True Blues

When the young Louis Armstrong was asked, "What is jazz?" he gave the famous reply. "If you have to ask, you're never going to understand." While his sentiments no doubt are shared by all creators, certain artistic traditions have evaded critical scrutiny more stubbornly than others. Medieval craft guilds, these esoteric arts are founded upon the master-apprentice relationship, upon the informal, almost accidental, transmission of a tradition from generation to generation.

Traditional rural music, especially, has been passed down without the benefit (or burden) of an intellectual framework. Country people who gathered at picnics, frolics and in honky-tonks managed to enjoy nearly anything: jigs, cakewalks, reels, buck dances, waltzes, blues. They had their heroes, but no super-stars. The reputation of a man like Blind Lemon Jefferson took a lifetime to build, unaided by the power of mass media. Today, our media have brought us to the brink of total cultural, regional homogeneity, and it would seem that the future of American folk music is the worse for it. Folk culture is a funky flower which wilts easily under the harsh glare of critical dogma.

Feel Like Going Home is one man's effort to throw a soft light on the blues tradition. It is a highly personal, non-systematic work by a true believer. Author Peter Guralnick shuns the "definitive history" approach in favor of a semi-autobiographical study of his heroes. He is selling his enthusiasm and his credibility, both of which ring true.

Chapter One presents a thumbnail sketch of the golden years of rock and roll, as viewed by Guralnick while growing up around Boston. It's a few quick steps from Arnie "Woo Woo" Ginsberg to the Club 47 folk revival to Leadbelly to the blues. Guralnick then spends exactly one chapter on the history of the blues, intended primarily for the benefit of the beginner. ("For our purposes I think it is enough to say that the blues came out of Mississippi, sniffed around in Memphis and then settled in Chicago where it is most likely it will peacefully live out the rest of its days.") The bulk of the book consists of fascinating personal glimpses of Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Skip James, Robert Pete Williams, Howling Wolf, Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich. Also included are two chapters dealing with Sam Phillips' Sun Records and the legendary Chess Records, a selected discography, and a bibliography.

Guralnick takes the reader many places: in Chicago, to Muddy Waters' house, to the moribund offices of Chess and to the hospital for a visit with Howling Wolf; to Newport, 1964, for the dramatic recovery of Skip James; to backwoods Louisiana, for "a real country supper" with Robert Pete Williams; and to Memphis, for visits with Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich. Wherever possible, he lets the artist tell his own story. He wastes little time attempting to describe a musician's style, instead concentrating on tracing the man's influences. One begins to sense the intimacy of the circles in which bluesmen travel: young Johnny Shines journeying off with Robert Johnson: Howling Wolf learning to play harp from his brother-in-law Sonny Boy Williamson and later being discovered by Ike Turner; or the list of musicians who've passed through Muddy Waters' band, which includes Walter Horton, Junior Wells, Willie Dixon, James Cotton, Jimmy Rogers, Earl Hooker, Otis Spann and Buddy Guy. The names and anecdotes go on and on. For example, Chess Records was offered the rights to Elvis Presley, but refused it because "we didn't think of ourselves as a hillbilly label at that time."

Feel Like Going Home is suffused with a sad nostalgia which occasionally turns into bitterness. Understandably, Guralnick deplores the neglect suffered by many artists; he is dismayed, too, by the tendency of the American public to devour its most gifted children. In any case, things will never be the same. Whether Chess Records is dead--or indeed, whether the blues are dead--can be debated; but unquestionably, an era has ended.

It was an era of the discovery by white youth of black music. It was an awkward, embarrassed rendezvous--a blind date, really. In discussing a blues festival, Guralnick writes, "(There were) many of the same problems which have plagued every blues 'concert' I have attended since I first saw Lightnin' Hopkins at Harvard twelve years ago: a stiff, unnatural atmosphere, an unbridgeable gulf between performer and audience, and a tendency to treat the blues as a kind of museum piece, to be pored over by scholars, to be admired perhaps but to be stifled at the same time by the press of formal attention."

These problems were the price to be paid for the very cultural isolation which spawned the blues. Guralnick is aware of the paradox of his sentiments; consider this sentence about Robert Pete Williams: "It may perhaps be necessary, then, to look on the prison blues as the product of a unique combination of genius and circumstances which, one would certainly hope, is not about to be repeated." Who wants to pay that kind of dues? The beauty of the blues is certainly born of suffering; but as B.B. King points out, everybody suffers in this life. The blues won't die, they'll just keep changing. And while cultural homogeneity may be fast approaching, we still have a few years of artistic cross-fertilization left. (An excellent example of such collaboration is Freddy King's recent album Getting Ready on Leon Russell's Shelter label.)

However, faith in the future in no way invalidates Guralnick's devotion to one chapter in history. We are indebted to him and the other members of the Boston Blues Society for their efforts to bring us surviving members of a dying breed of bluesmen. They brought Johnny Shines to the Harvard Freshman Union recently, and on Sunday, December 12, they're bringing Hound Dog Taylor to the Winthrop House Dining Room. If you are a blues lover, you will be there. If you are merely flirting with the blues, but a little shy, Feel Like Going Home will point you in the right direction and give you a push.