"BLUES? IN DETROIT? You mean that they actually still play blues in Detroit?"

"BLUES? IN DETROIT? You mean that they actually still play blues in Detroit?"

It’s understood that when Blacks started coming up here they brought their wives, and kids, and recipes, and churches, and do-rags, so there is no reason to assume that they didn’t bring their music - which, in non-religious circles, was blues. This makes sense. People don’t come out of a vacuum to a city, naked of culture and past. They bring along their old culture and modify it to the urban setting, adding and subtracting where appropriate. Characteristically the old culture resists change. The

guy from Macon (and even his children) is not so hasty in changing from a Southerner to an urbanite: he doggedly upsets white city planners by tossing beercans down housing project elevator shafts; he modestly thinks cunilingus is vulgar; and he keeps on planting collard greens in his backyard.

Yet he seems to have given up the blues, and 1, for one, would like to know why. This thinking about blues has been going on for some four years. My friend George West - Black, Southern, and recently discharged from the Navy - and I began

spending weekends searching for some “down-home music,” someone who could play guitar and blow harp like Old Fishback in Louisville. I had never been to Louisville in my life nor heard Fishback, but I dug the idea of a quest.

George’s brother had come to Detroit a couple of years earlier to work at Dodge Main. From guys at the plant he learned where blues musicians were playing and who

they were. Every weekend, George, me, and a variety of George’s relatives would go out to drink and listen to blues. There were two or three bars that had featured the same musicians for years, two or three mucicians who travelled from bar to bar, and regular big name attractions that came in to do a cabaret dance or week gig at the 20 Grand or Mr. Kelley’s,

I got to know many of the musicians and bars, and tried to seek out some of the

older musicians who are still around but not working. A lot of drinking time was spent listening to the music and discussing what blues are all about. Last August I went to a two day blues festival at the Regal Theatre on the South Side of Chicago, There I was able to interview at some length Junior Parker, Little Milton, Bobby Blue Bland, and B.B. King (who are the men you’re talking about if you mean contemporary Black blues).

With so much current interest in Black culture, it seemed that someone must have made a study of blues in Detroit, so I went to the main library to see what 1 could find - mostly as a matter of curiosity. 1 was directed to the Ernest Hackley Collection, supposedly the largest collection of “the Negro contribution to American

culture” in the country. Upon asking the white librarian in charge of this collection what was written on blues in Detroit, 1 was answered, “Blues? In Detroit? You mean that they actually still play blues in Detroit?”

Something, I ventured to myself, was not right. Any Black in the city (and that, may I remind you, is 40% of the population) could have told her about blues, yet she apparently had no idea of what theterm meant - at least to contemporary Black

Detroiters. What she considered blues to be was a fantasy perpetrated by Electra Records.

I supposed that if 1 had asked an average hip white and an average hip Black to list the best blues singers, neither would have heard of anybody on the other’s list, (. . .Blind Lemon Who???. . .) It appeared that there is an enormous discrepancy between what whites consider blues to be and what blacks consider blues to be. Therefore, before proceding any farther, it seems worthwhile to try to make the

distinction.

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First, I think that most whites, particularly liberal, social-conscious ones, use blues as a projective vehicle. That is, they use blues to define for themselves what they think a Negro should be. A good way to see this is by reading what white critics or album cover reviewers use as criteria to judge what is good and bad blues. What do they look for? and how does it compare with what Black audiences look Tor?

Almost any Downbeat, Jazz Journal, or Billboard record review contains comments like this one:

It is obvious that Sonny Boy (Williamson) is completely relaxed and is "kinging just what he wants, with no commercial considerations to mar the collection.

What is striking about this comment is the stress that whites place on Blacks being non-commercial, that is, natural. It is some evasive earthy quality that implies that only the penniless are pure. The dirtiest word in the white critic’s lexicon is “commercial.” It means that the musician wants to profit from his labor and talent (as the critic does), which I assert is a mark of manliness in our society. In other words, in order to be considered fully-balled, a man must work and produce and profit. By choosing doddering old men to represent blues, the critic, in effect, demonstrates a peculiar need to view Blacks as dependent children. By constantly emphasizing the element of crying, wallering, slobbering, alcoholism, pain, and self-pity, the white man is able to reinforce a comfortable image of the Negro as the perpetual American child. Whenever he exhibits the marks of manhood - that is, threatening independence by earning a living - then he is rejected. This has nothing to do with his music and is Uncle Tomism at its worst. It forces and intelligent man like Brownie NcGhee to play like a country hick, to crack the same stale jokes performance after performance, to which the audience patronizingly laughs performance after performance. In effect, he is letting us know, Yes Boss, I’m still back there on the cotton fiel’s - jes a-drinkin’, and screwin’, and fightin’ wif my woman. No Black audience would allow such an insulting portrayal of themselves. In fact, Black musicians'who would make it in their own society must exhibit just exactly the-opposite qualities.

Blues in not something a white man comes across in the normal course of his cultural experience. It is something that he must seek out. Inevitably, he choses to search out the old, the doddering, the alcoholic, and the impotent. There seems to be some unconscious direction to the choice, and one must ask why. Why, for the most part, are whites interested in musicians who Black audiences have scorned for twenty years?

To get ahead in the white blues market a Black musician must be born and advertise that he was born in poverty in the rural South (re: the back of every Josh White album released since 1940). He must speak either quaintly (Sonny Terry) or softly (Brownie McGhee). He must have been “discovered” in obscurity (Allan Lomax made a profession out of it for years) and preferably be on the decline as a musician.

Younger whites have, of course, shown enormous interest in blues during the past two or three years, and in many ways their taste is more sophisticated than that of their older folksinging brothers. Basically, however, blues is still being used as a projective vehicle. Instead of defining Blacks as harmless head-seratchin’ Toms, younger whites project an image of violence and dissatisfaction. This is not my bag, I don’t know what it means, and I won’t try to analyze it. And I'm not trying to put it down. However, what 1 do say with some degree of certainty is that this impassioned wildness is not the same tiling that a Black bluesman does before a Black audience.

1 noticed an interesting contrast not too long ago in a concert at Rapa House, a small cabaret theatre that sponsored an evening of blues. The star performer was John Lee Hooker, a Detroit musician. John Lee is a bit of an oddity as a blues singer because he manages to play both Black and white audiences, although recently, betore many more whites than Blacks. He go,t up for his first set and sang so slowly and low that everyone had to strain to hear him. (It is interesting to note that on his recording / which sell largely to the white market - his voice is amplified and an extra heavy beat is artificially added, much to the delight of reviewers who procede to make much noise about Negro sexuality.) He talked much of his blues, emphasizing the telling of a story in each song, and did long runs on his guitar, using it to supplement his voice.

Three white kids got up next and announced that they were such-and-such blues group, a guitar, drums, and lead singer with a harmonica. The impressive quality of their music was its violence and anger, qualities that you simply do not hear in Black blues. The singer lashed the air with his harmonica. The drummer leaped up and down to make the drums louder. The guitar turned up his amps and stomped his feet. The singer would get an anguished expression on his face and then cup his face into his harmonica hand, slobbering and blowing furiously. But this whole ritual is familiar enough to readers so that there is no reason to belabor a description of the performance.

John Lee sat quietly watching them, clapping politely and visibly annoyed by the noise.

But what about Albert King jumping around and shouting at the Grande? Or even a wilder young black man such as Buddy Guy? Certainly these are both legitimate bluesmen. It is true, they are; but at the Grande it is they who are imitating the white kids, not the white kids who are imitating them. After three-hundred years of carefully learning how to put on the white man, there is no reason to think that the black man is going to stop because the white man now has long hair and a heart which is supposed to be in the right place. Attitudes don’t change that quickly. With all the talk and hand-slapping the situation is the same as it has always been: a lean hungry Black cat learns to adapt his behavior to what the white man wants because he can use the bread. Blacks have always smiled at whites and always thought them to be tools. This isn’t even being cynical, it’s simply the hard reality and tricks of lifemanship that the ghetto teaches. An old word for it that Blacks used to use is “shucking.”

As I have said, blues mean different things to different people. But what I am most concerned with here is what blues represents to the ordinary Black listener.

There are only two groups ot Blacks who unhesitatingly admit that they like, buy, and listen to blues. The tirst is the intellectually culture-conscious and the second is the uneducated non-upwardly mobile poor. Anyone in between, particularly the young and the newly arrived middle-class, claims to be uninterested and prefers jazz and rock and roll.

A term that is bandied about a good deal is “urban blues.” It is possible that the term is a misnomer and that there is no such thing. My own (operational) definition is that blues is a Southern, non-religiousrmusical form that has been transported up north, electrified, and bastardized. Urban blues is simply complicated Southern blues played in the city. Far more important than the musical style (4/4 twelve bar pattern, repeat the tirst verse, eic.) is the sense of identification of blues with the South. In almost any performance a singer will try to evoke Southern memories. “We're goin' back home now,” he will shout, or “Let’s go way down, down in the alley.” Or he’ll often ask, “How many folks out there are from Mississippi? Say ‘yeah.’ How many from Alabama? Say ’yeah.’ Then this song is for you because you know what I'm talking about.”

Unless a listener can strongly identify with the Southern Black experience, on either a first-hand or vicarious basis, then it is unlikely that he will go out of his way to hear a blues musician. If he is city-born he might say that he like blues, but he won't pay S4.98 for an album or Si .50 cover charge.

Obviously there is no shortage of Blacks with Southern experience or

identification. The potential Black audience

Obviously there is no shortage of Blacks with Southern experience of

identification. The potential Black audience is enormous. The problem for the blues musician is that his audience wants to forget; not remember the past. And for this reason there is not a single blues musician in Detroit who earns his living by playing blues.

Joe Von Battle runs Joe’s Record Shop on Twelfth Street. Before he moved to Twelfth he was on Hastings. In the back of his record shop he has a small recording studio where he has been recording what the market wants for years. At one time he recorded strictly Detroit blues musicians. Now he says, “Can’t sell blues. The radio stations won’t play them. They say that it’s degrading and shit like that. 1 mainly sell blues to old people who come in and ask for them. People buy what they hear and they don’t hear blues on the radio.”

My girlfriend and I went to Mr. Kelley’s Ballroom some time ago to hear B.B. King, the most popular and successful blues singer in the country. The room was packed and we finally managed a seat at a crowded table. The woman next to us had come with her parents and was very friendly. I asked her why she had come and did she like blues. “Blues reminds me where I came from (North Carolina) - and that’s someplace that I want to forget. I came here tonight because mamma and daddy are from the South and like that old music. They wanted to go. I like jazz or rock and roll or just about anything.” Yet once B.B. started singing, she began dancing at her seat, cheered, signified (a church response in which you raise one or both hands to signal rapport with the minister, or in this case, singer), and finally had to be told to sit down by armed private guards. After a particularly moving song that I said 1 really liked, she said, “What are you talking about. You can’t understand that.” The point I am trying to make here is that 1 .)blues is basically a product of Southern Black culture, and 2.)most Southern Blacks appreciate but want to forget this past.

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My friend George once made an interesting comment. “Negroes resent anything that has to do with white oppression down South. When I was a little boy I always used to like spirituals. I used to like the song ‘Go Down Moses.’ Every time some white people would come to our school - some white city officials or a church group -they would ask us to sing ‘Go Down Moses.’ So we would sing ‘Go Down Moses.’ I got to hate the song because they identified us with it.”

LeRoi Jones says in Blues People that all Black music is basically protest music. I agree to the extent that when a Black is widely accepted among the white audience he loses his original audience. Jones says that this is an element of protest. Certainly it is true that there are few Blacks who have listened to Louis Armstrong in thirty years. Even Bessie Smith, who most whites seem to think of as a romantic symbol of blues, toured basically before white audiences. The Supremes are well on their way out of the Black market. At an Aretha Franklin concert in Detroit, people waited over two hours for Aretha to come on stage. The audience was well over 90% Black, but after Aretha finally came out and opened with “There’s No Business Like Show Business” many people booed and walked out. I think this was an ominous sign in her career.

Blacks make a point of not identifying with whites, and if there is anything that is white, it’s the South. Consequently, just as George still kind of likes “Go Down Moses”, so does he hate it. No matter how cosmopolitan he may become, it will always remind him of his insulted Southern boyhood. He would never buy the record, but he probably still has the song humming in the back of his head. And on a larger scale, I think the same thing holds true for blues; Blacks know and understand the memory, but are consciously rejecting it.

The reason I have suggested all this is to explain why there is so large a blues audience and so few blues singers. In Detroit, despite the heavy and recent Southern immigrations, there is net a single musician who supports himself solely by playing and singing blues, let alone one who supports himself in the elegant manner of a Mo-Town star or successful jazz musician.

But perhaps the best way to illustrate what has happened to blues is to describe some the blues singers and blues bars in Detroit.

Probably the most successful local blues musician is Little Sonny. Little Sonny, whose real name is Aaron Willis, was born in Alabama and came to Detroit when he was fifteen. He went to high school here for one semester and then dropped out and went back to Alabama to work. He was raised by his mother and says that he cannot remember seeing his father. He regrets that he didn’t complete school, but says that he was too poor to afford the luxury.

Sonny picked up the harmonica after his return to Detroit and taught himself to play (from records, incidentally, and not from leading about blind street minstrels). Within a few years he was playing professionally in small Black Bottom bars. He started out playing with Washboard Willie and eventually formed his own band. Somewhere along the way he began holding his harmonica next to the microphone, making it an extremely powerful and versatile instrument.

Little Sonny is more success-driven than the most ambitious Oak Park pre-med. He is now in his late thirties and is constantly working and trying to come up with new ideas to make it big. He changes his band members regularly, tries hip-swinging, or whatever else he feels might increase his appeal. Basically, however, he is working in the same bars which he has always worked. He is now at the Calumet Show Bar on 12th and Richton, where he has been for nearly two years. Since he is now the only bluesman in the city who is working regularly, it is recommended that you stop by the Calumet some weekend night to dig his sound. If you have never been to a ghetto bar, don’t fret; about the only thing you have to worry about is that the ID checkers tend to be very thorough. Before the Calumet, Sonny was at the Apex on Oakland for two or three years, and before that, the Congo Lounge. The difficult decision that

he must make is whether to sign a relatively long-term contract that pays weekly or to go out on his own and risk starving.

Lately things have been looking up tor Sonny. A recent 45 recording, “We Got A Groove/Sonny’s Bag,” was a two-sided hit, and he is now negotiating an LP with Atlantic Records. Unfortunately for the purist, however, he is climbing not by playing blues but by changing over to rock and roll. On some weekends aU the Calumet you would hardly know that he is one of the best blues harp players in the country. He often emphatically states that he is a blues singer and will never learn of like playing anything else, but at the bar and in the record shops, people want to dance and drink, not listen to blues. He must modify blues tempo and lyrical patterns so they fit the latest dances. When he plays out-and-out down-home blues, people laugh good-naturedly and seem to enjoy it, but he seldom plays more than one or two at a time. He says that after he makes a name for himself with rock, he hopes he can get back to the music that he loves and that he feels comfortable in.

Mr. Bo, whose real name is Louis Collins, is another Southerner who came to Detroit when very young. He learned guitar from records, and like almost all blues musicians, reads no music. He developed his style during a time when Southern blues were generally coming north and being called rhythm and blues. About this time B.B. King was making one hit record after another and was enormously popular in the Black community. Bo picked up a style very similar to King’s and hasn’t gotten out of it yet. Sonny says of him today, “Bo is in that B.B. King bag and will never leave it.” Unfortunately, there appears room for only one B.B. King on the market, so Bo has had a hard time supporting himself. He lives in Herman Gardens, a city housing project, and has only managed to work occassionally during the past few months. He had worked at The Zombie Lounge on Oakland for nearly

four years. After the Zombie closed down, he tried touring, making records, and travelling to different bars. He has had several reasonabley successful records in the past, but has trouble adapting his playing style to keep up with audience tastes.

Whereas Sonny broadens his appeal by branching into rock and roll, Bo tries to branch into jazz, which again puts him behind times. Although he is an extraordinarily good blues guitarist, he says he has no feeling for jazz and will never really learn to play it very well: but then, he has a lot of time to practice.

At the Zombie, where my friend George and I used to go to hear him nearly ^every weekend, the crowd had no illusions about sophistication. (Rock and roll, incidentally, is sophisticated.) The crowd was older, largely Southern, and poor. Few people checked out others’ clothes (or color) or laughed when a little short man danced with a big fat woman. A slightly modified blues tempo was good enough for dancing and Bo didn’t have to pretend that he was playing something else. He and his group were then known as Mr. Bo and His Blue Boys, Some incredible things used to happen on Thursday nights, when local amateur musicians would get up and stand in. The first time the Animals came to Detroit, they couldn’t wait to leave Olympia to go with John Lee Hooker over to the Zombie to jam. Although the bar was packed every weekend, it apparently went out of business and no similar bar has taken its place, forcing Bo to drop the last part of his group name and to try to learn jazz.

Washboard Willie has taken another approach to changing audience tastes. Washboards are unsuitable for jazz or rock and roll, so he plays the same music that he has been playing for forty years. As a result of his age and musical inflexibility, he has gone from bar to bar. For a while, he was the weekend attraction at the Calumet, then he was moved to Wednesday nights, then the Tanjero Lounge, a dump on Joy Road, then an even less elaborate bar on 12th, and, was last working weekends at the Club Caribbe on East Jefferson, a bit west of Belle Isle. The Club Caribbe is an old bastion of blues, small and very dismal. There is an aura of neglect about the customers as well as the premises. The customers are mostly over forty and poorly dressed. Instead of chic mini-skirted girls, the women, tend to be fat and to h jf bad teeth. The crowds ar small. It appears .uffikely that Willie and his two sidemen could have earned more than $10-15 apiece for a night. The bar now features Little Junior and his Midnite Fliers, a group I have never heard but whom I suspect are an old blues group converted to rock. Willie’s blues aren’t really very powerful anymore and he has compromised them a bit by increasing the tempo on many of his old numbers.

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Bobo Jenkins is another oldtimer who is still working. Like other Detroit bluesmen, he has had to modify his music, and like the others, he hasn’t managed this transition very successfully. Now playing at the Hurricane Lounge, a neighborhood bar on Michigan Avenue and 24th Street, he is hardly recognizable as a blues musician. He has a small record store and recording studio at 4248 Joy Road. Down in his old basement studio he played old records and tapes of his for me. It is traditional blues, but it just doesn’t sell anymore. While discussing the non-saleability of blues, he states that blues chord patterns and emotional content do not change, just the tempo. He says, “When times are good blues are up-tempo. When times are bad, people play ‘em slow.”

Another older musician is Little Daddy Walton. Little Daddy plays harmonica and sings, but is so old-fashioned that he doesn’t even amplify his harmonica sometimes. He is derided a bit by the more successful musicians, but had a good laugh himself last year when a record of his, “Highway Blues”, made the best-seller charts locally. Assuming that it will be a while before he has another big record, he will probably return to the Linford Lounge on Linwood north of Davison or The Verte Lounge across from the Calumet on 12th. The has organized his four sons and a friend into a blues and rock group, and the combination does well. Little Daddy plays for the older people and the boys play for the younger crowd. As in the case of Washboard Willie and the old Mr. Bo, Little Daddy’s audience consist almost entirely of those poor enough to have no illusions of sophistication or upward mobility. Their lives in Detroit, by and large, are not enough improvement over the South to make them want to forget it.

There are several more older musicians still around. Eddie B., an old-time Mississippi country-blues singer, came here several years ago and hasn’t worked since. He is an alcoholic and spends most of his time drifting and sitting around his East Jefferson rented room.

Brother Will Hairston has a unique approach. Having married a Christian zealot a few years ago, he has necessarily gotten religion himself. He now refuses to sing blues, claiming as does Mahalia Jackson and Reverend Gary Davis, that they are sinful. Consequently, he plays blues guitar and sings Christianity. He performs occasionally in church (sometimes the Greater King Solomon Baptist on 14th) and writes topical memorial songs for appropriate occassions. He has written and recorded many songs commemorating assasinations and events in the civil rights struggle.

Eddie Burns lost his job at the Club Caribbe to Washboard Willie and is now unemployed. Many local musicians have told me that he can blow harp as well as anyone in the city but I’ve never heard him myself. He says it’s too exhausting and no one really appreciates it. He says he can play any kind of music (meaning blues, jazz, or rock and roll) but plays mostly rock and is definitely second-rate at it.

Eddie Kirkland is as fine a guitarist and singer as anyone but he cannot find work, even irregularly. He goes to recording sessions and jobs after working eight to ten hours per day pushing a cement wheelbarrow. About a year ago he made a record in BoBo Jenkin’s studio called “Georgia Woman” (in which I, along with the six or seven other guys who were in the studio, can be heard in the background singing “George. . .ah Wo. . .mun”) and had it released throughout the South, hoping to build up impetus for a tour. I don’t know whether or not it was successful.

Baby Boy Warren is an oldtimer who was once fairly well known, and is still supposedly in town. He is even a bit of a legend. No one I have talked to, however, knowswhere he is or what he is doing.

There are three women blues singers who are or have been fairly well known. Sippie Wallace, like Eddie B., is a country-blues singer, and does not work in Detroit. She has been “discovered” by and given concerts for both the Wayne and University of Detroit folk music societies. Johnnie Mae Matthews is a powerful woman who sings at cabarets and occasionally in bars. Like BoBo Jenkins, she has a small recording studio. She mainly records local blues singers and has had several moderately successful records (including “Highway Blues,” most recently). Alberta Adams is a voluble woman who can serve as m.c. as well as singing, and therefore can usually find work. However, the unemployment time span between bars seems longer and longer and the caliber of bars goes steadily down. It is unlikely that she will ever dominate another Blues Unlimited, where she used to shout, “Check your wigs at the door. We’re going to let our hair down tonight.”

It is a moot question whether blues in Detroit is in fact a dead form. It is clear that there are not young black singers to take the place of the older fading ones. It is unlikely that another younger man could (or would) achieve the same kind of success as B.B. King.

Perhaps this is just as well. Although the purist will wistfully regret the passing of blues in the Black community and will have to wait for future Black intelligentsia to rediscover it, the loss of blues previews a new way of life. It indicates a culture-consciousness of the masses far more convincing thatn “Black is Beautiful.” It is a rejection of an old culture, which will always be identified with oppression and poverty.

Like the Yiddish Theatre of the Irish wake, blues will revive old memories and mixed feelings for some time to come. Presently, there are not many people who want these memories revived. In the foreseeable future, there will be fewer still who have these memories in the first place.

Sheldon Annis

LONG, LONGHAIR TO JOHN SINCLAIR