would ask “will Ottilie be there?”…It wasn’t so much a question of whether the band was good, or not so good, it was just that promoters did not want us without Ottilie Patterson.’

I think the best way to tie up this post is to leave you with some examples of Patterson’s work. Her 1956 EP Blues (Decca DFE 6303) is widely available second-hand on ebay (perhaps another measure of its contemporary popularity!), and many tracks featuring her can be heard on YouTube – for example, here, and here. My own favourite example of Patterson’s work is a video of a live performance in 1955 at the Wood Green Jazz Club, at the Fishmonger’s Arms in North London. You can watch that on Vimeo here.

Now, you might not think this sounds like ‘real’ blues. But, then again, who gets to decide what types of blues are more ‘real’ than others?

Finally, we should be cautious of the implications of titles such as ‘godfather’ in popular music history. While I don’t want to suggest that any of the musicians it is currently conferred upon are undeserving of praise, I think we also need to recognise that the ‘godfather’ title often obscures the importance of the musicians that came before, and the presence of those who do not fit the image of the title holder. Each generation has its own godfathers – and godmothers too.

Further Reading

Barber, Chris, with Alyn Shipton, Jazz Me Blues: The Autobiography of Chris Barber (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2014).

Brunning, Bob, Blues: The British Connection (Poole: Blandford Press, 1986).

Schwartz, Roberta Freund, How Britain Got The Blues (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007).

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.