The problem comes in the 60s when guys like Son House (and to a less successful degree; Skip James) get 'rediscovered' and brought back to play to halls of white musicology students who may as well tap the cage and feed them a banana. They do not dance, they do not bump and grind, they do not whoop in agreement. The party does not get started.

The problem was that people viewed these singers as artists. They thought these people made their music as a piece of art. They assumed the singers' motives were the same as the people making music in that time. The way I see it, they misunderstood. They paid no mind to the motives behind the music they were hearing preferring to assume them to be the same as their own. Of course, Son House wasn't going to say a thing about this. He's not going to cuss the audience for misunderstanding, so he was doubtless happy to proliferate the idea that the correct way to experience this music is in an environment of detached reverence. Hell, I am sure he positively milked the atmosphere and fed it as much as he could as part of what had now become his 'act'. If you'd lived the life he had you'd bite your tongue and you'd rim these stupid whiteys for everything they had too.

Yessir, thank you kindly fur lettun me play ma music sir

I don't doubt the sincerity and understanding of the young men who went out into the Mississippi to find these performers. In John Fahey's case, he only wanted to find Skip James to get a guitar lesson! The problem comes when these performers are put in front of a white, wealthy college or coffee shop audience. Those college kids thought these old guys' power came from an ability to engineer an air of reverence and respect that, in fact, was entirely their own making. In doing so they seem to have overlooked the whole sinlustpartydancingsexdrinkangerdespairjoy thing. Quite an oversight I'd say.

Clapton apparently quit the Yardbirds when they began to veer away from playing only blues music. The irony is, if he'd played the lowly pop music he thought was worthless, he'd have been closer to the real idea of the 'blues' as he'd have been providing a soundtrack for people to have a connection and empathy with and dance to and enjoy themselves. Playing rigid, serious blues to a crowd of kids in the 60s (kids like my Mum who just saw the Yardbirds as a pop band) is like me going out tonight to a country music club in the heart of East Anglia armed with a Casio drum machine and performing 'Rebel Without A Pause' and 'Straight Outta Compton' for the assembled farmers. You cannot re-create something you weren't part of, especially if it's so rooted in the social and economic climate of the times. Seems to me those young cats were too obsessed with this idea of
authenticity - even at the expense of any discernable skill. Even if the performer in question was, by that time, a shrivelled, weakened old man. Not important! The palsied prune in the chair carries a weight of realness that these people were desperate to buy into, or steal a piece of, to make up for something lacking in themselves. So they bring out this 80-year-old cat who can barely fret a string and who sits there and lets out a slow stream of drool onto the National guitar they bought for him, and this is somehow seen as great. Just seeing them is enough, and that stinks. It's making a personality out of someone who only came to the attention of the world outside their community because they weren't personalities, or artists. The performer is seen as authentic even though the reason we know about them - i.e. their skill and ability - is no longer present. The term 'authentic' is defined in some strange way by these recordings made in the 20s and 30s seeming to be real because they have a crackly distant sound, and because of the unintentional mysteries surrounding them. We as the public have been subjected to enough signifiers in TV and film to know this rough quality somehow signifies a gutsy, rough AUTHENTICITY.

So, some big shot records a song on their album with a 1930s guitar in a shack with one microphone, because they think it will make it 'authentic'. That it will give them the same quality as those old recordings that they have been affected by. Because they think the blues singers they love did the same and gave great thought and patience to this serious job in hand, or that their records were made this way through creative choice and conceptual thought rather than being shown into a primitive recording studio (or motel room) and asked to play. Or, because they saw Son House sit down and play to an awestruck room of 60s students they feel that they need to engineer this kind of intimate environment as it is more 'bluesy' and genuine. Bullshit!

Son House didn't write his music to play to a bunch of people stroking their chins and empathising. He wrote it as a soundtrack to his and his friends' lives. Which means it encompasses the bad times and the sorrow and the anger, but it also encompasses partying, drinking, laughing and grabbing hold of someone's ass and dancing yourself silly.

I am a 27-year-old British white middle class man. Well, lower middle class maybe. Whatever. I have no possible way of understanding what living in the Southern States of America was like between the wars for a black man or woman. I have made assumptions in writing this piece, and even that makes me feel presumptuous and stupid. If Skip James walked up to me in Akbars off license in Sneinton I'd leg it. I have no idea what living in that time was like. NO IDEA. I am so thankful that I could fucking cry. I do not believe that suffering on this scale somehow brings out inner strength in people or is in some way 'character building'. It is not. It is brutal, relentless and unimaginable to me.

In 'If You Haven't Any Hay', Skip James sings:

If I go to Louisiana, mama, Lord God, they'll hang me sure

He is talking about being lynched. He is talking about being hanged from a tree by the neck for sport. And bear in mind, this is 1931 in the deep south of America. In Alabama they were still burning churches in 1963. So, maybe I can guess what it was like, thanks to the music, but it's not music made for me, it's made for the people of the time and made only with them in mind. I don't live in a time where right and wrong is so clear-cut and people truly fear judgement from God. Likewise I can't appreciate exactly how exciting cutting loose from those fears must have been. Simply, nothing I can do can make me totally understand this music. It's not worth trying.

***

I have waffled long enough and doubtless contradicted myself in my enthusiasm, so let me conclude before I dig myself a hole I can't get out of.

The reason people should still listen to this music, and the reason that music made with such a small audience in mind (if any audience at all) can still be relevant is that, if there is anything authentic about this music, it's in the display of base emotions within it and how universal those emotions are. Love, loss, regret, fear, lust, pain, joy, enthusiasm, despair... we might not experience these in the same manner as Son House or Skip James, but then they didn't experience it in the same manner as I do now. Or you. It's not comparable. It's just different.

But yet, the two worlds are linked through this music. THAT is its authenticity. It is honest. Not because the sound of a slide guitar on a crackly record conjures up a feeling of nostalgic 'honesty' (bleurrrrgh) in me, but because the subjects these people were singing about are so universal and beautifully dealt with, and the motive for making that music is as close to being simple and unaffected as it possibly can be. Couple this to guitar or piano playing that positively boils over, and you have something wonderful. So fuck authenticity. It doesn't matter.

Concern yourself with how great this music sounds, and be thankful that it survived at all. It's worth listening to because it is amazing. And you don't have to be able to empathise with these peoples pain to love this music. Sure, I am aware of the conditions and climate this music was born in and that's important (as I really hope I've gone some way to showing), but I can't completely understand it and it would be stupid to try. It would be even more stupid to suggest that I feel these people's pain and it would be plain idiotic to suggest that me playing the blues today, in its traditional form, has anything to do with the source material. Clapton tried, and look at the results.

Surely all anyone can do is appropriate the things they like about this music into their own, out of respect and out of love. That is the only way anyone can be authentic. And by the way, when I say 'appropriate' I mean that. Not 'stolen wholesale'. And yes, Jimmy Page, that was aimed at you. If you think you can only play blues on an acoustic guitar or you need to sing about picking cotton - fuck you and fuck your stupid affectations. They are insulting to the people who made this music.

The blues is being played today but it's not being played by Eric Clapton or Robert Cray or Bonnie Raitt or The Rolling Stones or BB King even, it's being made by people doing things for their own reasons - be it on guitar, laptop, autoharp, zither, saxophone, violin, jew's harp... rich, poor, black, white, green, orange... just conveying something as purely as they can. You don't have to copy it to be influenced by it, so Cream covering 'I'm So Glad' by Skip James has less to do with the man himself than someone making minimal electronic music in his or her room. It's just jumping the original for some depth by association, and without a fresh context it stinks. It's Moby using samples from the Alan Lomax field recordings to imply a depth to his music that just isn't there. Or some kid from the suburbs dressing like a cotton picker and affecting a Mississippi drawl to imply some sort of realness by association of image and signifier, when in fact it's just a series of empty gestures. Damn it, if Skip James was alive today he'd probably be making the darkest hip hop imaginable. Or some form of music we haven't even thought of.

It's this purity of motive that's the true lineage of this first wave of amazing blues singers. By using words like 'purity' I'm not putting these guys on a pedestal, by the way. I mean that they boil their music down to the simplest actions. It's not:

I need to make a record that accurately reflects the internal sorrow and anguish that falls heavy upon my soul. I will create music that fellow sufferers will relate to. When asked about this conceptual masterpiece by journalists I will tell them that...

It is literally just:

Feel shit. Got to feel better

It's nothing to do with the House Of Blues or endless jam sessions by middle aged guys in pubs on a Tuesday night. They have nothing to do with it. It's been filtered down and become something else to these people. Don't blame the originators for it. They went with the 60s revival just like you would have done if you'd have picked cotton for 40 years and you were on your 8th wife. They played in coffee shops for whitey and they were viewed as anthropological exhibits. It gave people a false idea, and sent people on the wrong track. That's not their fault. And more to the point, they couldn't give a shit anyway.
This music is deeply, profoundly powerful at its most basic level - forget this notion of authenticity, that's not its power. Its power is in its mix of the positive and the negative (exactly like life itself) and the stunningly uplifting, exhilarating effect it has on the listener. This music overcomes.

That's why this is some of the most incredible music ever made.

The only way to let this music influence you is in the manner you approach your own - with as much purity of motive as possible. If that appeals to you, then you cannot be without this music. If you let it, it will inspire you more than you can imagine. It might change your life.

It's just Skip's music... I don't sing other people's songs. I don't sing other people's voices. I can't.
(Skip James)

The images in this article are by Robert Crumb and are reproduced without permission. We're not making any money from this, but if someone out there wants them taken down just get in touch and we'll oblige. They are all available to view at www.celticguitarmusic.com/crumb.htm.

Crumb's amazing biography of Charley Patton is also essential, and is at www.celticguitarmusic.com/patton1.htm.

Dick Waterman managed Skip James, and his website has some wonderful photos, especially those from the Newport Festivals of the 60s. It's at www.dickwaterman.com. Be sure to look at the wonderful photo of John Fahey with Son House and also this one of House, Skip James and the wonderful Mississippi John Hurt.

The Son House quote from Paul Rishell is taken from the splendid Heaven On Earth: Feeling The Power And Glory Of The Great Son House by Ted Drozdowski which is located at
www.bostonphoenix.com/alt1/archive/music/reviews/04-04-96/SON_HOUSE.html.

The tale of the rediscovery of Skip James is told here:
guitarvideos.com/interviews/fahey/core3.htm though it's told much better in Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life by John Fahey which you can buy from www.dragcity.com.

Finally, you can get modern CD reissues of the early 78s mentioned on lots of different labels (especially it seems for Charley Patton, who has numerous CDs of his work all recorded from the same 78s that have been turned up, with the Revenant box set being by far the finest. If not the finest box set ever. www.revenant.com). A good place to look is the Snapper series, available very cheaply usually: www.instant-shop.com/snapper/category240018.html.

Just don’t go for the Martin Scorcese DVDs.

article by Chris Summerlin