[Don't Let Your Children Buy, or Listen it…]

Scan page 6

Don't Let Your Children Buy, or Listen it usually takes the form of leaving the basic inspiration and starting town or going back home, ideas point for every major development clearly linked with trying to make a within what one could loosely fresh start, the search for something describe as "pop' music. better: Firstly, it was the combination "1 believe, I believe I go back of the blues style with the tradiYow cam mistreat me here Babe, country music, which led to the but you can't when I get home. development of 'rock and roll' , a However, even trying to get growing selt-assertiveness of white away from it all can have its draw- youth in the emerging affluence of road Blues (a blues constantly time raise cries of horror from the reworked and performed even limm af tlas andokilinlsanest /oet:l :t Although these recordings of Robert Johnson's songs have been available for a number of years, they remain among the best selling blues albums in Britain today, in itself a testimony to central importance of Johnson to blues music.

Johnson himself is an enigmatic figure about whom little is known except that he made a number of Important recordings in 1936-7 and was dead by the age of 21, poisoned by a jealous woman. There are no known photos of him io little is known even about his physical appearance. Many later bluesman however, remember him from their youth and cite him as an parly influence on their musical levelopment.

By the time that Johnson was inging, the blues was already well stablished within the black pommunity as a distinct musical form. During its formative period lowever the blues had drawn on two very different cultures. The regro slave labour shipped into America brought with them the palture of Africa. However, slaves pere subjected to an extremely larbaric process of dehumanisation rhich involved an attempt by the Jave traders and the slave owners • destroy every aspect of the African heritage. • This meant the destruction of he tribal family structure, the ribal languages and even the musical instruments of the slaves. consequently, the only remnants African musical culture to urvive were the highly developed ense of musical rhythm which had ten culturally instilled into every frican from childhood, and the musical scale on which the blues tas to be based, a scale different rom the one predominant in the Yest. : At the same time that the Ifrican slaves were being forced • loosen all connections with heir past, they were also onfronted with new culture. Leligion was clearly an important art of American bourgeois culture • the last century and there was ю shortage of Christians prepared P0C Take cha • teach these "heathens" heir God.

This was soon reflected in the Lusic that the blacks began to evelop, and in particular in the Megro spirituals and Gospel music chich the siaves sang in the fields Phile they worked.

Having been denied the use of lis own musical instruments, the Mack man was forced to resort to he instruments of the white man the American civil war provided the black man with the hance to pick up numerous musical instruments abandoned by De various armies.

Adapting the use of these astruments to the syncopated Two "Kin revie in African culture the Negro musicians produced music that came to be known as rag-time. This music later formed the basis of Jazz.

The blues on the other hand was the result of a combinatión of the rythyms and melodic lines of Africa with the form and structure of the American folk song. The black man took this structure and adapted to his own purposes.

The result was the blues, a song with several verses which did not tend to link up to tell a story but which was almost exclusively based on the same musical structure of twelve bars to each verse and the same chord sequence in each of the different songs.

To western ears, at the time, the music sounded very strange indeed. This was largely due to the fact that in the scale used by the blacks two of the seven notes were played flat. Moreover, it was common practice for blues singers to play their guitars holding a piece of glass over the frets and sliding the glass to the various notes they wanted to play.

'Bottleneck' or 'slide' guitar, as it became known, produced whining effect and of course many of the notes were slurred together. Robert Johnson was himself an accomplished bottleneck guitarist, a fact which comes across very clearly on these albums.

Contrary to popular opinion, the blues did not actually originate during the period of slavery but at the turn of the century. For the blacks this was a time of increasing isolation. What few constitutional rights they had been "guaranteed" in the aftermath of the civil war were finally removed in the last decade of the 19th century when the last Southern state disenfranchised its black population.

The blacks had no organisations of their own through which to fight back and so there emerged a tendency towards 'self-help' Negroes set up their own churches and schools and organised their own entertainments. It was of course not possible by these means Pepper CERs Banian self-expression.

Of the four basic types of black that confronted the black families (and many whites too) in the first records by Robert Je the Delta Blues Singe by IAN SWINDALE.

The blues, of course, was in no sense a revolutionary music. However, it was no pie-in-the-sky escapism from the oppression of American capitalism. It is no coincidence that the black church waged a very bitter battle against the blues and blues singers. Nor was this done solely because bluesmen sang (as they overwhelmingly did) about booze and women. The blues could provide no answers, but no music ever can.

It was a leisure activity of the black masses but its themes were rooted in the general problems of living as well as the specific problems confronting blacks. Blues criticised and protested against the world, even if unable to change it.

This songs, Robert Johnson takes up many of these themes. Social relationships between the sexes feature predominantly in the blues and represent a very largely unconscious reflection of effects of class society on human relationships. Under capitalism, the tendency is for relationships to become turned into money relationships which gives rise on the one hand to a view amongst men that women have a specific function in the home, whilst among many women men are seen as a meal ticket.

With the grinding poverty of the 1930s and the fairly loose relationships between the sexes which the slavers had encouraged and which still existed at this time, together with the drifting and searching for employment across the US, personal relationships between men and women were very frequently unstable. So blues songs about "woman trouble" which form the vast majority of blues songs, including those of Johnson, clearly reflect this instability.

As Johnson sings in I'm A Steady Rollin' Man, "T'm a hardworkin' man, have been for many years I know (x 2) And some cream-puff's usin' money, ooh well Babe, but that'll never be no more."

The bitterness between men and women in class society as their baby why didn't you tell me so?"

This bitterness can even turn to This 'solution" to the probiems (If you don't want to serve negroes in your place then do not have negro records on your juke box negro records on the radio.)

screaming, idiotic words, and savage music undermining the morals of our white youth Call the advertisers the radio music and complain them! nome (x 2)

backs as Johnson relates in Crosstoday, by blues and rock groups): "Standing at the crossroad, trying to flag a ride, (x 2)

Didn't nobody seem to know me, Babe, everybody pass me by."

Johnson's light-hearted treatment of the 'solution' of making a fresh start reveals a cynicism concerning any possibility of escaping from reality by running away from it. Consequently humorous blues form another response to the relations between the sexes as in the song where Johnson sings: "Well I'm gon' get me a gambling woman if it's the last thing that I do (x 2)

A man don't need a woman, ooh fair brown, he got to give all of his money to.

And then of course there the eternal "blue blues": "I love my phonograph, but broken my winding chain, (x 2) And you taken my lovin' and gave it to your other man."

"And we played it on the sola we played it 'side the wall But boys, my needle done got rusty and it will not play at all."

Excessive drinking of course seems one way to escape at least temporarily from the misery of one's existence, but because it is only temporary, particularly when the money runs out, it is no solution at all. In Drunken Hearted Man Johnson expresses what must have been the wish of so many: "I'm a drunken hearted man, my life seems so misery (* 2)

And if I could change my way of Living it would mean so much to The sentiments of Johnson's songs found a response in generations of black Americans. Although after his death his records did not sell particularly well, his songs were performed by a number of famous bluesmen.

After the war when amplification became available for the first time and the first electric guitars were made, a young singer named Elmore James recorded Johnson's song I Believe I'll Dust My Broom. The power and intensity of James singing and his guitar playing -he used an amplified guitar and played it in the bottleneck style -made the record an instant hit.

Since then many blues singers, ola and young alike, have recorded Johnson's songs, bringing some ot the outmoded expressions up to date, but retaining the basic sentiments of the songs. What is even more interesting is that the blues have since the war reached a much wider audience than simply black Americans. telp Save The Youth of America DON'T BUY NEGRO RECORDS To These Negro Records Racist whites campaigning against Blues music business, listen to lese records nerica. tional folk music of white America, music which was to reflect the the post-war boom, and at the same ups or tne estaousnment (uncl Il was realised that capitalism and rock and roll were far from incompatible, and even the Queen asked to see Haley's film 'Rock Around the Clock').

As the fifties gave way to the sixties two things happened. Firstly sections of youth began to feel alienated from the position which capitalism had placed them in, putting them on the commercial pedestal in order to make super profits out of youth-orientated industries such as clothes, recoras, cosmetics etc. Secondly • the postwar boom began to falter. The cracks in the system were beginning to open up.

White youth turned once more to the blues, this time in the form of the heavier electric blues of such singers as Chuck Berry and the Chicago-based rhythm and blues bands, The white groups removed much of the ethnic quality of the original records but what they were able to capture was the aggression and excitement of the music, which cney developed in the direction of a basically non-political, social protest.

The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and The Who all based themselves on this music, developing it in different directions until 'Flower Power' came along and poured mystical philosophical rantings of love and peace over the frustration of the Stones' I Can't Get No Satisfaction and the aggression of The Who's My Generation.

Disillusionment with the sterile idealist philosophy of flower-power - a disillusionment helped along by the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam war, and the batons of the Chicago cops as they beat open the heads of demonstrators outside the 1968 Democratic convention, led to a renewed politicisation amongst young people. Hand in hand with this politicisation there took place a revival of the blues.

One of the most popular blues singers amongst this new, predominantly white generation of singers was Robert Johnson. John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Cream and the Rolling Stones all recorded his songs, giving them a modern treatment which reveals the timelessness of the blues and its basic adaptability to and influence on different musical currents. So in 1975 Johnson's blues songs are not only best sellers in their original form but are also to be found on bestselling albums by top rock musicians. A greater tribute to Robert Johnson,: "King of the Delta st.14th January 1976 Page 7

Scan page 7

----- pull-quotes -----

The Blues: e Blues :

02400: OR****7%