I can remember first hearing Blues music during the minor revival of interest in the mid-seventies, just before the Punk Rock explosion. However, there weren’t many clubs playing it, except for coffee houses playing some folk blues, and the occasional house band that played Chicago-style electric blues.
The only other time you got to hear the Blues was the occasional concert by someone like B. B. King, or at folk festivals where they'd bring out some acoustic Blues player who had authenticity and not much else going for him. Worst of all were the times the rich rock stars would feel guilty about not giving back to where it all started.
They'd haul out someone like Lighting Hopkins on stage to sing a couple of songs and that would be it. Everybody would clap and cheer and the rock star would go off in his big limo to whatever fancy hotel he was staying in, and the blues musician would go off to whatever cheap hotel he was living in. Okay, so that's probably a little bit of an exaggeration, but I would get the feeling that something really important was being allowed to fall by the wayside.
Since that time, there has obviously been another resurgence of interest in the blues. Perhaps it was the emergence into prominence of players like Bonnie Raitt followed by the success of movies like Oh Brother Where Art Thou? that brought about the increased popularity of traditional music. When that was combined with the inevitable backlash against the ever-increasing reliance on technology by so many contemporary performers the 1980s and 90s, times were ripe for a renaissance of what we now call roots music.
Fortunately, there were still some of the original players around who could finally cash in on their talents and newfound popularity. For the Black musician in the 1950s, making money from the music you wrote was fraught with difficulties (like discovering the record deal you signed also sold your ownership of all the material recorded – meaning you never received a penny in royalties) and so many of them fell by the wayside, victims of poverty and despair.
Article comments
1 - Jim mcAllister
I agreee with the writer about John Lee Hooker. As much as he was fussed over in later life he should have been studied even more intently because he was a "living Fossil" so to speak. Like the alligator that has existed unchanged for millions of years, John Lee Hooker was a classic example of how Blues was played when it was first developed as a new form of music. He stubbornly refused to become contemporary, despite the industry pairing him up with all and sundry. No matter who he played with his style never changed. I've no doubt that his step-father was an actual Blues originator who was there when it was being conceived at the turn of the 20th Century. He taught the young John Lee what he himself had learned and for whatever reason John didn't feel he needed anything else. So we had in our midst a living example of the way it was done, as authentic as any lost Robert Johnson recording. John Lee was boogie-ing before it was even called that.