LITMIR.BIZ

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everything Handy tells us has a specific significance. First of all, he notes the guitarist’s obvious signs of destitution. The travelling bluesman was the poet and entertainer of an underclass within the underclass. Delta people were considered hicks and peasants by the more educated and sophisticated blacks who had established themselves in the cities; and within those rural communities the bluesman was, in turn, frowned upon by the upwardly mobile. Specifically, he was hated and despised by the black churches, who believed his trade to be the Devil’s Music, a living reminder of all that evil African stuff they were supposed to have left behind as part of their painful induction into the social mainstream. With his workshy ways, his never-ending perambulations, his bawdy, earthy songs and his fatal attraction to normally respectable women, he was an outlaw, a virtual pariah. Even when a bluesman was popular and successful, with a smart suit on his back, rings on his fingers and a fistful of money to buy a round of drinks, rather than poverty-stricken and ragged like Handy’s avatar, he was still a virtual out law among the devout and respectable. Maybe our faceless, nameless vagrant was a professional musician down on his luck, waiting for transport to somewhere offering richer pickings to an itinerant entertainer; or maybe he was just a working man on his way to where the work was – to a levee camp, a construction project, or simply day labour on a plantation or farm – whiling away the time with a meditation on his circumstances.

      Then Handy describes the guitarist playing slide, fretting his instrument with a knife. Since he cites the ‘Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars’, we can presume that in this particular case the guitar was played flat on the lap, rather than in the conventional guitarists’ position used by those who played with a glass bottleneck, or a short length of metal tube, on one left-hand finger. Nevertheless, while the technique of slide or bottleneck guitar may owe something to the touring Hawaiian ensembles so popular in the late 1880s and ’90s, the sub stance and content was an unmistakable African retention. One traditional practice which predated the cheap mass-produced mail-order guitar – and in fact survived well into the mid-twentieth century among those for whom even an instrument costing a buck eighty-nine was an inaccessible extravagance – was the trick of nailing a length of wire to a barn wall and using a piece of glass or metal to change the pitch. Known as a ‘diddley-bow’, such contrivances provided a first experience of plucked-string instruments for many a wannabe guitarist, including the young John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Under the influence of the slide or the hand-bent string, the rigid, tempered European scale melted to reveal all the hidden places between the notes: the precise, chiming instrument giving forth a liquid African cry.

      If we were doing this as a TV movie, or if we had any other motive to milk this event for spuriously augmented dramatic irony, we could cheat by replacing that nameless guitarist with someone with mythic resonance of his own. Charley Patton, the Father of Delta Blues his own self, for instance; or a still more enigmatic figure, like the mysterious, unrecorded Henry Sloan, the bard of Dockery’s Plantation, from whom Patton had learned; or even the sinister Ike Zinneman, who taught Robert Johnson and who, according to Robert Palmer, claimed to have learned to play the blues by visiting graveyards at midnight. If we wanted to be really portentous in a Movie-of-the-Week sort of way, we could go the whole hog and speculate that it might have been Hooker’s stepfather, Will Moore himself.

      Or maybe it was just some ordinary guy who happened to play a bit of guitar, some working stiff eking out his survival on the road, someone completely unknown outside of his own community, one forgotten drifter amongst many. Whoever he was, whatever he happened to be doing in that particular station on that particular night, wherever he was going, whatever his story had been, whatever fate finally overtook him along those highways and railroads on those dark spectral Mississippi nights, he stumbled into history that night and never knew it. What Handy heard him playing, right there in the station, was undoubtedly among the first Delta blues, a music that anyone who travelled extensively through the black Delta would end up hearing sooner or later. This was the earliest stirring of one of the most profoundly influential movements in all of the popular culture of the twentieth century, but at that time the sound was still sufficiently localized for Handy to find it strange and unfamiliar. And if this music sounded weird to W.C. Handy, an urban black man and an experienced, gifted professional musician, just imagine what the average turn-of-the-century white person would have made of it.

      Handy’s observation that the singer repeated his one line – ‘Goin’ to where the Southern cross the Dog’ – three times without variation, slides yet another piece of the jigsaw into place. The ‘classic’ three-line blues-verse template, the norm from the mid-’20s to the present day, has an A-A-B structure: statement, restatement and rhymed response. The verse quoted here, which simply goes A-A-A, exemplifies a contemporary form which coexisted with the A-A-B pattern as the music was teething, but by the mid-’20s, when the first rural blues records were made, it was already an archaism which grew progressively rarer with each passing year. The content of the line was a specific local reference to the intersection between two railroad lines: the Southern, and the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley (the latter popularly known as ‘the Yellow Dog’) which met at Moorehead, in Sunflower County. Maybe our man was headed in that direction to work, maybe to play music, maybe to visit family, maybe to see a woman, maybe just to be on the move. Or possibly he was simply whiling away the time, thinking back to some other time that he’d travelled there, reminiscing to himself about what he’d found or possibly about what had found him.

      Crucially, Handy locates this encounter in Tutwiler; just over the Coahoma county line, in the north-eastern corner of Tallahatchee County. Tutwiler is where Highway 49, ten or so miles south-west of Clarksdale, intersects with Highway 3. It’s roughly five miles south-east of Vance.

      Let me propose a working definition of the term ‘folk artist’. Though it applies equally to artists working in any medium you care to name, I’m primarily concerned with the ‘folk singer’: one who draws upon the traditional arts of their community, and uses their mastery of those arts in order to tell the story of their ‘clan’, ‘kith’ and ‘family’; their ‘house’, ‘kindred’, ‘lineage’ and their ‘race’; ultimately, the tale of their ‘people’, and their ‘nation’. In contrast, the bluesman’s vision is, almost by definition, personal. His value to his community – and to the world – is directly contained in his ability to reflect, in a manner uniquely and distinctively and unmistakably his own, his life in particular and, through that personal story, the life of the community in general. The bluesman makes himself the focus of his work; by placing himself at the centre of his art, he is taking possession of his life. He is asserting his right to interpret his own existence, to create his own definition of his own identity; first in his own eyes, in the eyes of his community, in those of the world at large and, finally, in the eyes of God.

      And whether that life is easy or hard, happy or sad, comic or tragic, what the bluesman tells us is, first and foremost, that his life is his, and that his self is intact. If the folk-singer tells us ‘this is how we lived’, and the bluesman’s message is ‘this is how it is for me’, then what could John Lee Hooker’s music possibly be, other than ‘the real folk blues’?

      4

      FRISCO BLUES

      ‘Whuh-whuh-whuh-where the car at?’

      Anybody who tells you an anecdote about John Lee Hooker as a young man – and Buddy Guy is the current champ, by a very short head indeed, of the Hooker Impressionists’ League – will inevitably end up mimicking his characteristic stutter. Bernard Besman, who recorded Hooker’s early hits in Detroit during the late ’40s and early ’50s, claims to this day that his primary reason for deciding to record the young bluesman in the first place was that he was intrigued by the notion of a man who stuttered when he spoke, but not when he sang. In a puckish spirit of self-parody, Hooker himself employs an exaggerated version of it when telling stories against himself. In 1953, recording a bunch of tunes in Cincinnati for producer/entrepreneur Henry Stone, he improvised ‘Stuttering Blues’, a classic monologue on that very subject wherein he appears, against the background of one of his primal riffs, in the role of a stammering seducer making a determined play for a hot babe even though his passion renders him so shivery that he can barely speak. ‘Oh, when I fuh-fuh-first

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