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19 May 05 - 06:53 PM (#1488576) Subject: Review: PREACHING THE DELTA BLUES From: GUEST,.gargoyle Amazing there is still a tiny snippet of the original mission-statement (In an effort to both provide you with Folk and Blues Music resources)
Darn - sure hate to keep bringing this upper thread area back to unimportant issues like the BLUES. The entire article is a true CLASSIC - enjoy it to the MAX.
Sincerely,
Joe - I'm still pleading for that third upper section we could call nigger-heaven
PREACHING THE BLUES: THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA OF MUDDY WATERS
Excerpted from:The Kenyon Review - New Series - Volume XXVII Number 2 Spring 2005. pp 129-147.
BY: Peter Rutkoff and Will Scott
The blues men, Son House, Robert Johnson, and Charlie Patton, who schooled Muddy Waters, formed the circle of the Delta blues. They had been roaming around the Delta for a decade, in fast cars, on slow trains, preaching as they sang the blues.
In a sense Muddy Waters had. During the 1930s Delta blues men had been traveling, scuffling, and playing up and down the region for most of the decade. Making three bucks a night at a fish fry seemed a lot more attractive than picking and chopping cotton.
How long, how long, babe to the surge of a powerful automobile,
I said flash your lights, mama Each image had lent itself to the ecstatic wonder of sex,
Hitch up my pony saddl' up my black mare
And each related to the inner structure of blues music itself. "The devil was in the turn-around," the blues musicians said. The turn-around, present in the blues between verse and chorus allowed musicians to lay their stamp on a song. A variation on a boogie-woogie lick, the turn-around brought a tune back to its beginning, completing the circle, making the blues into a ring.25 The turn-around, where the blues man could "signify" on the entire history of the song, since he had surely taken it in admiration from someone else, lay at both the beginning and the end. In railroad parlance the turn-around, the place where one turned the engine around, completed the metaphor.
When Eddie James House, Jr., Son, took up the bottle-neck, perhaps in 1927, House thought that he had left his deeply religious upbringing behind him. But, like many Delta blues players, his music owed an enormous debt to the church and to spirituals.
So Shine jumped overboard and it was a lady out there. Like ring-games, the "toasts" and verbal rhyme play of the Delta belonged to the Delta's blues culture. Bawdy rhymes and stories, recited by males, part of the cultural ritual of "signifyin'" that reached back to West African trickster folktales that had survived in the new world and maintained themselves in the Delta.
The open-tuned slide guitar style that Muddy Water (he added the 's' later) played allowed him to shape and search for notes and sounds evoked a rich and complex historical development. West African musical influences on the blues, especially from the Niger-Congo region, emphasized intensive polyphony.
Muddy maintained that intricacy through the introduction, using the slide to swoop up and down the neck, "worrying" the notes, intensifying the rhythm, and playing the melody first in the bass and then the treble registers in anticipation of the lryics. Muddy's layering of the melodic, harmonic, and the rhythmic created a moving spiritual and emotional feeling.
Robert Johnson took House's "Preachin' the Blues" and turned it inside out. House sang "Preachin' the Blues" as an emotionally intense, highly pitched and strained spiritual with hints of work-song exhales. He accompanied the song with his trademark bottle-neck style and simple turn-around of two thumb-snapped notes followed by three upward picks.
Johnson's turn-around, a set of call and response riffs picked on bass and treble strings as he simultaneously maintained the driving rhythm with his thumb, provided evidence of the West African trickster-derived "devil at the crossroad" explanation of his new-found musical prowess.
Yet, Johnson's genius, rather than his "devil's" persona, derived from his originality. Staying entirely within the Mississippi blues tradition, Johnson nonetheless emerged as its great innovator. Sometime in 1933, coincident with his crossroads/trickster conversion Johnson may have adapted the boogie-woogie blues piano style into a new open-tuning guitar style.
AVAILABLE (for awhile) |
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19 May 05 - 10:04 PM (#1488749) Subject: RE: Review: PREACHING THE DELTA BLUES From: Stewie Garg, thanks for posting this link - an interesting article indeed. --Stewie. |
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20 May 05 - 01:49 AM (#1488862) Subject: RE: Review: PREACHING THE DELTA BLUES From: alanabit I enjoyed that article too. I think it's time I gave those Robert Johnson CDs a spin again. |
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20 May 05 - 04:40 AM (#1488941) Subject: RE: Review: PREACHING THE DELTA BLUES From: Brian Hoskin Thanks for that! |