space echo
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Yer Blues, My Blues
I was watching The Blues Brothers on TV the other night, and I had a minor epiphany about my own obsession with the broad category I would call "black music" - blues, soul, jazz, reggae, hip-hop and R&B. I realized that it all goes back to the blues for me. I remember seeing The Blues Brothers for the first time when I was about 12, and really enjoying the soundtrack, which inspired me to go out and pick up "The Blues Vol. 1" on Chess Records, a compilation featuring John Lee Hooker, BB King, Howlin' Wolf, and many others. John Lee Hooker's outfit in TBB was more than a little inspiration for my fashion sense. But this wasn't my first exposure to the blues, or black music - in fact I already owned a 12" copy of "Rapper's Delight" by that time.
As a little kid, my dad played guitar and sang - mainly blues songs that he had picked up from white country artists like Hank Williams, Doc Watson, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. "Lovesick Blues," "Got a Feeling Called the Blues," "Mississippi Delta Blues" - the term "blues" so infused these songs that it made a big impression on me.
My mom was a Beatles fanatic, she had even met them while working for their fan club as a teenager. As a result, we listened to a lot of Beatles records - some of my earliest memories include listening to the White Album, which includes "Yer Blues" and a number of other blues-structured songs (Birthday, Why Don't We Do It In The Road, Revolution 1 and Rocky Raccoon). The huge influence of the blues on the Beatles burned its structure into my brain, as it must have with countless other young listeners. (As an interesting side note, my favorite song on the album was "Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da", the Beatles' take on reggae.)
Led Zeppelin was a favorite of mine as a teenager, and they borrowed liberally (maybe too liberally) from the blues canon. I remember tracking down Robert Johnson's recordings after realizing that he had written the lyrics claimed by Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. A whiter band you're not likely to find, but they knew where to find good source material. And it's not far from Zep to Jimi Hendrix, a blues master and innovator. British Invasion bands like The Who, The Stones, and Cream re-injected the blues into mainstream (white) American culture.
My introduction to Jazz? Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue." My first favorite Dylan song? "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Blues DNA was so pervasive in white music that it provides a link for white kids to follow - and follow it I did, to Schooly D, Funkadelic, Herbie Hancock, Lee "Scratch" Perry, James Brown, Al Green, EPMD, Curtis Mayfield, Derrick May, The Neptunes... the list goes on and on. Had it not been for the viral nature of blues music, I and countless others might never have enjoyed some of the greatest music ever made.
Feel like getting the blues? Here's some good entry points:
The Blues Foundation
Blues Wiki
Blues Brothers soundtrack listing
The Blues Vol. 1
