Because <In Memoriam> is kind of a coda to the year past, we might call this the first theme of the new. If you are of the type who makes resolutions at this time of year, it's like Starting Over. Unless, that is, you prefer to look back and claim the past is over. Either way, over it is.
And yes, I know we had a similar theme 5 years back, but time's has changed and so have half of your bloggers here.
And maybe I shouldn't go too far down this path, but .. hey .. if it's over, then judgment day is next.
This song is genrally credited to the legendary Robert Johnson, and Mr Eric Clapton plays a pretty decent rendition of the song. The real story of the song may be more complicated - a song that has been re-made over and over again from what appears to be the original - from a song called <Roll and Tumble Blues> by Hambone Willie Newburn (who?), which was maybe based on a piece called Minglewood Blues (what?).
You're probably familiar with the story of how Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil in return for super-natural guitar skills. And while more recent renditions of this song (Clapton) reference Johnson (and we learn that he may not have been the original source), hereis some rather detailed research into the background of the era - most of which totally de-bunks the common Robert Johnson myth. For what it's worth. Myself, I prefer to live with the myth.
None of which really needs to influence our enjoyment of the selected output here. Over to you....
Well is this the one to finally get me my marching orders? The 'Thanksgiving' theme is the one I generally sit out, it being a holiday I neither partake or understand fully, together with (this theme's) Arlo being someone I know precisely 2 songs about, the restaurant and the 'sickle. Other Arlo's have me stuck after the Good Dinosaur. But then I remembered the penchant for abbreviating names so de rigour your side, you know, J-Lo and, um, I can't think of any more, but, hey, never let evidence get in the way of a good idea. So I give you R-Lo. (Drumroll.) No, not that one.
Robert Lockwood, Jr, was one of the last credible links between the very early days blues of the blues and the appropriation of their legacy by white boys in the 60s, managing to haul back some of the credit, if little of the cash, raked in by these latter-day pillagers. Robert Johnson was the King of the (Delta) Blues, and Lockwood was (almost) his step-son, Johnson living, albeit intermittently, with his mother over a 10 year period, the seminal part of his childhood and early adulthood. What better guitar tutor could he have had, and he spent these years picking up many of the tics and trades of his default stepfather, performing with him and other local luminaries. Indeed, such was the similarities in style that an early nickname was Robert Junior.
During the 30's he plied his trade as a working musician, coming into contact with a who's who of who is who, even if it was before they were. So Elmore James, Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson were all contemporaries with whom he played, until he was able to kick off his own career, in 1941, with a brace of 78rpm discs, which includes the song, 'Black Spider Blues', featured above, before he and Williamson started a long connection with the King Biscuit Time radio show. Cited as an influence on B.B. King, he later played in an early version of his band, before working in the band of harp player extraordinaire, Little Walter, the Coronets, which also included the likes of Willie Dixon and Otis Spann. Quite a c.v.!
In his mid-40s he moved to Cleveland, becoming a well-established local performer and bandleader. with residencies at many a venue that lasted right up to his final years. But it was in his 60s that he made a further notch in the bedstead of blues history, discovering the 12-string guitar, adopting it and using it near exclusively for the final 3 decades of his life, in 2008 winning a posthumous Grammy for his performance with 3 other veterans, 'Honeyboy' Edwards, 'Pinetop' Perkins and 'Mule' Johnson, as the Last of the Great Missisippi Delta Bluesmen, made in 2004. And this a decade or so after he was an endowed with the highest honour in folk and traditional arts bestowed in the U.S., a National Heritage Fellow.
Modern history is full of tales like this, largely often forgotten footnotes. But there are possibly many other than enthusiasts who are familiar with his material. I refer back again to my earlier comments about the late 60s and early 70s blues boom, from the Rolling Stones, Mike Bloomfield and John Mayall, through and via Cream and the Allmans to, ultimately, Led Zeppelin and beyond. There have been a slew of records reinterpreting the music of said bands, often with performances by the individuals who influenced them in the first place. One such was 'Whole Lotta Blues: Songs of Led Zeppelin', which featured Lockwood on both parts of 'Bring It On Home'.
He died, age 91, in 2006. Here's a great short film about him.
This is a good place to start listening, emanating for his time in the 50s a a band leader, but he also appears in just about any compilation of blues greats that you might find.
O, an afterthought, harking back to the intended theme of my imposition, Thanksgiving by way of Arlo, Lockwood was born in the town of Turkey Scratch, Arkansas.
We haven't had a quiz lately, have we? Put on your thinking caps, my little Starmakers, and match the original Delta blues song (circa 1920-1930) with the British/U.S. group (circa 1960-1970) that made real money off it covered it. (And Canned Heat not only recorded the song, they also managed to wrangle the copyright to it as well, shame on them).
1. Matchbox Blues (1927) 2. Stop Breaking Down Blues (1937) 3. Bull Doze Blues (1928) 4. Rising Sun Blues (1933) 5. Crossroad Blues (1936) 6. Statesboro Blues (1928)
A. The Animals (1964) B. Canned Heat (1968) C. The Beatles (1964) D. The Rolling Stones (1972) E. The Allman Brothers (1971) F. Cream (1968)
highlight for answers: 1=C, 2=D, 3=B, 4=A, 5=F, 6=E
If you couldn’t tell, I’m having fun with this week’s theme. There are so many songs to choose from, you can just browse through your favorite artists and find one that fits. I vote for more grammar/song title-related themes.
For further proof that this theme is universal, and even timeless, here’s The King of the Delta Blues singing about one of the many vices that lead to his early departure.
You can’t have a series on the devil without getting into the blues. Satan figures prominently in the original “devil’s music.”
Well-known legend has it that Robert Johnson received his gift of guitar-mastery in exchange for his soul as part of midnight transaction at a crossroads on the Mississippi Delta. Read about the details here.
Now please indulge a personal story:
As a young college student fascinated with roots music, I borrowed the family station wagon and dragged three friends from Ann Arbor down to New Orleans for spring break. Instead of chasing bikinis in Florida like most normal college guys, we toured the great spots of American musical history: The Grand Ole Opry, Preservation Hall, Louisiana bayou country, The Mississippi Delta, Beale Street, Graceland, etc. It was a fun trip.
One of the highlights was our ill-fated attempt to find a suitable crossroads on the Mississippi Delta for purposes of selling our souls to the devil in exchange for musical talent. We didn’t figure Highway 61 would do, considering that by 1987 it was a fairly major thoroughfare. So we went in search of dirt cross roads and ended up getting my dad’s Pontiac Grand Safari stuck in the foot-thick muck of some Mississippi-farmer’s cotton field. (I had no idea how we were going to explain the presence of four bespectacled Midwestern college boys with a stuck station wagon and a guitar.) Luckily, we were able to dredge our way out of the mud before being discovered.
After our muddy experience in the cotton field we decided to try our luck at a Highway 61 rest stop just south of the Tennessee line. Unfortunately, the devil did not make an appearance—despite our tuneless renderings of Cross Roads Blues.
I often come across articles where the writer bemoans that nowadays, there's nothing new and original in music, that everything is a rehash of what came before when there was a regularity of fresh sounds. The new thing has always been there, but what makes it out to the mass media is based on commercial concerns. It's not like there's nothing new and original. Just go down to the small clubs spread around and you'll hear plenty of new sounds. But economic conditions keep these bands down, the average person wants something they've heard before, the safe and familiar. Captain Beefheart said it best about his own music:
"I think nutrition is very important. If you eat bad, you feel bad. If you feel bad, you do bad things. Most of modern rock and roll is a product of guilt. People cop licks off of dead people, like stealing pennies off a dead man's eyes. The movement needs a bowel movement."
"I don't do lullabyes. I'm tired of lullabyes, like The Beatles. I heard *Lullabye of Broadway* when I was a baby, and I still hear it now, and I'm still a baby. We're the only people doing anything significant in modern music. I haven't heard anything else that gets away from mother's heartbeat. All I've heard is a rebelling against parents, and I'm tired of hearing that."
"I don't believe in time, you know, 4/4 and all that stuff. Frank Zappa believes in time and we could never get it together. He writes all his music and gets sentimental about good old rock 'n' roll, but that's appeasement music."
As I wrote in Songwriting: Night Train, music has been building on itself since the beginning of time, musicians have been "borrowing" from one another forever. I refer to it as Open Source Songwriting - first, let's define Open Source Culture, via Wikipedia:
Open source culture is the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content. Examples include collage, found footage film, music, and appropriation art. Open source culture is one in which fixations, works entitled to copyright protection, are made generally available. Participants in the culture can modify those products and redistribute them back into the community or other organizations.
The rise of open-source culture in the 20th century resulted from a growing tension between creative practices that involve appropriation, and therefore require access to content that is often copyrighted, and increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws and policies governing access to copyrighted content. The two main ways in which intellectual property laws became more restrictive in the 20th century were extensions to the term of copyright (particularly in the United States) and penalties, such as those articulated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), placed on attempts to circumvent anti-piracy technologies.
Although artistic appropriation is often permitted under fair use doctrines, the complexity and ambiguity of these doctrines creates an atmosphere of uncertainty among cultural practitioners. Also, the protective actions of copyright owners create what some call a "chilling effect" among cultural practitioners.
One of the best articles of any sort I've read in recent memory comes from Harpers. Here's some key exerts from it, I highly suggest reading the whole thing.
"When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty." The line comes from Don Siegel's 1958 film noir, The Lineup, written by Stirling Silliphant. The film still haunts revival houses, likely thanks to Eli Wallach's blazing portrayal of a sociopathic hit man and to Siegel's long, sturdy auteurist career. Yet what were those words worth — to Siegel, or Silliphant, or their audience — in 1958? And again: what was the line worth when Bob Dylan heard it (presumably in some Greenwich Village repertory cinema), cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into "Absolutely Sweet Marie"? What are they worth now, to the culture at large?
In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled "Country Blues," Waters described how he came to write it. "I made it on about the eighth of October '38," Waters said. "I was fixin' a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing." Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called "Walkin' Blues," asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. "There's been some blues played like that," Waters replied. "This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out — Robert Johnson. He put it out as named 'Walkin' Blues.' I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House." In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he "made it" on a specific date. Then the "passive" explanation: "it come to me just like that." After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that "this song comes from the cotton field."
Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of "open source" culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked. Technology has only multiplied the possibilities; musicians have gained the power to duplicate sounds literally rather than simply approximate them through allusion. In Seventies Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry deconstructed recorded music, using astonishingly primitive pre-digital hardware, creating what they called "versions." The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London. Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.
Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors.
As a novelist, I'm a cork on the ocean of story, a leaf on a windy day. Pretty soon I'll be blown away. For the moment I'm grateful to be making a living, and so must ask that for a limited time (in the Thomas Jefferson sense) you please respect my small, treasured usemonopolies. Don't pirate my editions; do plunder my visions. The name of the game is Give All. You, reader, are welcome to my stories. They were never mine in the first place, but I gave them to you. If you have the inclination to pick them up, take them with my blessing.
I really don't have anything more to add to this, Mr. Lethem expresses my feelings more eloquently than I ever could. With the Net, the Genie is out of the bottle - I don't think it's going to be possible to get him back in.
Star Maker Machine does not accept music submissions from artists or promoters. However, most of the contributors here do accept submissions for our own blogs, listed below. Please visit our blogs, take the time to listen to what we post, and then feel free to contact us if you feel that your music would be a good fit.
