[Today: The bottom of the Blues...]
It’s easy enough to look at the Blues and see a music rooted in pain and suffering. If you focus exclusively on the story lines of the songs or the whiskey in the voices, that’s probably a fair enough takeaway. But when you get beneath those surfaces it’s easy to see that at its bottom, this is life affirming music. It feels funny to be a white kid from Oregon writing about the Blues, but I grew up around blue collar folks – much of my family and many of our neighbors plied their trade in the local lumber mills – so I knew people who left a little piece of themselves at their jobs every day. You’d see dads trudging home at 5pm, looking battered by another day on the green chain, and if that didn’t double your resolve to work harder on your homework you were just plain crazy or dumb enough to deserve what was coming.
Work that hard demands good times, and my relatives and neighbors were good people to unwind with. Gregarious, quick-witted and able with a story, they could drink and laugh and tell tall tales with the best of them. My impression was that if work was determined to squeeze the life out these people, they were equally determined to squeeze the life out of their free time. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – has there ever been more insidious false advertising than that? A more truthful version would be that what doesn’t kill you makes you REALLY appreciate not having something try to kill you (not as catchy or uplifting, I know).
When Mississippi John Hurt sings about laying his burden down, his voice has a carefree lilt that sounds more like someone punching the time clock on Friday evening than someone cashing in their chips. Hurt’s voice could swing from pure joy to the deep sadness of a man who saw his promising music career crippled by the Great Depression and put on hold for more than 30 years. Whether or not he had been rediscovered in the early 60s, his musical legacy was long ago sealed by the dozen pre-Depression Okeh recordings compiled on 1928 Sessions.
What these songs reveal is a guitarist of the highest order, a gifted storyteller, and wise soul. Hurt delivered his music with a ray of sunshine, and even murder ballads like ‘Frankie’ and ‘Stack O’ Lee Blues’ come off as good stories rather than bone-chilling narratives. In John Fahey’s liner notes to the CD re-release of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, he opines that “‘Frankie’ is… probably the best guitar recording ever. Rumor has it that when this piece was played for Segovia, he couldn’t believe there were not two guitars at work.”
Hurt’s own take was that “The Blues ain’t nothin’ but a good woman on your mind.” Clearly, for this great bluesman, life was hard, but the music came down to something good…
Listen: Stack O’Lee Blues
Listen: Frankie
Listen: Avalon Blues
Like this:
Tags: 1928 Sessions, Andres Segovia, Anthology Of American Folk Music, Blues, Harry Smith, John Fahey, Mississippi John Hurt
13 March 2011 at 1:09 pm |
Loved these tracks. Thanks.