WOKE up this morning, the Blues were 100 years old ...
It might seem strange to be able to put a precise date on one of our most venerable music traditions, but the centenary is said to date from the release, in March 1912, of Hart Wand's Dallas Blues, reportedly the first genuine 12-bar blues song ever published. Other songs that year featured the word "blues" in their title but weren't in authentic 12-bar blues form. Bill Wyman – blues aficionado and quondam Rolling Stone – says in his 2001 book, Blues Odyssey, that Dallas Blues was the first song with blues in its title, ahead of WC Handy's Memphis Blues and Arthur Seals's Baby Seal's Blues.
As both Wyman's book and Martin Scorsese's revelatory US TV series, The Blues, make clear, the history of blues music is both prodigious and poignant, tracing its evolution from Africa via the slave ships across to America, first to the plantations of the Mississippi Delta, up the Mississippi River to the Carolinas, then to Memphis and Chicago. "The roots of the Blues," Wyman affirms, "lie in the slave trade ..."
Over the decades, there have been blues legends almost without number: Lead Belly, Charley Patton, Bessie Smith (pictured), Blind Willie McTell (hymned by Bob Dyan to unforgettable effect on his Bootleg Series CDs in 1991), Son House, Robert Johnston, the King of the Blues; later, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Etta James (who died just last month), Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Elmore James, Albert King, Albert Collins, BB King, Buddy Guy. Plus gifted white guitarists such as Roy Buchanan, Eric Clapton, and Paul Kossoff.
Billy "Blindman" Allardyce is the elder statesman of the Scottish blues scene. A drummer, he's played the blues for half-a-century, chairs the Scottish Blues Alliance, runs the Blindman's Blues internet forum, is part of the downhome blues trio PapaMojo, and is also ambassador for the blues in Scotland for the Blues Hall of Fame.
Why does he think the blues have survived for so long? "Every idiom of popular music has its roots in the blues," says Billy, 68. "We've had rock blues and now have punk blues. If a genre doesn't continue to grow, the music will die. One reason blues is still here is that it has kept on growing. It's a simplistic form of music that people can adapt to their own style of playing. And if you have the empathy, you can listen to the old Delta blues guys and listen to them sing about the hard life they knew. Some people disregard blues history and quote Clapton to me: I tell them, listen to the guys he learned from."
The blues remain fresh and utterly vital: for proof, check out such guitarists as Joe Bonamassa (Usher Hall March 27, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall April 4), and the brilliant Gary Clark Jnr.
We're going to have a bad case of the Blues for a long time to come.
.... The Blues
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