Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Howlin’Wolf performing Killing Floor.
CD Review
Putamayo Presents: American Blues, various artists, Putamayo Word Music, 2003
The blues ain’t nothing but…He, Daddy Fingers (strictly a stage front name, with a no will power Clarence Mark Smith real name needing, desperately needing, cover just like a million other guys trying to reach for the big lights, trying to reach heyday early 1950s Maxwell Street, hell, maybe trying get a record contract, a valued Chess contract, and that first sweet easy credit, no down payment, low monthly payments Cadillac, pink or yellow, with all the trimming and some sweet mama sitting high tit proud in front), had to laugh, laugh out loud sometimes when these white hipsters asked him what the blues were (he, well behind the white bread fad times, having spent the last twenty years mostly in the hidden down South, the chittlin’ circuit down South, from Biloxi to Beaumont, working bowling alleys, barbecue joints (the best places where even if the money was short you had your ribs and beer, a few whisky shots maybe, some young brown skin with lonely eyes woman lookin’ for a high-flying brown skin man in need of a woman’s cooking , or at least a friendly bed for a few nights), an odd juke house now electrified, some back road road-side diner converted for an evening into a house of entertainment, hell even a church basement when the good lord wasn’t looking or was out on an off Saturday night had not noticed that these kids asking that august question were not his old Chi town, New Jack City, ‘Frisco Bay hipsters but mostly fresh-faced kids in guy plaid short shirts and chinos and girl cashmere sweaters and floppy skirts were not hip, not black-hearted, black dressed devil’s music hip. For one thing no hipster, and hell certainly no wanna-be hipster would even pose the question but just dig on the beat, dig on the phantom guitar work as he worked the fret board raw, dig on being one with the note progression. Being, well, beat.).
Plaid and cashmere sweater crowding around some makeshift juke stage, some old corner barroom flop spot or like tonight here on this elegant stage with all the glitter lights at Smokin’ Joe’s Place, Cambridge’s now the home of the blues for all who were interested in the genealogy of such things came around looking, searching for some explanation like it was some lost code recently discovered like that Rosetta Stone they found a while back to figure out what old pharaoh and his kind said (hell, he could have deciphered that easy enough for those interested- work the black bastards to death and if they slack up, whip them, whip them bad, whip them white, and ain’t it always been so). So he told them, plaid guy and cashmere bump sweater girl, told them straight lie, or straight amusing thing, that like his daddy, his real daddy who had passed down the blues to him, and who got it from his daddy, and so on back, hell, maybe back to pharaoh times when those slave needed something to keep them working at a steady death-defying pace, that the blues wasn’t nothing but a good woman on your mind. And if some un-cool, or maybe dope addled wanna-be Chi town hipster, or some white bread all glimmering girl from Forest Hills out for negro kicks, had been naïve enough to ask the question that would have been enough but plaid and cashmere wanted more.
Wanted to know why the three chord progression thing was done this way instead of that, or whether the whole blues thing came from the Georgia Sea Islands (by way of ancient homeland Africa) like they had never heard of Mister’s Mississippi cotton boll plantation, Captain’s lashes, broiling suns, their great grandfathers marching through broken down Vicksburg, about Brother Jim Crow, or about trying to scratch two dollars out of one dollar land. Wanted to know if in Daddy Finger’s exalted opinion Mister Charley Patton was the sweet daddy daddy of the blues, wanted to know if Mister Robert Johnson did in fact sell his soul to the devil out on Highway 61, 51, 49 take a number that 1930 take a number night, wanted to know if Mister Mississippi John Hurt was a sweet daddy of an old man (also“discovered” of late) like he seemed to be down in Newport, wanted to know if black-hearted Mister Muddy really was a man-child with man-child young girl appetites, wanted to know if Mister Howlin’ Wolf ever swallowed that harmonica when he did that heated version they had heard about of How Many More Years (not knowing that Wolf was drunk as a skunk, high shelf whisky not some Sonny Boy’s home brew, when he did that one or that, he Daddy Fingers, had backed Wolf up many a night when Mister Huber Sumlin was in his cups or was on the outs with the big man), wanted to know, laugh, if Mister Woody Guthrie spoke a better talking blues that Mister Leady Belly, or Mister Pete Seeger was truer to the blues tradition that Mister Bob Dylan (like he, Daddy Fingers, spent his time thinking about such things rather than trying to keep body and soul together from one back of the bus Mister James Crow bus station to the next in order to get to some godforsaken hidden juke joint to make a couple of bucks, have some of Sonny Boy’s son’s golden liquor, and maybe catch a stray lonesome Saturday woman without a man, or if with a man, a man without the look of a guy who settled his disputes, his woman disputes, at the sharp end of a knife, wanted to know, wanted to know, wanted to know more than the cold hard fact that, truth or lie, the blues wasn’t nothing but a good girl on your mind. Nothing but having your wanting habits on. But that never was good enough for them, and thus the fool questions. And always, tonight included, the fool Hey Daddy Fingers what are the blues. Okay, baby boy, baby girl, the blues is … And thus this compilation
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