Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Chicago blues legend Howlin’ Wolf performing the Robert Johnson/Elmore James electric blues classic, Dust My Broom.
CD Review
American Folk Blues Festival ‘80, various artists, Optimism Records, 1982
This review was originally written for the American Folk Blues Festival ’64 CD reflecting a time when some of us first strongly imbibed those finely-hewed big blues night notes when we were looking, well, looking for something to explain that unspeakable hurt, alienation and angst as we travelled from teen-hood to young adult-hood in the early 1960s be-bop night. Of course by the 1980 that folk blues, or any blues, minute was long over for all but aficionados, and the life-long searchers. So rather than write a new screed that would not reflect the spirit of the genre as we were introduced to it I am keeping the old review. Except to say that many of the1960s CD participants were no longer on the scene by then, except those like Hubert Sumlin who had joined Howlin’ Wolf as a kid. So the old shoes are filled here by younger musicians who sat at the feet of the masters and were carrying on the blues on right down to their shoes to a new generation. Hopefully.
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Let’s go by the numbers, the musical year numbers for my generation, the generation of ’68. We all came of musical age, more or less with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee in the mid-1950s when the music was hot, we were naïve (or worst), and just let it go from there. After a musical counter-revolution in the late 1950s where we put up with some awful Bobby Vee/Fabian/Johnny Somebody stuff we stepped right into the hard rock and roll of the Rolling Stones and later groups that based their early work on the blues, the American etched blues. You cannot listen to early Stones with thinking about Little Red Rooster, Baby Don’t Go, Hoochie Goochie Man, and a million other Chess Record classics. Go figure.
Yes, go figure. Go figure that much of early rock and roll was derived from the blues, city blues mainly, Chicago mainly, but those self-same city blues were derived from you guessed it, the old country blues from down in the Delta, the North Carolina Piedmont and the hills and hollows of Appalachia where all the hip Chicago cats (Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Well, etc.,) came from. All of this is just around about way to pay tribute to the roots, or one of the significant roots, of our generational genre. Hell Elvis, Jerry Lee, and you know for sure that Chuck was listening, listening hard, at the juke joint doors when Saturday night turned into Sunday. And then they listened to the sanctified music that was meant to wash away that Devil’s music blues. But never quite did.
But more than that search for roots business it was a question of revivals, here the American Folk Blues Festival of 1980, which was indirectly brought about by our generation of ’68’s search for roots to explain our angst and alienation, including the search for authentic roots music. See once rock and roll hit our mid-1950s brains like an, well like an atomic bomb, we lost sight of where the music had come from. We just wanted to dance, or think we could dance so we could more smoothly be around that certain she (or he for she) without having to learn the fox trot or some old fogey dance. And not have to get sweaty-palms, strange-smelling breathe close and be cool at the same time.
More importantly we didn’t “hit the books” to find out what happened to those who created the music that once was the staple of hip music. It was only after we figured out the social graces stuff and needed to do more than dance cool with that certain she (oh yes, and he for she) that we went root hunting. And guess what? Some of the boys (mainly) were still around in places like Maxwell Street in Chicago or down picking cotton in the Delta or holed up in some skid row hotel just waiting to be “discovered,” or really rediscovered.
That may not be the exact genesis of the folk blues revival when that movement hit high stride in the Newport folk festivals of the early 1960s reintroducing a young audience to the likes of Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House but it will do here. And of course the artists on this CD-the likes of Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, the legendary producer and writer Willie Dixon, and the “max daddy of them all,” Howlin’ Wolf. This is history, maybe not world-shaking, change-the course-of civilization history but a very important slice of the people’s history. Listen up.
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