Steve

I agree that there are post-Muddy players who are doing the blues. I mentioned a few of them. But so much of what is called blues these days — as evidenced by some of your choices in the first post on this thread — doesn't qualify in my view. Just like there is a dividing line between country and rock'n'roll, there is a cutoff between blues and the post-R'n'R rock that has its roots in blues. I definitely think there is a point of "innovation" around a style of playing and singing that makes it something else and it would take a helluva lot of convincing to get me to think Jimi Hendrix played blues.

There was a magic in one man with one guitar being able to carry a whole dance or put an audience through an emotional wringer that just gets lost when you get a whole bunch of musicians playing together to do the same thing.

Sure, some of these guys can play guitar and — if they would — sing. But screaming, either vocally or instrumentally, doesn't make me feel THEIR anger as much as it makes me feel mine at having to listen to it. To me blues is about emotion expressed through finesse, not primal scream.

Maybe I'm just coming at this from a little different perspective. I used to listen to WLAC, a Nashville, TN station, back in the '50s when they sold "race records" to the black population of the southern U.S. They played Muddy Waters, Bobby "Blue" Bland, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker and lots of others who were recording in Chicago and New York at the time. I liked that music better than the country and early rocka'n'roll that were standard fare around where I lived, but in about 1958 somebody introduced me to Josh White, Leadbelly and Big Bill Broonzy and I realized that the guys I'd been listening to were not a patch on the old masters — and that was before I heard Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Willie McTell, John Hurt and Mance Lipscomb. In my estimation Hendrix and King couldn't carry most of the old guys' guitar cases.

Oddly enough, most of the better blues players since the old masters have been white, middle-class boys. I just hope some of them are still alive when young black men rediscover the music so the techniques can be passed back to the people who started it all. But I guess we have to wait for rap to run its course and for young blacks to rediscover MUSIC as a way to convey their angst and joy.

cheers,

david