its a fair question. i wish the answer was simple.

lets put it this way.

yesterday it was Broonzy. he played a simple riff i learned off Lighning Hopkins records when i was young. but suddenly Broonzy plays it differently. different rhythm, different feel to the song, different function in the way the guitar punctuates the song. and done without self conscious self importance. and i am old - and yet i can do no other than try to incorporate this texhnique until i can use it, with all the apparent artlessness of Broonzy.


today - it was something different. somehow i started thinking about a song called Electric Chair blues by blind lemon jefferson. i was moved by the song and recorded it a while back. then out of the blue people started requesting it at my very few folk gigs.

so i thought about the song and i realised there was an ambiguity in the lyrics of the sort analysed by the great English critic William Empson. utterly brilliant. this is what the audience had been reacting to. sheer brilliance.

no one studies this stuff as far as i'm aware. Jim Carroll, whom i respect very much, seems to think my attitude to the blues makes me first cousin to Simon Cowell. and the blues audience in England are just bleeding idiots. if it doesn't come in earsplitting volume - its not the blues.

in other words i feel isolated.