This is Soub's fault!
He offered Sonny Boy Williamson the other day and I have been listening to the Blues ever since! I am so lucky that this was the music that influenced my generation so much. The Beatles, based in Liverpool, had family and friends who worked as stewards and the like on liners taking the rich back and forth across the Atlantic. These brought back Jazz, Blues, and Rock & Roll records which influenced the youth learning to play their music. Picked up from Radio Luxembourg, once upon a time the only way to hear decent pop music, similar types in the rest of the country wanted more! Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and others influenced so many people in Britain while being almost unknown to the major Radio & Tv stations in the US. Their sin was to be black and play music not acceptable to the genteel white folks who controlled America.
Young Americans however were listening also. Up in Duluth Bob Dylan, then known as Zimmerman, was annoying folks with music influenced by what he had heard, a great many others were like him. The arrival of the Beatles allowed them to develop their music as an audience was ready and waiting for them.
Today black Americans (now called Afro-Americans) prefer to ignore Blues music and for reasons no sane person sould possibly understand they find life through Rap! A type of music that misses out the appropriately placed letter 'C.' Shame on them!
How I wish I could play guitar like these guys could. Max found one man who could play like they!
.
8 comments:
There was a band in the 70's CCS with Alex Korner - They had a hit with 'The Band played Boogie' now that was a great song, i loved it.
Great memories
One would hope that the Blues will rise again, stronger and as good as before (I was going to say "better" but perfection can't be bettered)...and Rap is just a passing phase...albeit one that's overstayed its welcome.
Mametz, CCS were no bad indeed. I remember delivering to Alexis one day. he died soon after.....
Lee, Rap is Crap. Blues will die out which is a shame.
Well, if a blind squirrel can find a nut every once in a while, I suppose it is possible for a deaf dimwit to stumble across some really good music, as well. What amazes me the most is how you were able to recognize it! On the hand, it really shouldn't be all that amazing. For miracles still happen.
Jerry, I think you will find that you are the tone deaf one!
I only ever play music!!!!
I think you have overestimated the value of Rap. :)
Max, You may be right.
Yo, Bitches!
No. I give up, I was going to try write a rapper's riposte, but then I realised I just couldn't bring myself to do it. There should have been a huge rappers convention on that per that just got swept away last week....
I find rap offensive.
Whereas the blues? The blues is poetry, it's art, it's the ability of a person to conjure up emotion in another, purely by music.
And it's a hugely varied genre, to say 'I like blues' is not to say 'I like all blues equally', and, I like the blues derived music of Led Zeppelin, of Clapton, of Canned Heat, Captain Beefheart, and so on. I'm interested in what was going on in britain when people like Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Peter Green, Long John Baldry, Eric Burdon....
What drew a generation of british youth to those scratchy crackling blues discs? Did the music come over in the 1940s with the black soldiers and airmen, who built army camps and airbases, and who maintained those gleaming bombers. For the most part, black and white servicemen brought their segregation with them, lived separate lives. The music of the era, though, brought jive and other black music to Britain. I imagine a world of young british kids, listening in fascination to the talk and the rhythms, to the harmonica and guitars played by the first shining black-skinned men they'd ever seen.
Whie britain is no stranger to racism, I've read of many cases where villages preferred the very polite young black soldiers to their brasher, 'we own the world' white counterparts. Pubs who, tired of the fights between enlisted men, barred the whites, but not the blacks. I have no evidence, but I'd like to think this was how young people here first met the blues, through homesick young black servicemen, far from home, and yearning for their roots.
Post a Comment