I first planned to post about "Frankie and Johnny", but Glenn at the musical blog So Well Remembered made an excellent post about the Harry Smith anthology including a review of Mississippi John Hurt's "Frankie". You have to check it out !
According to a good Wikipedia article, "In The Pines" dates back from at least the 1870s and may be of Southern Appalachian origin.
It was first published by Cecil Sharp, founding father of the folklore revival in England. His story is very interesting and this man had a crucial role, even though it is an indirect one, in the emergence of country music. I will come back to his story in a future post. Sharp collected the following lines :
Black girl, black girl, don't lie to meWhere did you stay last night? I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines And shivered when the cold wind blows
The wikipedia article gives a big list of people who performed that song, including the Monroe Brothers, great Georgia bluesman Peg Leg Howell, and Louisiana Cajun accordion player Nathan Abshire who recorded a French version (I really should hear that one).
But the version I want to play you is not part of the list. It's by Darby and Tarlton and it's from 1927, so it's probably one of the earliest versions of the song. Darby and Tarlton, a hillbilly duo featuring Hawaiian-style guitar, played in such a bluesy manner that people often mistook them for Afro-American performers.
And then, of course, the Leadbelly version, "Black Girl", made famous by Nirvana's cover. Leadbelly was from West Louisiana / East Texas, home of the piney woods, and I've always found his version menacing and mysterious. But I'm a Leadbelly fanatic… It seems that Leadbelly took from Darby & Tarlton, because he also recorded a song called "On A Monday", that may originate from D & T's biggest hit, the great "Birmingham Jail".
This one's a traditional tune, whose origin is not very clear. Is it from Britain, Ireland, or is it an American creation ? Nobody knows for sure. It was first published by WC Handy as "Loveless Love", and it is more common in blues and jazz than in country music.
My favourite version is by New Orleans guitar player Lonnie Johnson. I love his almost introspective singing.
There's also a great country version by The Delmore Brothers, one of the greatest harmonizing duets. Sort of musical grandfathers to Gary Louris & Mark Olson (fathers being the Everly Bros, of course).
"Saint James Infirmary" is an American folk song with English origins. In Britain it was called "The Unfortunate Rake" and it was about a sailor who dies after spending his money on prostitutes. In America it became a more drinking or gambling-related song.
The most famous and influential version was Louis Armstrong Dixieland jazz rendition in 1928, but I really love what Jimmie Rodgers did with that song, keeping the melody and the setting but telling a slightly different story. His "Gambling Barroom blues" is the first country version of SJI.
The second song in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Musicdidn't draw my attention when I first heard it. The sound quality was rather bad, I was in the subway, and I didn't notice the lyrics. Then when reading the liner notes I realized what it was all about and came back to it, and now it's one of my favorite songs from the anthology.
Favorite ? Well, I don't know in fact... Certainly most striking though, as it is about the murder of a child. Now that I have kids, I've grown very sensitive about that subject. Searching for documentation about the song history, I learnt that it goes back to the Middle Ages, and that it was originally an (very sadly) popular anti-semitic story, the murderer being "the Jew's daughter". For more details, see here.
Well at least in that version from Alabama, the anti-Semitsm is absent : the woman is a "gypsy" which is the symbol of the fearsome stranger, the unknown, the otherness of evil. The song has a mysterious, almost gothic athmosphere, emphasizing contrasts (the flower garden/the hideous murder), and is a mini horror movie in itself. And the melody and the singing are rather sweet and lovely, with those smooth Hawaiian guitars… Creepy ! A sort of moral story : don't talk to strangers !!! Well, a really ambiguous song, but very interesting anyway.
"Charges of ritual murder was common against Jews. They were first levelled in 12th-century England, and occurred throughout Europe as late as the 1880s. Jews were said to kill Christian children, often before Easter, for ritual purposes. These fabrications, known as the Blood Libel, made a cult of the supposed victims and was an excuse for persecution which took a toll of thousands of Jewish lives over many centuries."
You can't talk about the origins of pop music, of country music, of the blues, without mentioning folk songs from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. I owe them (at least) a week.
So I'll try to post folk songs this week (starting from today), hopefully everyday, with a few historical comments.
First song is "The Coo-coo Bird", first recorded by old time banjo player Clarence Ashley in 1929. The song comes from England or Ireland (no one really knows). Ashley sings it his own way, making it sound very Appalachian with his unique 5-string banjo tuning.
You can read about the story of that song on Ashley's website. I forst intended to post the original version, but that one, with Doc Watson on the guitar, recorded in 1961, is indeed way better.
I love lists. I make a lot of lists with my friends at Acclaimedmusic.net, a site who compiles every "best-of " list ever published by critics in books, sites or newspapers. Recently I found at the library a French book called Great Black Music : un parcours en 110 albums essentiels. (Great Black Music : A Journey in 110 essential albums) by Philippe Robert, a French critic and writer working for various great magazines (Les Inrockuptibles, Vibrations, Jazz Magazine).
This list is interesting but the title can be misleading : it is not an anthology of Afro American music in general, but of “conscious” black music. That explains the omissions : very few blues. The blues wasn’t a protest music, at least in a direct way, the singers being to afraid of retaliation.
Everything that is suspected of being too “whitey-oriented” is left aside. So no black rockers from the ‘50s (Chuck, Fats et al), few Motown artists from the ‘60s. No more than one album per artist, which broadens the range but also means hard choices (like Stevie W). These considerations aside, it is an interesting list, quite personal, not caring much about objectivity, and strongly relying on ‘70s soul and jazz. Very few rap, or old-school and avant garde stuff. For the soul and jazz lover, it is a gold mine. Here are 2 links to the list :
Now, like in every list, there are things we would have loved to find but that have been omitted. The author himself acknowledges that, as he added an appendix with even more albums than in the original list !!
The next song is from the first artist/album in my top 200 that Robert failed to include in his list (but I think it's in the appendix).
If you love New Orleans music, you should hear this album if you haven't already.
AND YOU ? What are your favorite Great Black Music albums ? What omissions make you jump and shout ? I'd love to hear from you cause you've been a bit silent these days..
If you're a regular, you probably know I'm both fond of blues and Africa.
But I've always felt a little uneasy about conecting them, especially after seeing Feels Like Going Home, the Martin Scorsese documentary that links the blues to West African contemporary musicians like Ali Farka Touré. I found it really oversimplifying. So I was really happy to find this wonderful interview of Gerhard Kubik on Afropop Worldwide.
You have to listen to the audio interview as well (that was a pleasure to me, because the interviewer is French and the interwiewed Austrian, so I could understand their accents very easily !!) because you can hear the music.
Pr. Kubik, a music ethnologist from the University of Vienna wrote a book on the subject, which is one of the only scientific studies about African influences on American music.
First thing in this interview, he rejects the concept of "roots" :
As a scientific term, “roots” was tenuous. It is a concept not best suited for historically oriented studies. In African and African-American history as elsewhere in the world we have to operate from sources: written sources, oral sources, recorded sources, if possible, archaeological sources. Where there are no sources, there can be no safe conclusions. “Roots” is too vague to be used beyond casual statements that such and such tradition is based on something, somewhere. For example all the talk about roots of the blues in Mali is just enough to satisfy the public’s need for wild imagination. But we want to know which traditions, by whom in Mali or elsewhere, and in which time period—late 18th century?—were relevant as a background for the rise of blues in the US a century later. Popular formulations such as “From Mali to Mississippi” are anathema to historical studies. The roots concept also has an ideological undertone. It implies that you can study at one culture without the light of history, while the other cultures is just “roots” to the former, a repository of stagnant, centuries old tradition. The concept insinuates that one continent is a provider of musical raw material to be processed somewhere else. Now to us in Africa, this is not acceptable. We are not roots to anyone.
You'll notice that he spent so much time in the field in Africa that he refers to the continent as "us".
Summing the whole interview is impossible (the audio file lasts one hour), but here are a few decisive points that I picked :
Using a "trait by trait" comparison between various forms of blues and field recordings he made in every part of Africa, Kubik eventually drew a map of blues sources in Africa. The darkest zone is the "core area for the provenance of the rural blues" and covers the best part of the Savanah belt (first legend) : Southeastern Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Nigeria and Cameroon. Some musical styles there were influenced by Islamic and Mediterranean culture.
Then you have areas showing more blues traits (second legend, in grey), and areas where asymetric timeline patterns are prominent (Guinea Coast and Central Africa), a trait absent from the blues, but present in Brazil for instance (third legend, in light grey). The two remaining legends demarcate areas where specific instruments (slider techniques and mouth harps) are used.
On the other hand, "Delta blues has processed a stronger shot of traits from the West African savanna and sahel zone than other blues styles".
What are those traits ? Declamatory singing, wavy, ornemental intonation and pentatonic tonal systems (e. g., the famous "blue notes" that were absent from European traditions).
In the audio interview, Kubik plays successively a song by Big Joe Williams and a recording of a single-stringed fiddle player in northern Cameroon, and the result is quite amazing. I don't own the latter (go hear the audio interview for that), but just check the Big Joe Williams tune : it really sounds African.
Well, what's the reason for that overlap ? Let me quote Gerhard Kubik :
One explanation would be that African Americans in the Mississippi Delta experienced greater social isolation and deprivation (than in other Americans areas). Segregation was more rigorous than elsewhere. In such a situation, people anywhere in the world tend to create and establish an alternative culture, as different as possible from that of their oppressors. The memory of Islamic values attached to an Arabic Islamized savanna style cluster, probably transmitted within just a few families, would have been eligible to fulfill such a function, and it took over in at least one genre, blues singing and blues guitar.
So, to come back to the Ali Farka Touré subject, the expression "from Mississippi to Mali" is not so wrong, but it is a 2-way link. Let us not forget that at the beginning of his career in France he became a John Lee Hooker fan and then integrated elements of American blues in his own style. All across Africa, in the late 20th century, young musicians took from American and European music : in Congo, from Cuban son and rumba; in West Africa, some singers were influenced by French chanson, in Nigeria and Ghana High Life took from Calypso, etc… So all that marketing thing about Farka Touré being the source, the roots, is nonsense. Of course there were connections between his original culture, his individual style and the blues. That's why his music is so beautiful
Here's another bluesman who sounds very African : Louisiana ex-convict Robert Pete Williams.
Nest post in blues saga will be about another underrated influence of the blues : Native Americans
Sources for this post : thanks to Afropop Worldwide. The map was taken from Kubik's book Africa And The Blues, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
