Can blue men sing the whites?
TASS* volunteer Terry Hyde checks out some recent donations of blues music and ponders the ultimate question.
I don’t know whether it’s a male thing or an age thing - but the older I get, the more blues music that I listen to when I’m at home. If there are other people around, I inevitably get: “Why are you listening to that? It’s so depressing.” “Au contraire!” I yell back, as there is now some science, published in peer- reviewed academic journals, which confirms that playing the blues (I wish) or listening to it, can be therapeutic. (If you are interested in this topic, a good starting point is the collection of articles in the book ‘Blues’, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, in the ‘Philosophy for Everyone’ series. This book also addresses the question of whether a music genre that started out being written and sung by poor black Americans can be ‘genuine’ if performed by middle-class white kids from Surrey.)
Boy With Toy: I demonstrate the best way to listen to old blues recordings
On vinyl we have five LPs in the Blues Documents series on RST Records. They feature transcriptions from 78 rpm recordings made over 80 years ago by various black American bluesmen (and one woman). In some cases there are only one or two copies of the original recording known to exist. Some of these individuals ventured into a studio just once in order to cut a couple of sides and then disappeared forever. This is musical archaeology.
“Can blue men sing the whites?” is a Vivian Stanshall song from the 2nd LP by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: “The Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse” (1968). This and the band’s other original studio albums are now available remastered with additional tracks. Their 1967 debut “Gorilla” features Eric Clapton on ukelele and J Arthur Rank on gong. Although Eric Clapton would be the obvious choice to focus on as a white bluesman (we have his 2CD compilation: ‘Blues’), I have instead chosen to highlight the singer/songwriter Jackson C Frank. Frank recorded just one eponymous LP (in 1965) that would normally be filed under ‘Folk’, and on CD we have that album, now re-titled after the opening track: “Blues Run the Game”.
Negro spirituals are closely related to what we now classify as ‘blues’: they were religious songs born of a slave interpretation of the white man’s hymns. Such is the power of language, that nowadays the word ‘negro’ may only be used in one context: as an adjective preceding the word ‘spirituals’. We have in stock a rare stereo LP with this title, from 1961. To put this in a historical context, in 1961 most American states enforced racial segregation by means of ‘Jim Crow’ laws that typically forbade inter-marriage and forced businesses and public institutions to keep black and white clientele physically separated. This LP sleeve comes with a stunning image on the front cover (see photo) and features various artists singing classic spirituals such as ‘
...Motherless Child’ and ‘Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen’.
There are a handful of eminent female blues singers (Nina Simone being my favourite: we have several of her CDs in stock at the moment), but overwhelmingly it is men who dominate the genre. The typical subject matter of blues songs underlines this: booze, drugs, womanising, poverty, crime, jail and confrontations with ‘the man’ and the Devil generally in all his guises. This is not to say that women do not ‘get’ the blues (in both senses) but as the woman is typically the rock of the family, maybe she doesn’t have time to sing the blues. 28 The DIARY, JULY-AUG, 2013
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