Institute for Studies In American Music Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York NEWSLETTER
Volume XXXIII	No. 1 Fall 2003
Inside This Issue: Music of Williamsburg by Carol J. Oja The Germania Musical Society by Nancy Newman Music of Carl Ruggles by Stephen Slottow Scorsese's Narratives of Blues Discovery: Review by Ray Allen Eric Porter's What is This Thing Called Jazz?: Review by Salim Washington Roger Sessions and Arthur Berger: Review by Anton Vishio Sondheim's Bounce: Review by Gayle Sherwood and Jeffrey Magee Home	Scorsese’s Narratives of Blues Discovery By Ray Allen “I’ll never forget the first time I heard Lead Belly singing ‘See See Rider.’ I was entranced.” So begins Martin Scorsese’s preface to The Blues: A Musical Journey, the companion book to the seven-part PBS series Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, which made its national debut this past September. He continues, “Like most people of my generation, I grew up listening to rock & roll. All of a sudden, in an instant, I could hear where it had all come from.” Such narratives of blues discovery permeate the films produced by Scorsese and his six series co-directors, Clint Eastwood, Richard Pearce, Wim Wenders, Marc Levin, Mike Figgis, and Charles Burnett. The story is certainly familiar to this reviewer. My own blues epiphany came in 1969 at Bill Graham’s East Village cathedral of rock music, the Filmore East, when B.B. King took the stage to open for the British band Ten Years After. I was entranced when King hit those first electrifying notes on his guitar Lucille. In that magical moment, the source of rock ’n’ roll was revealed and I knew my life would never be the same. Forget about medicine, law, or engineering–I was hell-bent on catching that fast train to a career in folk music and ethnomusicology. Thirty-plus years later, with this baggage in tow, I approached the Scorsese blues series with anticipation tempered by a degree of caution. Could Scorsese, with his cadre of five white and one black male film directors and six white film producers, with no scholarly assistance in evidence, possibly convey the richly textured history and subtle cultural complexities of the blues via the medium of television? Granted, the series is designed to be impressionistic rather than definitively historical, but the packaging and presentation leave no doubt that Scorsese is attempting to construct a canonical story of blues to rival Ken Burns’s grand narrative of jazz, made-to-order for PBS consumption. Scorsese’s own film, Feel Like Going Home, is an epic adventure tracing bluesman Corey Harris’s journey south to Mississippi and eventually back to West Africa, jawing and jamming along the way with old Delta bluesmen and venerable African griots. Harris, who is young, hip, black, and an accomplished blues guitarist, is an effective voice for the blues. His infatuation with the tradition and reverence for elder players suggest that the blues could and should continue to speak to new generations of African Americans, a theme that unfortunately is not adequately pursued in the ensuing films. More troubling is the up-the-river, or Delta to Chicago (and eventually London) narrative established by Scorsese in Feel Like Going Home and developed in a number of the subsequent films.1 Harris’s musings and accompanying archival footage contend that the blues was born in the Mississippi Delta and migrated up to Chicago where it would eventually disseminate to broader national and international audiences. Charlie Patton, Sun House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Willie Dixon (and later Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones) are the heroes of this tale, while neither the practitioners of the rich Texas and southeastern Piedmont blues styles nor the early vaudeville blueswomen receive sufficient attention. The Delta/Chicago/London saga lies at the heart of Marc Levin’s film, Godfathers and Sons, an excessively celebratory homage to Chicago-based Chess records and a work marred by the overbearing character of Marshall Chess (the son of co-founder Leonard Chess) who gleefully spins his own self-serving history of Chicago blues. Mike Figgis’s film, Red, White, and Blues, completes the Delta/Chicago/London loop with an intriguing chronicle of the 1960s British blues explosion spearheaded by the white blues guitarists John Mayall, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck. Wim Wenders’s disjointed offering, Soul of a Man, opens with Texas songster Blind Willie Johnson, hinting that blues might exist outside of the Delta/Chicago axis. The bulk of the film, however, is devoted to Delta bluesman Skip James (and his rediscovery during the 1960s folk revival) and Chicago blues singer and songwriter J.B. Lenoir (and his discovery by white art students/filmmakers Steve and Ronnog Seaberg in the 1960s). Clint Eastwood’s Piano Blues further widens the blues field to include Georgia-born Ray Charles and New Orleans piano luminaries Fats Domino, Dr. John, and Professor Longhair, as well as jazz giants Jay McShann and Dave Brubeck. But Eastwood’s omnipresence and annoying interjections during interviews detract from the larger story of black folks and blues piano. The overarching problem with these five films is the excessively personal lens the directors bring to the blues. The result is a very narrow and very white interpretation. Scorsese et al. came of age in the post-War years at a time when the blues was beginning to slip from the R&B charts, only to be discovered by a new audience of young white folkies and rockers. For these directors, blues was first and foremost an appendage of the white folk revival and the gritty precursor to the rock and soul music of their youth. The discovery of blues roots and the romancing of old rural (mostly Delta) bluesmen became essential components of their blues mythology. Thus, in order to historicize the blues for the present project, the directors simply roll out the grainy footage of southern black folks chopping cotton, working on chain gangs, shouting in church, and gyrating around juke joints, and mix in a few hardship testimonies from old-timers. This accomplished, they feel free to jump cut forward to the early 1960s with Skip James and Sun House titillating white folks at the Newport Folk Festival and Muddy Waters sailing to England to inspire Clapton, Mayall, Jagger, and company. What’s missing from this skewed history is acknowledgment and exploration of the vital force that blues continued to exert in black communities across the rural south and urban north throughout the Depression, the War years, and well into the 1960s. Nor is the deeper blues trope that inspired generations of African American writers, artists, jazz musicians, and composers given any consideration. Questions of cultural appropriation, perhaps too uncomfortable for the predominantly white PBS audience, are adroitly avoided through a bevy of rhetorical testimonies (from both blacks and whites) regarding the universal nature of the blues. Such issues of African American identity and cultural politics are simply ignored since they don’t fit neatly into the narrative of blues discovery that undergirds these five films. The contribution by the project's sole black director, Charles Burnett, is Warming by the Devil’s Fire, a semi-autobiographical tale of a twelve-year-old black boy returning to Mississippi in the 1950s for a proper baptism. But before he can be saved, his womanizing, good-for-nothing uncle whisks him away to explore the seedier side of Delta blues culture. The idea is intriguing but the execution is lamentable. The flip-flopping between docudrama and archival footage of old blues artists falls flat, and while the latter is visually compelling, the acting in the former is so abysmal that the film is often painful to watch. The one production that moves in a broader direction is Richard Pearce’s The Road to Memphis, a rollicking jaunt on tour with bluesmen B.B. King and Bobby Rush. Pearce’s work reveals the power of WDIA, the 50,000 watt Memphis-based radio station that piped blues and gospel music to huge audiences of black listeners during the late 1940s and 1950s. Memphis’s Beale Street is accurately depicted as the mid-South epicenter of black creativity while King and Rush are presented as blues artists who continue to speak to African American audiences. In the Ken Burns tradition the seven films are packaged with a companion book and boxed five-CD set. The Blues: A Musical Journey (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2003; $27.95), edited by a team of popular writers led by Peter Guralnik, is a handsomely produced trade book full of vintage photographs, song lyrics, portraits of legendary blues singers, and brief commentary from such notables as W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Unfortunately, the latter are jammed into sections organized around each of the seven films, and while offering snippets of insight, fail to coalesce into a meaningful story. Aside from Robert Santelli’s ample introductory chapter, there is little of scholarly value here. The boxed CD set, also titled The Blues: A Musical Journey, is the most useful piece of the project, and undoubtedly the most comprehensive compilation since The Blues: A Smithsonian Collection of Classic Blues Singers (1993, now out of print). The Scorsese CD set moves comfortably over time and through space, presenting a wide variety of rural and urban blues styles. But unlike the Smithsonian collection that exclusively features African American artists, the final third of the Scorsese anthology is peppered with white bluesmen and a few white blueswomen. This provocative editorial decision results in an accurate portrayal of blues music’s steady migration towards white production and consumption throughout the second half of the twentieth century. But more importantly, the close juxtaposition of black and white singers underscores two critical points about blacks, whites, and the blues that the editors may not have foreseen. First, white folks sure can play the blues a lot better than they can sing them; and second, the most successful white interpreters are those who began with a bluesy feeling and took the music somewhere else. White singers like Jimmy Rodgers, Elvis, Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, and the Allman Brothers, rather than the slavish imitators, have clearly created the most durable music from the blues. I suppose those of us who teach American music should be grateful that Martin Scorsese and his collaborators have brought so much attention to one of our most cherished and enduring forms of musical expression. But the uneven quality and narrow focus of the series is a regrettable yet predictable result of too many white-boys-discover-the-blues fantasies and too little serious understanding of the African American experience that lies at the heart of the blues. Meanwhile, the disquieting realization that Hollywood celebrities like Mr. Scorsese seem to be calling the shots at PBS these days should give serious documentary filmmakers and scholars a good reason to sing the blues. —Ray Allen 1For more on the up-the-river myth and other blues misconceptions, see David Evans, “Demythologizing the Blues,” ISAM Newsletter XXIX/1 (Fall 1999): 8-9, 13.