Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Read online

  MARTIN SCORSESE PRESENTS

  THE

  BLUES

  a musical journey

  Edited by

  Peter Guralnick

  Robert Santelli

  Holly George-Warren

  Christopher John Farley

  Preface by Martin Scorsese

  Foreword by Alex Gibney

  Afterword by Chuck D

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Preface By Martin Scorsese

  Foreword

  Writing About the Blues: The Process

  An Introductory Note By Peter Guralnick

  A CENTURY OF THE BLUES

  FEEL LIKE GOING HOME

  WARMING BY THE DEVIL’S FIRE

  THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS

  THE SOUL OF A MAN

  GODFATHERS AND SONS

  RED, WHITE AND BLUES

  PIANO BLUES AND BEYOND

  Afterword

  Attributions and Sources

  Contributors

  Photo Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface By Martin Scorsese

  I’ll never forget the first time I heard Lead Belly singing “See See Rider.” I was entranced. 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. And I could feel that the spirit behind the music, behind that voice and that guitar, came from somewhere much, much farther back in time.

  Many people I know had the same shock of recognition. Rock & roll seemed to just come to us, on the radio and in the record stores. It became our music, a very important way of defining ourselves and separating from our parents. But then we uncovered another, deeper level, the history behind rock and R&B, the music behind our music. All roads led to the source, which was the blues.

  We all like to imagine that art can come from out of nowhere and shock us like nothing we’ve ever seen or read or heard before. The greater truth is that everything—every painting, every movie, every play, every song—comes out of something that precedes it. It’s a chain of human responses. The beauty of art and the power of art is that it can never be standardized or mechanized. It has to be a human exchange, passed down hand to hand, or else it’s not art. It’s endlessly old and endlessly new at the same time, because there are always young artists hearing and seeing work that’s come before them, getting inspired and making something of their own out of what they’ve absorbed.

  When you listen to Skip James singing “Devil Got My Woman” or Son House singing “Death Letter Blues” or John Lee Hooker laying down one of his snaking guitar figures, when you really listen—and believe me, it’s not hard, because this is music

  that grabs your full attention from the first note—you’re hearing something very precious being passed down. A precious secret. It’s there in all those echoes and borrowings, all those shared phrasings and guitar figures, all those songs that have passed down from singer to singer, player to player, sometimes changing along the way and becoming whole new songs in the process.

  What is that secret? Recently, I was shooting a scene for the film I contributed to this series. I was in a studio with Corey Harris and Keb’ Mo’, two extraordinary young musicians, and we were talking about Robert Johnson. Corey made a very important point: Throughout the history of African-American music, right up through the present, there’s a distinction between the emotions of the singer and the words he or she is singing. The words of “Hellhound on My Trail” may be about a jealous woman sprinkling hot foot powder around her lover’s door, but Robert Johnson is singing something else, something mysterious, powerful, undefinable. The words don’t contain the emotion, they’re a vehicle for it. Corey called this a “language of exclusion,” which can be found in the poetry of Langston Hughes just as easily as it can be found in the music of Howlin’ Wolf or Lightnin’ Hopkins. It was and still is a way of maintaining dignity and identity, both individual and collective, through art; and as we all know (or should know), it originated as a response to the very worst forms of oppression: slavery, sharecropping, and the racism that’s never left American society. The precious secret is simply that part of the human soul which can never be trampled on or taken away. It’s brought more to our culture than any of us ever could have imagined. It’s tragic that racism continues to thrive in the western world, but it’s also utterly ridiculous, because there’s no one who hasn’t profited from the spirit that animates this music. Without it, this culture of ours, so rich and varied, would be nothing.

  A few years ago, we initiated this project—these films and this book of essays to accompany them—as a celebration of a great American art form. It became many other things along the way a series of inquiries, tracing the different emotional and geographical paths the music took; a memorial to many great artists who have sadly passed away; a reflection on time and on the many ways the past can both haunt and enrich the present; and for all of us, for Wim Wenders, Charles Burnett, Richard Pearce, Marc Levin, Mike Figgis, Clint Eastwood, and myself, something deeply personal. For my own part, it became a reflection on an essential part of my creative process.

  Music has played a key role in my life and my work. When I’m preparing a movie, it’s only when I hear the music in my head that the movie comes together for me, when I really start to see it. I could picture Gangs of New York’s opening scene only after I first heard Otha Turner’s hypnotic music. Even when the music doesn’t make it into the finished product, it’s there behind everything I do. When I look at the wonderful films made by the other directors who took part in this series, I know that it’s the same for them. And the blues has always held a special place for me. It’s the most physical music I know, with an emotional undertow that’s unlike absolutely anything else. When you listen to the otherworldly voice of Robert Johnson hitting those words “blues fallin’ down like hail,” or Howlin’ Wolf riding the rhythm of “Spoonful” with such amazing

  ease and more than living up to his name at the same time, or Skip James lamenting love, the worst of all human afflictions, in “Devil Got My Woman,” or Son House hugging the memory of his dead lover for dear life in the tightly coiled “Death Letter Blues,” you’re hearing something from way, way back, something eternal, elemental, something that defies rational thought, just like all the greatest art. You have to let it grab hold of you. You have no choice. When I made The Last Waltz, I had the privilege of filming Muddy Waters, and I still get an electric thrill just thinking about his amazing rendition of “Mannish Boy,” the pleasure he took in every word, every phrase, the authority he commanded. How many times had he sung that song before that night? And there he was, singing it again, like it was the first time, or the last. I realized that the blues could do that for you, and for us. It gets at the essential.

  I hope you enjoy watching these films as much as we all enjoyed making them. And when you read these beautiful essays by all these terrific artists, historians, and writers, you’ll feel the passion that this music can arouse. We turned to some of the best writers we could think of—Elmore Leonard, Studs Terkel, David Halberstam, the great biographer and critic Chris Farley, and the wonderful historian Peter Guralnick, among them—and they all came through out of sheer love for the music.

  Most of all, we want you to listen to the music. If you already know the blues, then maybe this will give you a reason to go back to it. And if you’ve never heard the blues, and you’re coming across it for the first time, I can promise you this: Your life is about to change for the better.

  Foreword

  “Ain’t but one kind of
blues and that consists of a male and female that’s in love …”—Son House

  It’s hard to explain, describe, or write about the blues. Like listening to the sound of sex through a thin motel wall, you know the blues when you hear it, even if you would be hard-pressed to describe exactly what is going on. What you do know is that it stirs you and that it keeps you up at night.

  From the moment when Margaret Bodde (Martin Scorsese’s producer at Cappa Productions) invited me to join this project, I had been giving some thought to what kind of book might accompany the film series. On the one hand, we faced the same problem confronted in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee, who agonized over the fact that a literary essay could never capture the pain of rural poverty as much as a collection of weathered shingles, bent lead forks, and torn window blinds. There were also more fundamental questions: What is it about the blues singer and her song that is inextricably linked? Perhaps it’s the hardship that so many of these artists had to overcome; perhaps, even further back, is the fact that the roots of the blues trace back to Africa and Were born of the horrors of slavery. But the geography of the blues is both a route to a particular time and place as well as a road map to the human soul. That ability of the music to connect with universal feelings of desire, love, loss, and bitter disappointment makes the blues fertile soil for so many of our greatest writers.

  The search for that emotional truth brought us back to the parable of the motel room. Being both in the moment and apart from it is the peculiar territory of literature. The quest of the writer seemed to

  offer the best way to herald both the personal and impressionistic character of the films as well as the music they celebrate. The book would rejoice in the literary power of the blues.

  It is a rich tradition. Bluesmen—from the griots of Mali to the itinerant poets of the Mississippi Delta—are more than musicians; they are storytellers. And blues lyrics are underappreciated as poetry. Hearing them in the context of a song, they carry an incantatory, if momentary, emotional power. But on the printed page, a song like Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” has the lasting literary impact of a poem that seems as if it were written not just for the elusive pleasures of a juke joint on a Saturday night but to express, in a way that speaks to eternity, a personal reckoning with matters of longing and fear, as well as deep observations about the existential tension of being alive: caught between a restless soul and a hunger for peace.

  So, too, there is a great literary tradition of writing about the blues. To that end, Peter Guralnick has culled an extraordinary collection of stories and reminiscences from musicians—from John Lee Hooker to Eric Clapton—and authors like Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Stanley Booth, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. In addition, we commissioned original pieces from the likes of David Halberstam, Suzan-Lori Parks, Elmore Leonard, Touré, Luc Sante, John Edgar Wideman, Studs Terkel, and Greg Tate. We did not necessarily seek out music experts; we looked for people who felt passionately about the music and who had a story to tell. We wanted personal impressions. In that quest, we mirrored the goals of Marty’s film series: a kind of freewheeling film festival, which, taken together, provides a wonderful sense of the full sweep of the life of the blues. The approach of each film is personal, idiosyncratic, steered by the passions of the individual directors.

  This approach is critical to understanding both the films and this book. Neither intends to be the last word on the subject. Rather, they are “first words,” agents provocateurs meant to stir audiences and readers to explore the emotional territory of the blues on their own. To aid in that effort, this book offers a series of fundamental and evocative blues portraits by Christopher John Farley (including tips for further listening), as well as a framing essay by Bob Santelli. In filmmaking terms, Bob offers the elegant wide shot that frames the more emotional close-ups. And veteran editors Holly George-Warren and HarperCollins’s Dan Conaway have been gracious and indefatigable producers, finding a way, against all odds, to create something real and lasting out of quixotic expectations.

  We have all been alone in that motel room with the thin walls. Hearing the cries of pleasure next door is painful because it is impossible to go to sleep while someone else is having so much fun. Yet those sounds also stir imaginary pleasures. And so this book is a showcase of how the blues has awakened the literary imagination of a group of musicians and writers who have tried to explore that feeling of the blues, an inexorable yearning that, in the words of Muddy Waters, just can’t be satisfied. It’s not exactly like being in the room next door. But, through the skill of the writers contained herein, it’s the next best thing.

  Alex Gibney

  Series Producer

  Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey

  New York City, May 2003

  Writing About the Blues: The Process

  It starts before conception, before gestation, before birth. It continues in classrooms (where your history is rarely told), during traffic stops (license and registration please), and job interviews (we’re not looking for anyone right now). It carries on at polling places, Supreme Court conferences, and barbershops. There’s the music of course—Bessie Smith, Son House, Robert Johnson. There’s also the words of those who came before—Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston. Inspiration hangs on museum walls—Jacob Lawrence, William H. Johnson—and is served up by the plate, with a side of black-eyed peas, at Spoonbread and the Shark Bar. There’s the discipline of immersion—knowing the players, the songs, the backgrounds—but there is no process. There is only life, lived, set to music, rendered into words.

  Christopher John Farley

  New York, May 2003

  An Introductory Note By Peter Guralnick

  Picking out the pieces for the anthology portion of this book was a labor of love—but it was hard work, too. There wasn’t enough room! And as I was forced to leave out one after another of my favorites, in the end I just had to rationalize that after all this was an introduction (although what comfort can a rationalization like that ever give?) and that it was intended most of all to give a taste of a world so rich, so alive, so full of what James Baldwin calls “a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster” that how could it ever be fully contained within the page of a book?

  Well, nice try—but the point for me was to find work that could begin to suggest some of the dimensions of that world, work that could reflect and refract the spirit of the blues. So that whether it is William Faulkner describing the uplifting power of a black church service, literally from the outside, or James Baldwin, a onetime boy preacher, passionately invoking it from within; whether it is Ralph Ellison bringing to broad metaphorical life the already vivid myth of real-life blues singer Peetie Wheatstraw, or Eudora Welty transmuting the experience of seeing pianist Fats Waller perform in a roadhouse in Jackson, Mississippi (“I tried to write my idea of the life of the traveling artist and performer—not Fats Waller himself but any artist—

  in the alien world”), the reader takes away something far deeper and more spiritual than a mere recitation of the facts.

  Stanley Booth’s brilliantly evocative description of Memphis bluesman Furry Lewis going to work as a street sweeper for the City Sanitation Department at three each morning, coupled with Johnny Shines’ poetic portrait of Robert Johnson, with whom he traveled in the thirties; Johnson’s own lyrics, along with Langston Hughes’ revelatory conjunction of the music and the Movement in “Dream Boogie”; Zora Neale Hurston’s uninhibited embrace of “the muck,” which in Their Eyes Were Watching God amounts to the blues life (“I am not tragically colored,” she wrote in A 1927 essay. “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that Nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal”)—all of these, I hope, suggest just a little of the resilience and diversity, the spontaneity and indomitability of a culture that simply refused to be defined either by what it lacked or b
y the moralistic judgments of its oppressors.

  That culture today remains just as vital and alive as ever, and if the blues seems to have run its course as a twelve-bar form, the blues spirit surely has not. I think much of that spirit comes through here, but more significantly I hope you will find some of that element so uniquely central not just to the blues but to the whole African-American cultural tradition, that unvarnished, unblinking, unapologetic embrace of the human experience in all of its manifold aspects and dimensions.

  A CENTURY OF THE BLUES

  By Robert Santelli

  1903. The place: Tutwiler, a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta, halfway between Greenwood and Clarksdale. It is dusk, and the sky is rich in summer color. The slight breeze, when it visits, is warm and wet with humidity.

  William Christopher Handy, better known by his initials, W.C., waits on the wooden platform for a train heading north. Handy, the recently departed bandleader for Mahara’s Minstrels, a black orchestra that mostly plays dance music and popular standards of the day, is a learned musician who understands theory and the conventions of good, respectable music. He had joined the Minstrels as a cornet player when he was twenty-two years old and traveled widely with them: the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Cuba. In time, he became their band director. Now, some seven years later, here he is, fresh from agreeing to lead the black Clarksdale band Knights of Pythias.

  The train is late, so Handy does the only thing he can do: He waits patiently, trying to stay cool, passing the time with idle thoughts, and scanning the scenery for anything that might prove the least bit interesting. Finally succumbing to boredom, Handy dozes off, only to be awakened by the arrival of another man who sits down nearby and begins to play the guitar. His clothes tattered and his shoes beyond worn, the man is a sad specimen, especially compared to Handy, whose clothes bespeak a black sophistication not often seen in these parts.