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[Dave Van Ronk] WHAT do
you picture when you hear the word "blues"? A lone vagabond
walking a dusty road in the Mississippi Delta? A gruff giant shouting
over the noise of a Chicago bar? An outlaw guitar hero squeezing fiery
notes from his Stratocaster?
Today,
most people think of blues as the ultimate roots music, the rawest,
earthiest sound America has produced. A typical sketch of its evolution
runs from the Delta growl of Charlie Patton through Robert Johnson to
the electric South Side bands of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and eventually
to the Rolling Stones and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
This sketch makes perfect sense if you follow it backward. The rock
scene has always equated primitivism with authenticity, and it is logical
that it would latch onto the grittiest, least polished blues artists
as its forebears. Likewise, people in search of an African-American
folk heritage are naturally drawn to the music's most archaic-sounding
performers.
But before blues was marketed as roots or folk music, it was a vibrant
black pop style, and its original audience had very different standards
from those of most modern-day fans. While today's blues lovers look
back to rural Mississippi, black Americans at the height of the blues
era were looking forward to Harlem and "sweet home Chicago."
This split is perfectly exemplified by the two audiences' reactions
to Leroy Carr.
Carr was the most influential male blues singer and songwriter of the
first half of the 20th century, but he was nothing like the current
stereotype of an early bluesman. An understated pianist with a gentle,
expressive voice, he was known for his natty suits and lived most of
his life in Indianapolis. His first record, "How Long — How
Long Blues," in 1928, had an effect as revolutionary as Bing Crosby's
pop crooning, and for similar reasons. Previous blues stars, whether
vaudevillians like Bessie Smith or street singers like Blind Lemon Jefferson,
had needed huge voices to project their music, but with the help of
new microphone and recording technologies, Carr sounded like a cool
city dude carrying on a conversation with a few close friends.
Carr's lyrics were carefully written, blending soulful poetry with
wry humor, and his music had a light, lilting swing that could shift
in a moment to a driving boogie. Rather than Smith's vaudeville jazz
combos or Jefferson's idiosyncratic country picking, Carr sang over
the solid beat of his piano and the biting guitar of his constant partner
Francis (Scrapper) Blackwell. The outcome was a hip, urban club style
that signaled a new era in popular music.
Given his importance, it was logical that when Columbia records had
a surprise success in the early 1960's with Robert Johnson's "King
of the Delta Blues Singers," the label followed up with a Carr
compilation. It was titled "Blues Before Sunrise," after one
of Carr's most popular songs, a haunting ballad that had been covered
by John Lee Hooker, Elmore James and Ray Charles.
But the folk and rock fans who hailed Johnson as a genius showed no
interest in the Carr album. His music was dismissed as an overly smooth
variant of Johnson's fiercer, more rural style, as if he were Pat Boone
to Johnson's Elvis Presley. Never mind that Carr's first records predated
Johnson's first recordings by eight years, or that Johnson's work showed
an immense debt to Carr's innovations. Carr's suave, laidback style
was not what the new audience wanted in a bluesman.
Now Columbia Legacy has come out with a two-disc Carr set — the
first major-label release of his work since the 1960's — and the
title suggests that the company has learned its lesson. Rather than
evoking a lonely sunrise, it quotes a rough and ungrammatical line from
the obscure "Hustler's Blues": "Whiskey Is My Habit,
Good Women Is All I Crave." This line was not original to Carr
(it comes from Lucille Bogan's "Whiskey Cravin' Blues"), but
it conjures up the right image: a hard-living precursor to Keith Richards.
Carr died of an alcohol-related illness shortly after his 30th
birthday, so the title makes some biographical sense--but what made him a key figure in American music was his records,
not his lifestyle. His followers dominated blues for more than 20 years
and affected every aspect of the African-American pop scene. In Chicago,
studios filled up with piano-guitar duos and Carr clones like Bumble
Bee Slim and Bill Gaither (billed as "Leroy's Buddy"). In
Mississippi, Muddy Waters recalled "How Long" as the first
song he ever learned. In Kansas City, Count Basie recorded Carr's hits
as piano solos. On the West Coast, T-Bone Walker and Charles Brown made
Carr's smooth urbanity the hallmark of the L.A. style. In New York,
vocal groups from the Ink Spots to the Dominoes harmonized on Carr compositions.
Nat King Cole's first hit, "That Ain't Right," was a Carr-inflected
blues, and the R & B historian Arnold Shaw traced soul ballad singing
from Carr through Dinah Washington and Sam Cooke to Otis Redding and
Jerry Butler.
These artists were trendsetting stars, not obscure geniuses playing
in back-country juke joints, and they were regarded in their communities
as symbols of success. In his heyday as a R & B hitmaker, Muddy
Waters wore gorgeous suits, combed his hair in a high pompadour and
appeared on all-star bills alongside the Clovers and the Harptones.
It was only in his later years, when he was playing for largely white
audiences that considered him a carrier of the deepest Delta blues tradition,
that he came onstage in street clothes.
It is no coincidence that the audience that hailed both Carr and Waters
as up-to-date stars was overwhelmingly black, while the one that rejected
Carr as over-sophisticated and reinvented Waters as a link to Robert
Johnson was overwhelmingly white. Very few African-Americans have ever
been nostalgic for Depression-era Mississippi, while the image of the
Devil-haunted Delta bluesman has been a romantic touchstone for everyone
from the Stones to the White Stripes.
Maybe the time has come, though, when blues can escape its stereotyped
mythology and Carr can assume his rightful place. The subtle eloquence
of lyrics like "When the Sun Goes Down" helped bring a new
simplicity and directness to pop writing. The lonesome passion of Carr's
voice on songs like "Midnight Hour Blues" set the stage for
Ray Charles. As for the roots of rock 'n' roll, the pounding piano and
sharp guitar lines of "Sloppy Drunk" and "It's Too Short"
sound like direct antecedents of Ike Turner and Chuck Berry.
Of course, some listeners will always prefer solo guitar to piano combos,
and Charlie Patton's hoarse country shout to Carr's more subtle phrasing
— just as some prefer B. B. King to Little Richard, the Stones
to the Beatles or Missy Elliott to Norah Jones. But those are matters
of taste, not authenticity. In its heyday, blues was not an old-fashioned
folk style. Like rap, it had deep traditional roots but also a dynamic,
modern sensibility that revolutionized American music. And Leroy Carr
led that revolution, smooth voice, piano, fine suits and all.
©2004 Elijah Wald (originally published in
The New York Times)
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