Blues Passion
For many years, the blues of the Mississippi Delta were all but forgotten. With the combination of cross over or urbanized performances and scholarly interest, the blues have experienced a resurgence. Ted Gioia's new book "Delta Blues: the Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters who Revolutionized American Music" (2008) is the most recent work which carefully studies the Delta blues tradition Gioia is a performer and a scholar who began with an interest in jazz. As a young jazz musician, Gioia tells the reader that he thought that he understood the nature of the blues in terms of harmony, rhythm, and chord patterns. Only as a result of maturity and years of close study did he become aware of the "deeper essence" of the music (page ix). Gioia writes:
"I found myself listening to the same blues music I had heard in my youth with much different ears, and certainly no longer with the glib assurance that I had plumbed its depths. On the contrary, the music now seemed multilayered, otherworldly, elusive. I sensed a richness to these songs, especially the older blues from the Delta tradition, that I had missed before." (p. x)
Throughout the book, Gioia writes about the history of the Delta blues, the performers, and the music with passion and knowledge.
The history of the Delta blues can be divided into two large parts. The first is the traditional blues, performed by artists on the farms, plantations, prisons, juke joints, streets, railroad stations of the Delta itself. Generally traditional blues were performed by one person or sometimes two persons, singing and accompanying himself on guitar or harmonica. This type of traditional blues generally ended with Muddy Waters's recordings on the Stovall Plantation in Mississippi for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress in 1943.
The second period of the Delta blues began when blues musicians migrated from the Delta and moved to Chicago or other cities. When they did so, they generally electrified their guitars and began performing in bands rather than as individuals. Their music became influenced by other musical styles and by commercial considerations. It led to rock and roll and then in turn became heavily influenced by rock. Here again Muddy Waters is the prototypical figure with his move to Chicago shortly after his sessions with Lomax.
In his book, Gioia discusses thoroughly both these forms of the Delta blues and he shows their relationship. But his heart clearly is with the early blues masters. This early music is wild, raw and primitive. In its anguish, simplicity, repeated guitar patterns, and harmonic quirkiness, it brought something to music that was not found elsewhere, either in the classics or in other forms of popular music. The Delta blues was music of outcasts and loners, of untutored musicians who lacking musical training struggled to express what was in them. The bluesmen lived undisciplined lives filled with wandering, alcohol, violence, prisons and Parchman Farm, and lost love. These passions they expressed through music.
Most importantly, many bluesmen were conflicted between what they perceived as their rootless, sinful life in the blues and the force of religion. The Delta blues show a distinctively metaphysical, personal cast. The tension between the life of a vagrant musician and a life devoted to God pervades the music of Son House, Tommy Johnson, Robert Johnson and others. Gioia is at his best when he describes this tension and gives it central place in his treatment of the Delta blues. He describes as well the origins of the music, its recording history, and the biographies of its practitioners. He analyzes the music in a way that lay readers may follow easily. In addition to the musicians that have now become well-known, Gioia describes obscure figures such as blueswomen Geeshie Wiley and the rare Delta woman blues pianist Louise Johnson.
Gioia offers as well a sympathetic portrayal of the Delta blues beginning in the 1940s with its urbanization and increased sophistication. His portrayals of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and their relationship with Leonard Chess and Chess records in Chicago were brought home in the recent movie "Cadillac Records" which I found captured the spirit of this urban transformation of the Delta Blues. Besides Waters and Wolf, Gioia devotes extensive attention to the long careers of John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Gioia's treatment of King is particularly detailed as he portrays King's early days in the Delta, his blues scholarship and knowledge, and the many transformations in his music and in its reception over the years.
Writing of the early Delta blues in particular, Gioia states "This is strange, wonderful music no less peculiar for having achieved lasting appeal and commercial success" (p.5). Gioia's in-depth treatment of traditional Delta blues has inspired me to revisit this great American music. The book includes an excellent bibliography and a list of 100 Delta blues songs for listening and study.
Robin Friedman
