What did they know, the rock’n’rollers, of the more than six hundred thousand Africans who were enslaved and shipped between 1619 and 1808 to what is now the United States? Would they have cared that so many had been ripped from their homelands, places of diverse cultures and multiple languages, and then separated on arrival from those with whom they shared family, roots and tongues? They might have reacted with mild indignation at the thought of those people having been deprived of an essential feature of their heritage: the playing of drums.
Slave owners, fearing uprising and rebellion, took away those vital tools of communication. Slaves improvised. They fashioned percussive instruments from sticks and bones. They used spoons, washboards and their own bodies, clapping hands, stamping feet and ‘slapping’ or ‘patting’ juba: hitting legs, chest and cheeks to create sounds and rhythms, later known as ‘hamboning’. They also sang, to drown the suffering of body and soul. From the mists rising over vast plantations drifted the haunting sounds of field hollers: unaccompanied songs without set form or steady beat. These mournful moans and vocal shifts and bends echoed both West African music and the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, because many slaves were adherents of Islam.
Forced by their owners to abandon their faith in order to be ‘civilised’ as Christians, they kept their religion and traditions alive secretly through song. Call-and-response work-songs also found across African cultures were sung together by groups as they went about tasks dependent on precise timing, such as the adjustment of railroad tracks. Later came the spirituals: Christian songs chorused by African Americans before and after slavery. Although hymns were mainly composed by white Americans and Europeans, they were customisede by distinctive African performance styles. Other songs highlighted the conditions they endured. ‘Negro spirituals’ served up biblical stories recounting the plight of the Jews under slavery in Egypt, as well as David-and-Goliath-type tales of triumphant underdogs. From the late nineteenth century, blues ballads celebrating the lives of heroes and villains combined European-influenced native American ballads with African American music, giving rise to the slow, sentimental songs we know as ballads today.
By 1860, there were still close to four million enslaved black people in America. Slavery officially ceased in 1865, at the end of the Civil War, when ownership of other humans became illegal. But life remained miserable for survivors and their descendants. The rights of African Americans were severely restricted. Racial segregation persisted until the mid-1960s, when discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex and national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity, were outlawed. Little wonder that the blues emerged among people for whom segregation, isolation and hopelessness were a way of life, and for whom the railroad was a symbol of opportunity and escape.
Most were sharecroppers: agricultural labourers working somebody else’s fields in return for a share of the profits, with housing and basics provided. The system was corrupt. Isolated rural Americans could purchase goods from mail-order catalogues, if they had the money to buy. But by the end of most months, most sharecroppers were in debt to the owners of the land they toiled. Many made music to remain sane, and to survive. The blues were rooted in their plight. Rueful reflections and soul-baring laments evolved to solve, soothe and sustain.
They accompanied themselves on the barest instruments: the diddly bow, also known as the ‘one-string’, the ‘jitterbug’ and the ‘mono chord zither’, a rudimentary one-stringed guitar harking back to basic single-stringed African instruments; the washboard, played by rubbing sewing thimbles or other metal pieces against its ribbing; the harmonica, the free wind instrument common in American folk music, known variously as the mouth organ, the blues harp and the Mississippi saxophone; and the banjo, often played with a metal or glass slide usually fashioned from a broken-off bottle neck. Improvised bass instruments included household jugs, blown into to create low sounds. Jug bands featuring improvised instruments alongside stringed instruments became popular in the 1920s, particularly in Memphis. Acoustic guitars gained widespread popularity during the early 1900s when mass production made them cheap and available by mail order.
Maybe the birthplace of the blues, as the dusty cobalt sign at Dockery Farms in Cleveland, Mississippi admits, is long lost to time. But that humble former cotton plantation boasts a sturdier claim than most. For almost three decades it was the home of Charley Patton, the most important of the early bluesmen. Patton himself was taught by his Dockery neighbour Henry Sloan. They influenced many other musicians who drifted into their midst, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson and Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples. But who started it? When was it first heard? What are the features that make it perhaps the most vital musical genre of all?
There’s a story about an Alabama-born African American musician, songwriter and bandleader W.C. Handy (1873–1958), William Christopher to his friends, who called himself ‘the Father of the Blues’. He wasn’t, exactly, although he was among the first to promote and popularise it. He claimed to have happened upon it one day at the train station in Tutwiler, Tallahatchie County, played by an anonymous itinerant guitarist. ‘The weirdest music I ever heard’ was how Handy described it. Adopting aspects of the sound that had caught his attention into his own compositions, Handy delivered it to the masses across the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the South by publishing sheet music. By the 1910s, thanks to sales of Handy’s scores, the music had become a national craze. Within the blues, to all who listened with the right ears, throbbed the field hollers and work songs of slaves of yore. The blues gave voice to a silent, mostly illiterate group with little to their name and less to hope for. They told of what it was like to be an African American. They sang their songs to live audiences, and made records to reach those who might not otherwise get to hear. These recordings are of monumental significance because the music was not taken seriously as an art form in its day. The blues, said the bluesmen, was heaven’s way of helping folk with hard times.
Why ‘blues’? As a metaphor for melancholy and hopelessness, it leans back to the term ‘blue devils’ found in English from the 1700s. Folk would later speak of ‘having the blues’ when they felt sad. Thus, the blues is both an emotion and a musical form. It is also the perfect paradox. Musicians play the blues in order to expunge the blues.
‘The blues’ is at once a state of mind and the soundtrack thereof. It’s about a good man feeling bad. Sing the blues and feel better about yourself. Overcome your negative feelings by listening to somebody else expressing them through music. Purge your emotions through art. Find a way out of your loneliness and frustration. It’s easy to understand why the music, sung mostly in the first person, was so appealing back in the bleak, and why it took hold. Blues songs describe feelings both personal and universal, instead of telling specific beginning-middle-end stories. Without a set plot to stick to, blues songs can be lengthened and improvised upon during performance and recording. They can take you anywhere you want, if you feel so inclined.
Ever heard the ‘blue note’, the ‘secret ingredient’ of the blues? You have: in the Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (‘the one with the fuzz box’) and in the Beatles’ ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, bending every blue note possible (the verses use a twelve-bar blues progression, unusually for them, and get George’s cheeky guitar solo). Audible proof that the blues is not only about vocal brilliance or depth of emotional expression, but also about the notes being sung. Not just notes that we are accustomed to and expect to hear, but a range of out-of-key others that rise from elsewhere. Also known as the ‘outside note’, the elusive blue note is the hallmark of the blues. David Temperley, Professor of Music Theory, Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, New York, has long been fascinated.
‘As musicians, we’re always taught there is an octave divided into twelve pitches,’ he says. ‘Now, we’re finding evidence that it’s not so simple, and people sometimes deliberately fall between one pitch and another for expressive effect.’ For example, he says, a melody in C major might be sung with a note that is halfway between E and E-flat, or a C minor blues might feature a tasty F# note for instant down-home effect. ‘Blue notes arising in systematic ways suggest to me there is some kind of intentionality at some level, though that could be unconscious,’ Temperley reflects.
In 2017, the team at Eastman developed algorithms and used automatic pitch-tracking software to extract and analyse the pitches within vocal tracks. Pitches were then examined in context of the entire song, to determine whether the tuning deviated from conventional pitches of the chromatic scale, and whether the deviations appeared to occur in intentional ways. Their work is ongoing.
Although the genre is widely regarded as the male guitarist’s domain, the earliest blues stars were female. The first African American blues song ever recorded was by Mamie Smith from Cincinnati. Born Mamie Robinson (1883–1946), she was a vaudeville pianist and dancer who had toured with a white dance troupe from the age of ten, later dancing herself into the clubs of Harlem, New York City, where she began to sing. In February 1920 she recorded ‘That Thing Called Love’ and ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down’ against fervent racial opposition. Months later, she scored her biggest hit with the first blues recording, ‘Crazy Blues’. A million copies sold in under a year, most of them purchased by African Americans. Thus began the era of so-called ‘race records’. Record companies went looking for more female blues singers, giving rise to the age of classic female blues.
The ‘Queen of the Blues’ was soon eclipsed by Bessie Smith (1894–1937) from Chattanooga, Tennessee, who as an orphaned child had sung for pennies on street corners. She became not only the most important female blues singer of the Jazz Age, but also ‘Empress of the Blues’. Clara Smith (1894–1935) from South Carolina was ‘Queen of the Moaners’. She mentored thirteen-year-old dancer Josephine Baker (1906–75), the pair becoming ‘lady lovers’. This risqué future spy and siren of the French Resistance married several times but was openly bisexual. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’honneur.
Ma Rainey (1886–1939), born Gertrude Pridgett in Russell County, Alabama, took up performing in her teens, becoming known as ‘Ma’ to match her husband Will’s nickname ‘Pa’ Rainey. They featured in black minstrel shows, toured with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and formed their own group. Ma recorded more than a hundred songs including ‘Moonshine Blues’ and ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’. Her fierce, soul-baring, defiant work was a stark portrayal of the real lives of African Americans. But she did not betray them, as has been suggested, with her materialistic lifestyle and extravagant wardrobe. Decked out in her twinkling tiaras, gold-dollar jewellery, ostrich feathers and satin frocks, her glamour gave hope to downbeat women.
The ‘Mother of the Blues’ was visible, audible proof that there were ways out. In this sense, she was an important proto-feminist icon. Her deep, gritty, powerful voice and subtle phrasing inspired the likes of Louis Armstrong, with whom she would later record, and Janis Joplin and Bonnie Raitt. A forerunner of the LGBTQ cause, she was rumoured to be romantically involved with Bessie Smith. Her 1928 song ‘Prove it on Me’ is notable for daring allusions to her bisexuality. A poster for the record featuring Ma in drag with a cop hovering close by may well have inspired George Michael seventy years later, when he released his 1998 single ‘Outside’ after his arrest for engaging in lewd behaviour in a Beverly Hills public toilet. The tongue-in-cheek video for the smash hit featured heli-cops, bathroom arrests, kissing policemen, stripping patrolwomen and al fresco fornication.
Ida Cox (1888 or ‘1896–1967), born Ida M. Prather in Toccoa, Georgia, first stepped out in touring troupes including the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, like her idols Ma and Bessie. A charismatic, comedic and expressive singer, she was known at the height of her career as the ‘Sepia Mae West’.
Alberta Hunter (1895–1984), a lesbian blues singer, was born in Memphis and moved to Chicago to sing in brothels and bars. She developed a talent for improvising lyrics. On tour in Europe in 1917, she visited Paris and London. She took the role of Queenie in 1928 in Show Boat’s first London production, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, opposite Paul Robeson, and sang a 1934 season at the Dorchester. In later years she worked with Louis Armstrong, abandoning her career after the death of her mother to work for twenty years as a nurse. Music lured her back when she was in her eighties, and she enjoyed an unexpected revival. Her albums were certainly popular among London students in the early 1980s. I was one of them.
Memphis Minnie (1897–1973) was born Lizzie Douglas, probably in Tunica County, Mississippi, and gained fame as ‘the Most Popular Female Country Blues Singer of All Time’. Gifted her first guitar at the age of eight, she also learned to play the banjo, and spent most of her teens singing and playing on street corners. She joined a circus in Memphis, supplementing the music crusts with sex work – as many female artists had to back then, when the dough ran dry. She performed with a succession of husbands, toured the South extensively, and had established herself in Chicago by 1935. As a blues guitarist, singer and songwriter, she recorded some two hundred songs over her thirty-year career. Her biggest hit was ‘Me and my Chauffeur Blues’. One of her greatest fans is Bonnie Raitt, who cherished her memory and paid for her headstone. Minnie could sing and play as well as any man. So can Bonnie.
Billie Holiday (1915–59), born Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, worked as a brothel maid and began singing in Harlem nightclubs in her early teens. She made her recording debut at eighteen with Benny Goodman in 1933, and later worked with Count Basie and Artie Shaw. Her relationships with bad men, booze and heroin made a lag of her, and ultimately destroyed ‘Lady Day’. She was dead by the age of forty-four, a grotesque shadow of her once glistening self. Her 1956 autobiography Lady Sings the Blues was adapted for the screen, starring Diana Ross.
The blues were the first medium via which African American women could express their social, political and personal problems publicly. Ladies who sang the blues spoke for their kind, and were inspirational. But the Great Depression threw a fire blanket over the age of the female blues artists. By the end of the 1930s, they were on the wane. The blues became a male-dominated domain.
Henry Sloan (1870–1948?) was a plantation worker who lived at Dockery Farms. One of the earliest blues musicians, Sloan taught Charley Patton to play guitar and was a friend of Robert Johnson. Patton, Tommy Johnson, Son House and others named him as their teacher, as well as the originator of what flourished as the Delta blues. He may have migrated north to Chicago after World War I. He left no recordings.
Charley (also spelled Charlie) Patton (1891–1934) was born in Hinds County, Mississippi. The ‘Father of the Delta Blues’ and one of the most important American musicians of the twentieth century was so light-skinned that his appearance provoked speculation. He was a popular showman and all-rounder with a distinctive gravelly voice. His 1929 song ‘Pony Blues’ is preserved in the US as a work of cultural, historical and aesthetical significance.
Son House (1902–88), born Edward James House Jr in Lyon, Clarksdale, Mississippi, was a man of the cloth who gave in to the blues when he was twenty-five, pouring the passion of his preaching into music. He also became an exquisite slide guitarist. Under the patronage of Charley Patton he recorded from 1930, but the Great Depression thwarted his quest for national fame. He inspired Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, but was disappointed by the lack of personal recognition. He moved to Rochester, New York in 1943, turning his back on music to work as a railroad porter and chef. Rediscovered twenty years later when he was sixty-two, he was coaxed out of retirement and became a folk blues singer for predominantly young white audiences. Several albums and live concert recordings ensued.
Big Bill Broonzy (1903–58) was born Lee Conley Bradley, probably in Arkansas, Mississippi Delta. He made his first fiddle from a cigar box when he was ten, and learned to play spirituals and folk songs. Starting out as a country blues musician, he became a leading light in the American folk music revival. He moved north in 1920, took up the guitar, and became a pioneer of the Chicago blues. This suave, sharp-suited jazzman would sport the overalls and hat of the field hand for his folk performances, attracting praise for his authenticity. Many of his influential songs drew on his personal rural-to-urban metamorphosis.
T-Bone Walker (1910–75), born Aaron Thibeaux Walker in Texas, was a pioneer and creator of jump blues and electric blues. He performed professionally on the blues circuit from the age of fifteen. Known for songs such as ‘Bobby Sox Blues’ and ‘West Side Baby’, his most famous number is the desolate 1947 release ‘Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just As Bad)’.
Howlin’ Wolf (1910–76) was born Chester Arthur Burnett in White Station, Mississippi, to Native American and African parents. The Chicago blues guitarist, singer and harmonica player is known for songs such as ‘Smokestack Lightnin’ ’, ‘Spoonful’ and ‘Killing Floor’. He was a major influence on subsequent artists, including the Stones.
Robert Johnson (1911–38), born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, was a blues guitarist and singer-songwriter. ‘The King of the Delta Blues Singers’, his following increased massively after his death, allegedly from poisoned whisky. He became an icon of the British blues movement, Eric Clapton describing him as ‘the most important blues singer that ever lived’. Keith Richards, Bob Dylan and Robert Plant have all recognised him as a major influence on their work. His best-loved recordings include ‘Me and the Devil Blues’, ‘Sweet Home Chicago’, ‘Cross Road Blues’, ‘Hell Hound on My Trail’, ‘Come On in My Kitchen’ and ‘Love in Vain’. The master.
John Lee Hooker (1912 or ‘1917–2001) landed in Tutwiler, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. The blues singer-songwriter and guitarist performed an electric guitar variation of the Delta blues, e.g. on ‘Dimples’, ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’. He collaborated with many artists in later life, including The Doors, B.B. King and Van Morrison, which earned him a wide and appreciative next-generation audience.
Sonny Boy Williamson (1912?–65), born Alex/Aleck Ford, later Miller, was a distinctive blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter who went by a variety of stage names including Rice Miller and Little Boy Blue, the latter inspiring the name of Mick Jagger’s starter band. He settled on Sonny Boy Williamson, a name already taken by a better-known Chicago blues singer and harmonica player. Historians therefore sometimes refer to him as Sonny Boy Williamson II. When he moved to Memphis, he lived with Howlin’ Wolf, taught him to play harmonica, married Wolf’s half-sister Mae, and ran his own radio show. He began recording in 1951, and rose to prominence as a member of Elmore James’s Chicago-based band.
Recording for Chess Records, who had inherited his earlier contract, he achieved fame and relative fortune from some seventy songs. He toured Europe during the 1960s, recording with the Yardbirds and the Animals. A pre-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant is rumoured to have stolen one of Williamson’s harmonicas during one of those British shows. He’s not going to tell us, is he. Famous numbers include ‘Don’t Start Me Talkin’ ’, ‘One Way Out’ and ‘Bring It On Home’. Notable is Chess’s 1972 compilation of his work, This Is My Story.
Muddy Waters (1913–83) was born McKinley Morganfield, somewhere in the state of Mississippi. Accounts vary. He acquired his nickname as an infant, being fond of playing in the mudslide-y Deer Creek. He added ‘Waters’ in his teens when he started performing. The good Baptist blues singer-songwriter and musician rose to fame as ‘The Father of Modern Chicago Blues’. Hailed for his recordings of blues classics ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ and ‘I’m Ready’, he shocked trad jazz and folk enthusiasts on his first visit to England in 1958 with his squealing electric guitar and rocking blues. He inspired the UK and European blues revival, and remains a major influence on rock’n’roll. When he returned to Britain four years later armed with an old acoustic, it was to find that his followers had gone electric and were in the process of outdoing him.
The Rolling Stones named themselves after Muddy’s 1950 recording ‘Rollin’ Stone’, a variation on the Delta classic ‘Catfish Blues’. As Keith remarked, Muddy’s was ‘the most powerful music I had ever heard – and the most expressive … When you think of some dopey, spotty seventeen-year-old from Dartford who wants to be Muddy Waters – and there were a lot of us – in a way, very pathetic, but in another way, very heartwarming.’
Willie Dixon (1915–92) started life in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The blues musician, singer-songwriter, producer and arranger is reckoned to be the most influential musician in the shaping of post-World War II Chicago blues. He played double bass and guitar. His most famous songs ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, ‘Spoonful’ and ‘My Babe’ influenced artists all over the world. ‘Little Red Rooster’, a blues standard first recorded by Howlin’ Wolf for Chess in 1961, was covered by the Stones as their fifth UK single in 1964. It gave them a No. 1 and was the first blues song to top the British charts. The Stones’ cover left the world in no doubt as to what the blues are really about. Clue? Three across. Dixon remains a significant figure in the transition from blues to rock’n’roll.
Elmore James (1918–63) was born Elmore Brooks in Richland, Holmes County, Mississippi. He started out with a diddley bow, the one-stringed instrument so pivotal to the evolution of the blues sound. A blues guitarist, singer-songwriter and bandleader, he was known as ‘the King of the Slide Guitar’ and for songs such as ‘My Bleeding Heart’, ‘The Sky’s Crying’ and ‘Stranger Blues’. James was a massive influence on the Stones. When he first heard him, Brian Jones said ‘it was like the earth shuddered and stopped on its axis’. Bill Wyman confirmed that James was ‘the single most important reason for the formation of the Rolling Stones’, while Rod Stewart named him as a major influence on his singing style.
Elmore admitted to having picked up his ‘Dust My Broom’ lick from Robert Johnson himself, electrifying and injecting it with more muscle. He customised amps in order to wring distortion and feedback from them, chasing ‘a sound louder than God’. Sonic manipulation was in. Keith Richards must have had Elmore in mind when he plugged in Nashville engineer Glen Snoddy’s Gibson Maestro FZ1 Fuzz-Tone and played ‘Satisfaction’.
Jimmy Reed (1925–76), originally Mathis James Reed, arrived in Dunleith, Mississippi. He started out busking and found his way to paid engagements in Chicago, before serving in the US Navy during the Second World War. This popular electric blues musician gifted the world many cherished songs, including ‘Honest I Do’, ‘Big Boss Man’ and ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ – the title being borrowed by author Jay McInerney for his seminal, second-person 1984 novel about life in New York during that decade. Reed toured Europe in 1968, as part of the American Folk Blues Festival.
The Stones performed Jimmy’s hits during their earliest outings, for example ‘Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby’, ‘The Sun is Shining’ (which they also performed at Altamont), ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ and ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’. They recorded ‘Honest I Do’ for their debut album The Rolling Stones in 1964. Their 2016 covers-only Blue & Lonesome album featured a sublimely soulful rendition of Reed’s ‘Little Rain’. It has been said that they felt the presence of Brian Jones while they were in the studio recording it. The song was one of Brian’s all-time favourites.
Little Walter (1925 or ‘1930–68) started life as Marion Walter Jacobs in Marksville, Louisiana. The ‘king of all post-war blues harpists’ and the ‘father of modern blues and blues rock harmonica’ learned to play the harmonica as a child, left school before his twelfth birthday and was on the road doing odd jobs and busking, from New Orleans to Memphis to St Louis by the time he was sixteen. He learned from the masters, including Sonny Boy Williamson II. Reaching Chicago in 1946, He took guitar work where he could but found himself in demand primarily as a harmonica player. He was one of the first to hold a small microphone in the palm of his hand next to the harmonica, to project his playing. Amplification allowed him to experiment with sonic effects hitherto unheard from the instrument. He joined Muddy Waters’s band in 1948, and within two years was playing both acoustically and amplified electronically on Muddy’s recordings.
His first No. 1 hit, ‘Juke’, remains the only harmonica instrumental ever to top the chart. Many hits followed. An angst-ridden alcoholic, he was often in trouble, and his popularity waned towards the end of the 1950s. He toured Europe in 1964 and 1967. But a claim that he had toured the UK with the Stones in 1964 is denied by Keith Richards.
Chuck Berry (1926–2017) was born Charles Edward Anderson Berry in St. Louis, Missouri. The singer-songwriter and guitarist looms large as ‘the Father of Rock and Roll’ (although Little Richard claimed the distinction). Inspired to pursue a career in music by T-Bone Walker, an early pioneer of electric blues, Chuck met Muddy Waters in Chicago in 1955 and recorded with Leonard Chess at Chess Records. When Chess cajoled Chuck into reimagining the old country fiddle tune ‘Ida Red’ as ‘Maybellene’, he had a hunch. ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Rock and Roll Music’, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘No Particular Place to Go’ and ‘My Ding-a-Ling’ followed. He did time for trafficking an under-age Apache waitress to work at his St Louis nightclub, and for having sex with her. Sentenced to five years, he appealed, got the sentence down to three and wound up serving eighteen months. His final single ahead of his incarceration was ‘Come On’, later covered by the Stones. Their and other versions of his songs kept his name alive while he languished behind bars.
He resumed recording on release, and toured the UK to wild acclaim in 1964. His return to Britain the following year was less incendiary. He continued to tour, and performed at the White House for Jimmy Carter in 1979. Then the IRS caught up with him over evasion of income tax. Back to the slammer. Later years were dogged by scandal. He was accused of filming women in the bathroom of a restaurant he owned, and of drug possession. Video footage emerged of him in scatological compromise with an unknown female. On his ninetieth birthday he announced Chuck, his first new studio album for thirty-eight years. He died the same year.
The Beatles famously admired him and covered his songs, notably ‘Rock and Roll Music’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ and ‘Memphis Tennessee’. The Stones were more assiduous, pumping out their takes on ‘Around and Around’, ‘Bye Bye Johnnie’, ‘Carol’, ‘Let It Rock’, ‘Little Queenie’, ‘Talkin’ About You’, ‘You Can’t Catch Me’ and more, as well as ‘Come On’. Though many identify Berry by his ‘duck walk’ and ‘a coupla crackin’ toons’, his contributions to the genre are immense. For what would a rock band be without a posturing frontman, signature guitar riffs and epic songs?
Bo Diddley (1928–2008), born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, and later became Ellas McDaniel. His adoptive family relocated to Chicago. His love of music stemmed from his involvement with the Baptist church. He played trombone and violin, the latter so well that he was invited to join the church’s orchestra. Inspired by music he came across at a nearby Pentecostal church, he switched to guitar. His performing name remains something of a mystery. Although several individuals claimed to have coined the nickname, ‘Bo Diddley’ may simply have been a reversal of the name of the old one-stringed instrument the diddley bow.
He favoured African rhythms and a hambone rhythm that were dubbed ‘the Bo Diddley beat’, and which would later become a hallmark of hip hop, rock and pop. He played an unusual, one-off rectangular guitar of his own design, made for him by Gretsch, which had a rare resonance and sound. As a guitarist, singer-songwriter and producer, he remains an important figure in music’s evolution from the blues to rock’n’roll. Many artists admired and were influenced by him, not least Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Animals, the Clash and the Rolling Stones. He performed as part of a 1963 UK concert tour with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the fledgling Stones. He regrouped with the latter on their 1994 concert broadcast of Voodoo Lounge, performing his song ‘Who Do You Love?’ Said Mick Jagger after his death, ‘He was a wonderful, original musician who was an enormous force in music and was a big influence on the Rolling Stones. He was very generous to us in our early years, and we learned a lot from him.’
Music seemed to speed up during the 1950s. Rock’n’roll grew dominant, but the roots were still there: gospel, country, blues. Teenagers and the electric guitar became rock’s primary forces. In August 1952, Big Mama Thornton recorded the twelve-bar blues song ‘Hound Dog’, the work of black culture fans Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Her only hit, it sold more than half a million copies. Elvis Presley’s multi-chart-topping effort came four years later, one of the best-selling singles ever. He championed rockabilly, a variation on the rhythm-and-blues-meets-country theme. His uninhibited sexual performances caused outrage. Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley, Big Joe Turner and Bill Haley and his Comets seized the reins. In March 1955, the film Blackboard Jungle, showcasing twenty-eight-year-old Bahamian-American future Oscar winner Sidney Poitier, made stars of Haley and his band, and ‘Rock Around the Clock’ entered the songbook. Clean-cut Pat Boone covered black R&B hits, bleaching them for mainstream radio. Though its pioneers were black, rock’n’roll gained traction as a ‘white’ genre.
Satellite Records was founded in 1957, later evolving into Stax and its Volt subsidiary. Southern soul and Memphis soul were born. Here was the home of interracial band Booker T. & the M.G.’s and Otis Redding, and later of Isaac Hayes, the Staples Singers, and the Dramatics. Black American entrepreneur Berry Gordy Jr founded Tamla Records in 1959, which evolved into the Motown Record Corporation the following year. Motown’s R&B-to-pop-crossover template went down in history as the most important development in sixties American music, performing a vital role in racial integration. But despite becoming the most successful black-owned business in the United States, many of its artists and those of other labels soon stood accused of racial betrayal for ‘not being black enough’.
Elvis was drafted into the US Army in 1958, and was never the same again. The music, some of it, died on 3 February 1959 when Buddy Holly, J.P. ‘the Big Bopper’ Richardson and Ritchie Valens fell out of the sky in a chartered Beechcraft Bonanza in Iowa, soon after take-off from Mason City. They were immortalised by Don McLean in some song.
The Beatles ‘invaded’ America in 1964, with the Rolling Stones hot on their heels. Both groups promoted the black American sounds they had cut their teeth on. It was the Stones who took the flak for it, finding themselves called out for ‘ripping off black music’ as a result of their ‘white appropriations of black genres’. Criticism was both ironic and erroneous. The Stones implied from the outset that the only distinction among musicians was talent. The scruffy white R&B group was defiant in its carting of coals to Newcastle, a heaving that frequently backfired. Having done more to uphold black musical tradition than any other contemporary act, they were denounced for having become, by default, lukewarm defenders of a heritage they had plundered and restyled for nobody’s benefit but their own. Having set out to pay homage to the founders of the blues, they came to find themselves worshipped as the architects of a dimension in which musicians all over the world strove to be them. Take the money and run? Wouldn’t you?
Pause the ‘Honky Tonks’, the ‘Jumpin’ Jacks’, the ‘Brown Sugars’. Tread back through their more obscure tracks to hear what turned the Stones on in the first place, and what they were getting at: raw, guitar-led blues that throbbed and erupted like sex. You get the picture. A style more rock’n’roll than ever before. Pull up ‘Little Red Rooster’, their 1964 take on the Willie Dixon standard made classic by Howlin’ Wolf three years earlier. Was it phallic or was it farmyard? Jury’s still out. The Stones recorded their version at Chess Studios in Chicago, where the original was laid down. That place was a church to these young pretenders. Imagine how overwhelming it must have felt. Listen. Savour blues purist Brian Jones’s finest hour, perhaps his greatest-ever slide guitar performance. Sam Cooke did have a hit with a pacier version, but the Stones’ rendition was more faithful to the first. Theirs topped the UK chart. ‘The reason we recorded “Little Red Rooster” isn’t because we want to bring blues to the masses,’ insisted Jagger. ‘We’ve been going on and on about the blues, so we thought it was about time we stopped talking and did something about it. We liked that particular song, so we released it.’ Fair dos.
Then there’s Willie Dixon’s evergreen blues number ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’. First recorded by Muddy in 1954, the Stones covered it on their first LP The Rolling Stones ten years later. Their version, flogging Keith’s frenzied guitar and Brian’s flawless harp, serves as a virtual manifesto for the band the Stones would become.
‘No Expectations’, written by Mick and Keith, the B-side of the original ‘Street Fighting Man’ single and a track on 1968’s Beggars Banquet, is as lonesome as they come. Mick’s vocal is controlled, sad and accepting. Keith’s acoustic rhythm guitar is mournful. The magical tinkling keys are by Nicky Hopkins. But the lament is all Brian’s, whose heart-cracking acoustic slide is one of his final contributions to the Stones’ oeuvre. Even the lyrics can be interpreted as a shrouded last goodbye to him. He won’t pass through here again.
‘Midnight Rambler’ from 1969’s Let It Bleed is perhaps better showcased by the live take on Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! of the following year. ‘As close to genuine blues as the Rolling Stones ever got’? The statement was hard to disagree with at Madison Square Garden in 2003 when a possessed and dislocated Mick dervished and harmonica’d as if for his life. Keith in blue satin (a back-up green shirt underneath) raised the Mississippi dead, and howled happily. Also on Let It Bleed, find their take on Robert Johnson’s heart-rending ‘Love in Vain’. Controlled and gut-wrenching, it’s a little more country than the original. The train left the station, but the Stones are still aboard.
‘You Gotta Move’ is a traditional African-American spiritual, recorded as a blues song by ‘Mississippi’ Fred McDowell in 1965. Mick, Keith and the boys went for a more raucous, insistent take with a funereal feel and an alarming closing beat that was otherwise faithful to Fred’s, at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama in 1969. They included it on 1971’s Sticky Fingers. ‘Right,’ said Fred, ‘I make the guitar say what I say.’ Keith did too.
There’s always a favourite. Today, for me, that’s ‘Ventilator Blues’ from 1972’s Exile on Main St. So Muddy, so so Wolf. Favourite not just because majestic Mick Taylor (on lead) who created the riff is credited as co-writer, for Mick’s rare double-tracked vocal, for Keith on slide, for Nicky Hopkins’s lightnin’ trills or Bobby Keys’s weird rhythm which Charlie had to learn by having him clap it; nor for its heavy, seductive, drama-filled, draining tone. This wrings you out. I think it’s partly the whole thing of it having been created during the Stones’ real-life exile in the dungeons of Villa Nellcôte, Keith’s sinister rented mansion in the South of France, where anything went and everything did. That Keith kept a speedboat called Mandrax was the size of it.
I wasn’t there, of course, but I’ve been, at times, obsessed with it. The menace and the magic never wane. This song feels like the soundtrack of the entire sojourn; the addictive, hellish vibe of those months captured for posterity on tape. I allow myself a listen sometimes. You don’t want to overdo it, it can keep you awake. I wish I’d been there for their only live performance of it, in Canada, on the 1972 North American tour.
In October 2015, I flew to Illinois to deliver a lecture at the Fifth Annual Chicago Ideas Week. A break in the busy schedule afforded me a few hours to spend in the city’s Art Institute, which houses a masterpiece I’d been longing to see for years. The painting, the first-ever Picasso acquired by an American museum and said to be worth $100 million (it’s not for sale) was The Old Guitarist: a stark rendition in oils of a decrepit, apparently blind minstrel, strumming his battered instrument on a Barcelona backstreet. It reflects Picasso’s own poverty when he painted it, at the age of only twenty-two. Thousands gaze at it each week. They are as enchanted by it as the many who make the pilgrimage to the Paris Louvre to stare at Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. I too had contemplated Picasso’s guitarist over the years, if only on postcards and in coffee table books. I had never yet set eyes on the genuine article. The painting lured me, for reasons I could not explain. Something told me that once I’d looked at the real thing, I would never feel the same again. In it, I knew, I would find grief and degradation, things that most of us find difficult to confront and process. I was almost afraid to go looking for it. I went anyway.
I found it on the third floor of the Institute’s Modern Wing. It was larger than I had expected. I lingered before it for a while, did the rounds and circled back. I was unprepared for its blueness, even though I had known what to expect. I was well aware that it had been painted during Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’, in late 1903/early 1904. I had underestimated the impact that the brownness of the guitar would have – the only other colour Picasso uses here. Which is significant. The lowly instrument leaps out as a symbol of redemption. The picture told me in apparently living oils, in a way that printers’ ink could not, that Pablo empathised with the destitute. It also said that the blues would save him. Not the blues of the oils, but the music.
I know now that the painting represents not only worldly poverty, but also emotional dysfunction and hopelessness. By which I mean the dilemma and drive of all who create, including Picasso himself, but especially musicians. It is the perfect depiction of the artist’s paradox: art makes him special, but it is the thing that isolates him from the rest of the world. He is incapable of abandoning his art because it is the means by which he survives, the very thing that saves him from doom. He is a slave to it.
I have no idea whether Brian Jones ever got the chance to look at this painting. I’m guessing not. But I think that he of all artists would have identified with Picasso’s blue man.