The US Congress has officially designated 2003 as 'The Year Of The Blues', marking the centenary of an event that, at the time, passed all but unnoticed. The composer and entrepreneur William Christopher 'W.C.' Handy (1873-1958) was killing time waiting for a delayed train at the railroad station in Tutwiler, Mississippi when he encountered a guitarist also whiling away the time by playing to himself. Describing the incident in his autobiography, only slightly self-servingly entitled Father Of The Blues, Handy provided the first known account of the music we now call the blues. It has been frequently quoted, and quite rightfully so: it is perhaps the first truly significant American cultural signpost of the twentieth century.
'A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags, his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song too, struck me instantly. "Goin' to where the Southern cross the dog." The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.'
Virtually everything Handy tells us has a specific significance. First of all, he notes the guitarist's obvious signs of destitution. The travelling bluesman was the poet and entertainer of an underclass within the underclass. The people of the Mississippi Delta were considered hicks and peasants by the more educated and sophisticated blacks who had established themselves in the cities; and within those rural communities the bluesman was, in turn, frowned upon by the upwardly mobile. Specifically, he was hated and despised by the black churches, who believed his trade to be the Devil's Music, a living reminder of all that evil African stuff they were supposed to have left behind as part of their painful induction into the social mainstream. With his workshy ways, his never-ending perambulations, his bawdy, earthy songs and his fatal attraction to normally respectable women, he was an outlaw, a virtual pariah.
Then Handy describes the guitarist playing slide, fretting his instrument with a knife. Since he cites the 'Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars', we can presume that in this particular case the guitar was played flat on the lap, rather than in the conventional guitarists' position used by those who played with a glass bottleneck, or a short length of metal tube, on one left-hand finger. Nevertheless, while the technique of slide or bottleneck guitar may owe something to the touring Hawaiian ensembles so popular in the late 1880s and '90s, the substance and content was an unmistakable African retention
One traditional practice which predated the cheap mass-produced mail-order guitar - and in fact survived well into the mid-twentieth century among those for whom even an instrument costing a buck eighty-nine was an inaccessible extravagance - was the trick of nailing a length of wire to a barn wall and using a piece of glass or metal to change the pitch. Known as a 'diddley-bow', such contrivances provided a first experience of plucked-string instruments for many a wannabe guitarist, including the young John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Under the influence of the slide or the hand-bent string, the rigid, tempered European scale melted to reveal all the hidden places between the notes: the precise, chiming instrument giving forth a liquid African cry.
'In a way the blues is a constant wellspring which keeps bubbling up,' Keith Richards - who should know - told me not long ago. 'I don't think there's any music made in the West, even the most banal pop songs, that don't owe something to the blues somewhere down the line. And it all comes from African music, which is why it's so exciting. There's something primal about it which we all recognise, because we're all African. Some of us just left and turned white.'
| Continue Charles Shaar Murray's Observer Music Monthly article "Cryin' the blues"
posted in articles on November 20, 2003 6:02 PM | t (0)
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