***Big Bill Broonzy Is In The House

CD Reviews

Big Bill Broonzy, Chicago, 1937-1940 (four CD set), Big Bill Broonzy, ISP Records, 2005

I am in the process of reading and re-reading many of the books of oral history interviews collected by the recently departed Studs Terkel. As part of that process I have read his last work (published in 2007), a memoir of sorts but really a series of connected vignettes, that goes a long way to putting the pieces of Studs’ eclectic life together. A fact that I did not know is that Studs’ had radio and television music shows in the Chicago of the 1950’s. On one of those shows he performed with the blues/jazz folk artist under review here, Big Bill Broonzy. That long ago reference was enough for this reviewer to scamper back to give a listen to the melodious voice of one of the best in these traditions. But that begs the question where to start?

That is not merely a rhetorical question here. My first exposure to Big Bill, back in the mists of times, was as a performer on a Sunday night folk program here in Boston. In that format he was presented as a folk singer in the style of a black Pete Seeger, including singing many leftist political songs dealing with the pressing questions of race and class. Later I found some more jazzy works by him and some more raucous material in the old country blues tradition. So I hope you can see my dilemma.

The hard fact is that certain musicians, certain very talented musicians, can work more than one milieu or can transform themselves (for commercial or other reasons) into more than one genre. Moreover, in Big Bill’s case, the confluence of folk, blues and jazz at some points is fairly close. That surely is the case here on this CD compilation. So give a listen to that voice, that guitar and those wonderful songs. I might add that, although it seemed to be a given at the time, some of Big Bill lyrics are on point on racial segregation and other social issues. Think of the songs like “Brown, Black and White” or his version of “This Train” (that whipsaws Jim Crow very nicely). That is the real connection with old Studs, that is for sure.


Do That Guitar Rag 1928-1935, Big Bill Broonzy, Yazoo, 1991

The hard fact is that certain musicians, certain very talented musicians, can work more than one milieu or can transform themselves (for commercial or other reasons) into more than one genre. Moreover, in Big Bill's case, the confluence of folk, blues and jazz at some points is fairly close. That surely is the case here on this CD compilation. So give a listen to that voice, that guitar and those wonderful songs. At this time Big Bill was influenced by (and in turn influenced) the country blues mania then sweeping the black enclaves of the South (and not just those enclaves either- think about Jimmy Rodgers) and the songs here reflect that origin. What's good? "Guitar Rag", of course. "Down in the Basement" and "Bull Cow Blues" deserve a listen but for my money "Operation Blues" is tops here.

Added note: I "forgot" to add that on many of these tracks Big Bill has company. On some tracks that company is none other than the legendary Tom Dorsey (who also played behind Blind Willie McTell and many others in those days before going on to a gospel music career). On other tracks, in addition to Dorsey, the very, very bluesy voice of Jane Lucas is heard. Listen to "Leave My Man Alone". Nice, indeed.

***Remember "Studs" Terkel- Pro- Working Class Partisan Journalist

Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page.

Commentary

Strangely, as I found out about the death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in Americaand elsewhere, for review in this space. A little comment is in order here for now. The obvious one is that many of the icons of my youth are now passing the scene. Saul Bellows, Arthur Miller, Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, Utah Phillips to name a few. Terkel was certainly one of them not for his rather bland old New Deal political perspective, as much as a working class partisan as he might have been, but for his reportage about ordinary working people. These are our people. He heard the particular musical cadence of their lives and wrote with some verve on the subject. Here I post an obituary from The Boston Globe for November 1, 2008. I will have much more to say later when I review his books.

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Studs Terkel - the Pulitzer Prize-winning oral historian and radio host who heard America talking and presented an aural landscape of its democratic vistas as lively, expansive, and often as dark as Walt Whitman's - died in Chicago yesterday. He was 96.

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His son, Dan, issued a statement saying Mr. Terkel died at home, the Associated Press reported.

Mr. Terkel, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, "is more than a writer; he is a national resource." The psychologist Robert Coles hailed him as "our leading student of American variousness as it gets embodied in human particularity."

Mr. Terkel's interviews with a wide range of Americans on such topics as the Great Depression ("Hard Times," 1970), jobs ("Working," 1974), and World War II ("The Good War," 1984, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction) helped establish oral history as a popular and enduring genre.

Yet the designation "oral historian" never sat well with Mr. Terkel. "It's too much kind of a grandiose term," he explained, "I'm uncomfortable wearing it. My books aren't histories; they're memory books."

Mr. Terkel preferred a more companionable title for himself: raconteur. A raconteur, he once said, "is a teller of stories for public entertainment. I like that; it's a good description of what I am, I guess."

Those stories were told on the air, as well as in print. For more than a half-century, Mr. Terkel was a fixture in Chicago broadcasting. His interview program - originally known as "Studs Terkel Almanac" and then "The Studs Terkel Show" - ran from 1952 to 1997.

When Mr. Terkel retired from broadcasting, he became distinguished scholar in residence at the Chicago Historical Society. The society is a repository for some 5,000 hours of tapes from Mr. Terkel's radio shows and another 2,000 hours of taped interviews done for his books. Several hundred hours are available at www.studsterkel.org.

Mr. Terkel liked to joke about how important the tape recorder had been to his career. "Do I become most alive and imaginative when I press down the ON lever of my mute companion? I have a theory. I am a neo-Cartesian: I tape; therefore I am."

Despite this identification with his tape recorder (or perhaps because of it), Mr. Terkel often referred to the device as "the goddamn thing." Such dismissiveness was understandable. Among the interview subjects Mr. Terkel inadvertently erased or failed to record were actor Michael Redgrave, theater director Peter Hall, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, and actor and comedian Jacques Tati.

"I don't know how a tape recorder works," Mr. Terkel once confessed.

Although audio technician never appeared on Mr. Terkel's resume, he did not lack for job titles. In addition to author and radio host, Mr. Terkel's jobs included actor, playwright, disc jockey, and journalist. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, whose first performances for predominantly white audiences were arranged by Mr. Terkel, told him he should have been a preacher.

"The way I look at it," he said of his interviewing, "it's like being a gold prospector. You find this precious metal in people when you least expect it."

Mr. Terkel, whose first book was "Giants of Jazz" (1956), an introduction to the music for young readers, likened his interviewing to a jazz soloist's improvising: "There aren't any rules. You do it your own way. You experiment. You try this, you try that. . . . Stay loose, stay flexible."

Along with looseness and flexibility, Mr. Terkel had another piece of advice: "The first thing I'd say to any interviewer is . . . Listen. It's the second thing I say, too, and the third, and the fourth. Listen . . . listen . . . listen. And if you do, people will talk. They'll always talk."

Mr. Terkel was being somewhat disingenuous. Much of that willingness to talk was special to him. He was the least intimidating of interviewers, with a famously warm and empathetic manner. As Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko said, "I could never imagine someone replying 'no comment' to Studs."

Such friendliness toward his subjects led to the criticism most frequently leveled against Mr. Terkel's books, their tendency to sentimentalize people and simplify complex issues.

Admirers as well as critics saw in that tendency the influence of Mr. Terkel's politics, which were very much of the left. (Blacklisted during the 1950s, Mr. Terkel was proud of having a 503-page FBI file.) Certainly, his populist methodology reflected his radical egalitarianism. "My turf has been the arena of unofficial truth," he liked to say.

Mr. Terkel's books include the words of the unknown as well as famous, poor as well as rich, inarticulate as well as eloquent: a class-blind democracy of the tongue.

"I'm looking for the uniqueness in each person," he said. "What was it like to be a certain person then? What's it like to be a certain person now? That's what I'm trying to capture."

Mr. Terkel's own uniqueness was never in doubt. A friendly biographer once spoke of his "orotund personality."

He cut a colorful figure: garrulous, exuberant, a character every bit as distinctive as the honeyed gargle that was his voice. Working into his 90s, Mr. Terkel seemed inexhaustible and inexhaustibly interested.

"Curiosity never killed this cat - that's what I'd like as my epitaph," he once said. "It's what gave me life; the older I got the more curious I became."

Part of Mr. Terkel's legend grew from his association with Chicago. Equally uncomfortable with the elitist East and the laid-back West, he personified the open, muscular ethos of the urban heartland. Appropriately enough, his best friend was another quintessential Chicago writer, the novelist Nelson Algren. Indeed, Mr. Terkel was as much a part of Chicago as Wrigley Field or the Loop.

"In a city with a population of 3 million, Studs must know 2,999,999," the writer Calvin Trillin once observed, "and the only reason he doesn't know the other one is they never happened to ride the same bus together."

Even Mr. Terkel's nickname sprang from his hometown: So great was his identification with Studs Lonigan, the hero of James T. Farrell's 1930s trilogy, a classic of Chicago literature, friends took to calling him Studs. By the time he married Ida (Goldberg) Terkel, in 1939, only she was calling him by his given name, Louis, a habit she never abandoned during the six decades of their marriage. She died in 1999.

Louis Terkel was born in New York on May 16, 1912. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia: Samuel Terkel, a tailor, and Anna (Finkel) Terkel, a seamstress. In 1922, the family moved to Chicago and ran a boarding house. Mr. Terkel would often cite the experience of listening to the establishment's highly varied clientele as to how he came to have such an appreciation for others' talk.

After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1932, Mr. Terkel attended its law school. "I'd read about the great Clarence Darrow, the defender of the guilty and the oppressed," he said. "I saw myself as some kind of heroic figure like that."

He quickly learned the law had more to do with torts than crusades. Still, Mr. Terkel earned his degree; but after failing the bar exam he abandoned the profession. He applied to become a fingerprint classifier for the FBI, only to be rejected. Years later, he discovered that one of his professors had warned the bureau, "His appearance was somewhat sloppy, and I considered him to be not the best type of boy."

He went to work for the federal government doing statistical research in Omaha and then Washington, D.C. In Washington, he took up acting, something he continued when he returned to Chicago to join the Federal Writers Project.

Mr. Terkel flourished as an actor on radio, tending to get cast as a gangster, he explained, "because of the low, husky menacing sort of voice I had." During World War II, he briefly served in the Army Air Force.

Back in Chicago, Mr. Terkel became host of a music program called "The Wax Museum." Music was always a great love of Mr. Terkel's, and his tastes were eclectic. A given show might include recordings by Duke Ellington, Lotte Lehmann, Benny Goodman, Mahalia Jackson, and Enrico Caruso.

With the blacklist preventing him from acting, Mr. Terkel took up on-air interviewing. A publisher, Andre Schiffrin, noticed his talent for drawing people out and urged him to do a book.

The idea appealed to Mr. Terkel. "A radio interview, you do it and it's gone," he once put it. "The ephemeralness, that's part of the attraction. But a book is forever."

Mr. Terkel's other books include "Division Street: America" (1967), "Talking to Myself" (1977), "American Dreams: Lost and Found" (1980), "Chicago" (1986), "The Great Divide" (1988), "Race" (1992), "Coming of Age" (1995), "My American Century" (1997), "Spectator" (1999), "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" (2001), "Hope Dies Last" (2003), and "Touch and Go" (2007).

"P.S.: Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening" is scheduled for release this month.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

The Adventures of Augie March- Saul Bellow's Chicago

BOOK REVIEW

The Adventure of Augie March, Saul Bellows, Penquin Press, New York, 2002

These seem to be Chicago days for this reviewer. He has just done some reviews of Chicago’s Chess Records that essentially defined the sound of the electrified blues in what would be old Augie’s old neighborhood. Furthermore, I have reviewed the work of Chicago’s Nelson Algren who takes more than one look at the downside of Chicago life in the raw - what happens to the Augies when they do not break out of that place between the working poor and the lumpen proletariat. And this is a good place to set up the fundamental difference in Bellow’s take on life as compared to Algrens’s. Both describe lives and milieus that can expose the nasty, short and brutish side of life but unlike Algren’s Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden Arm Augie is smart (and clean enough) to make the break.

To that extent Bellow’s Augie, his pals and his town are a celebration of the possibilities that the immigrants to this country believed was possible (and on too many occasions were dashed to pieces). A nice little devise that Bellow uses to highlight this contrast is the tension between the career paths of Augie and his brother. Both face the existential crisis of being left to one’s own devices in the world but the brother survives by creating wealth for himself and forgets, in fact scorns, the idea of intellectual reflections about man’s fate. Poor Augie though wants to know the meaning of life once he has finally broken out of the working class milieu- but travel, a rich lady friend and a whole different set of adventures do not satisfy that hunger to know that meaning.

I would argue, and here I go back to Augie’s days as a Trotskyist, that he might have cut against the grain of that modern day sense of self-isolation in a heartless world if he had organized others to create an alternative society where that alienation from productive labor could have been diminished. But, that is just this reviewer pontificating against Bellow’s facile early literary Trotskyism. Although I read this book initially about 25 years ago the first half still is gripping. The second half meanders a little more than I recall from the first reading. This is an early work though. Bellow gets better as a writer later, if not better in resolving humankind’s existential crisis.

The Hour Of The Wolf

DVD REVIEW

Howlin' Wolf, The London Sessions, 1971

One of my first exposures to the world of Chicago-style blues, after a steady diet of country-style Delta blues, was the Rolling Stones’ version of the Willie Dixon classic Little Red Rooster back in the early 1960’s. I thought that was a song to beat all songs and it had nothing to do its allegorical nature, you know, about sex. What, moreover, capped it for me the fact that it was originally banned in Boston- from the radio airwaves of the times. Naturally that made this teenager want to hear it even more.

All this is by way of saying-yes; the Stones did a great version of that song but if you really want it heard then you must go to the master- Howlin' Wolf. That big gravelly-voiced man who, in still pictures that I have seen of him as well as film seems to be inhaling the microphone, lets it all hang out as he struts his stuff on that number. In Do the Do, Little Red Rooster, Killing Floor and on and on the Wolf sweats, bleeds, sucks up the whiskey, has another one for good measure and gets down on his knees, sometimes literally, to belt out the blues.

In this two-disc set of Howlin' Wolf classics some of those Stones did exactly what I mentioned above-went to the source. Listen in to the dialogue when the Wolf tells these trained, experienced musicians how to do the do here on Little Red Rooster. And they are all ears. That says it all. Moreover, the musical excitement builds as song after song gets you in a true blues mood. This is all about sex, about whiskey, about hardworking weeks to get to fun-loving Saturday nights. Yes, the hour of the Wolf is just before the dawn. Get this masterwork. You will not regret it.