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RE: Big Mamas & Johnny Otis
There's a good reason that the nickname "Groovemaster" stuck ;-)
Skeptically examining these myths and legends is one of my running themes.
Slayer of Legends, :-) I must admit I love the fanciful embellished legends.
Aesop's "Familiarity breeds contempt" is probably more like a natural law than an adage.
I'm not doing any slaying, I should make clear, just reporting the slaying that's gone on in recent years. It's still the legend that gets printed. It'll take more than Elijah Wald's book showing Robert Johnson to have been a huge Jimmie Rodgers fan and a polka hound, who let's say 'borrowed' all his songs, to convince people Robert Johnson was anything but a semi-mystical original operating in isolation, his gifts deriving from a pact with the devil.
The written word is always getting me into trouble. When people speak to each other it's so much easier to pick up on attempts a humor. I was totally kidding about the legend slaying, hope I didn't offend you. I do, however, cop to being a sucker for tales about music and musicians.
Of course the more info we have about our legends the better. That Robert Johnson info you mentioned above is fascinating.
Finding the truth in the haze of the distant past must be a real challenge. One can find two musicians who will have widely divergent memories about the same thing. Sometimes even a single musician can have contradictory accounts.
For example, Paul McCartney on writing Balckbird. Wiki has an article about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(Beatles_song)
I remember having a bootleg of McCartney and Donovan taking turns playing for each other in a studio back when the Beatles were still together. It's now on YouTube and about 4 minutes in he says originally it had nothing to do with a black girl
Be later when he published a book of his lyrics and he gave a much different version that involved being motivated by the race struggle in America at the time.
In any case, I can see you're going to have a bunch of interesting posts to share and I'm looking forward to reading them!
No, no, I wasn’t at all being touchy about mythbusting – maybe it was me who wasn’t expressing himself clearly. I agree with you it would be a great shame if the tall tales were expunged from history – they’re part of the story too.
The Wald book is salutary. Here’s a great podcast in which he talks about its themes with Ned Sublette, who I mentioned in a previous reply: https://tinyurl.com/y7f652q6. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, check 24 mins in. This Afropop Worldwide podcast, if you don’t know it, is well worth checking in its own right. The name is deceptive because it covers a lot more than Afropop, or at least defines that term in an extremely wide sense.
I’ve never come across those Donovan sessions and will be looking into them for sure. Does the clip clarify anything about ‘Blackbird’, though? Despite the fact you can make the lyrics fit it, I’d always been dubious about the civil rights narrative, so when I read Ian McDonald’s take I took it as confirmation. Here, unless I’m mistaken, Paulie seems to contradict himself within a single breath, doesn’t he? First he seems to say “I DIDN’T mean it like that originally”, then right after talks about “reading something in the paper about the riots and that”, as though this was the inspiration after all.
The Beatles history is packed full of this stuff, of course. (My man Stockhausen makes the Sgt Pepper cover, btw, if you don’t know that. The story of how the band nearly met him could almost make a Steemit post, though actually there wasn’t much to it.) With some of the older stuff I’ve been dealing with things can get very murky, you’re right. How much segregation was there in New Orleans at the turn of the century, for instance? Depends who you talk to, exactly when you’re talking about, and whether what we would call discrimination even occurred to them as being anything but an accepted part of life. Many blacks (Anglo-Africans I call them in the book) say the creoles (Franco-Africans) discriminated against them worse than the whites did, regarding them not as cousins but as something (ex-slaves) they had no wish to be associated with. Things are not helped by the fact that some of these people didn’t even know when they were born, so that when they used their age as a reference point they might be ten years out. The fact we don’t know for sure when even a guy like Jelly Roll Morton, every aspect of whose life has been subjected to the jeweller’s eyepiece, was born, even within ten years, says everything. Jelly himself was clear enough, but he was not above massaging the truth, and since he claimed to have “invented jazz in 1902” might have had a vested interest in making Alan Lomax and others think he was older than he was.
Anyways, we could both go on about this stuff for ever, but right now I got to go and dust my broom. :o)
About Paul and BBird, I remembered that so well from my bootleg, so when I heard him make that claim in an interview while promoting his book -- alarm bells went off ;-)
One can imagine that when people around him heard the song (like Donovan) they made that connection (since a bird in British slang is similar to a chick in American slang.) So that idea was probably planted in his mind soon after the song was released -- even if that wasn't his original intent.
As a big Allman Brothers fan I've come across lots of conflicting accounts of various things.
Anyway, thanks for that podcast link, I listened to a few minutes, sounds like fun, so I'll head back there again. I always appreciated Robert Johnson's songs, but to be truthful, I never got on the same train as Clapton, Dylan etc in regard to Johnson. How about you, did he rock your world? Son House blows me away much more than RJ.
I did know of Leroy Carr from an interview I did with Chuck Leavell about his tribute to early piano blues -- if memory serves Chuck's son-in-law is a musicologist. That was interesting for me, the realization that before electric guitar, piano was king.
Speaking of Afropop, I don't know too much about it, but if you're into that my interview with Etienne Mbappe (John McLaughlin's bass player) gets into that.
I'm not into the steemit meetups, not really a crowd guy, but it is a shame we are so far apart, we'd have lots to talk about ;-)
It does sound like an exercise in creative memory by Macca − which of course makes you wonder what else might be wishful thinking.
I do love those Robert Johnson records, though without putting him on a pedestal above House or plenty of others who recorded around the same time. I think what attracts people is that he sounds so darned authentic, though this is true of others too. One train I’ve never been able to get on is Clapton’s take on it all. Musically speaking, I mean. If you hear him talk you can’t doubt the effect this stuff had on him, but when you hear say the ‘Crossroads’ on that podcast, to me it seem a million miles away from the same spirit. This isn’t at all a “white guys should leave that stuff alone” thing – I love the covers vintage-period Stones did of some of those records, and to my ear they have their own authenticity. But House, yep, ‘Death letter blues’ and all that – absolutely hair-raising stuff.
There’s a whole book on blues within my book, incidentally – my painstaking attempt to get to the bottom of what part (if any) they played in the origins of jazz. Before doing the book I never really got why what’s called ‘classic blues’ − Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and all that − was piano-based, given my assumption that blues was a rough rural (Delta) folk music. What I discovered was that – whatever WC Handy heard some guy playing with a knife on guitar strings on a railway station in Evansville, Indiana in the early 1890s – the blues that preceded the classic blues (which in a sense was a recording company creation with whites partly in mind) not only didn’t emanate from the Mississippi Delta but was really nothing like House’s blues, or Johnson’s, or Charley Patton’s, though it was also recorded in the 20s, by people like Rufus Thomas and (those early Okeh recordings) Mississippi John Hurt. I became totally addicted to this stuff when I discovered it, and there is a lot of it (https://tinyurl.com/y93x9nrs).
So before piano was king, guitar and to a lesser extent banjo were. Originally – or at least soon after it was formulated – blues tended not to be the province of tormented figures singing the pain of their lives, but just one item in the repertoires of banjo- and guitar-picking singers of the songster tradition. This tradition too sort of persisted alongside everything else that was going on, in the person of Mississippi John, for example, and also Furry Lewis (born within a year of each other – 1892/3 – and the last generation of this type). Leadbelly too, five years older, in his own way. One of my favourite things on YouTube is this Furry video, which ends with Leon Russell accompanying him in new rather than old blues style: https://tinyurl.com/ycxaoate
Found that Etienne Mbappe interview on talking2musicians.com and steemitKR and listening to it now. Will also be checking out that Bela Fleck banjo doc you reference. That story, and the whole business of African retention, are also things I do my best to probe in the book.
I sense we have much in common. Any gathering of more than three or four people is something I try to avoid, in favour of steemit meetups as I am in principle (I’d be interested to know if there are Steemians where I live), in real life I’d run a mile rather than find myself at one. :o) So it’ll have to be the written word.
LATER ... That's a lovely interview - Etienne sounds like a great guy.
Thanks for the insightful response. Music is just so wonderful, really glad you're on the platform. I'll check the links when I get some time.
Cool that you listened to the Etienne interview, what a joy it is to talk to him. I spoke to him again when I did a tribute interview about U Shrinvas, the Indian mandolin Master -- they were in a trio together, but Shrinivas died right before the album came out. Long story.