Though they have been root and center of jazz and most American popular music for many decades, the blues brewed in the 1960s to a degree and in a manner as perhaps never before. As part of the great revival of interest in America's traditional folk music in the late 1950s. an appreciable and sympathetic audience for the traditional country blues was created. Triggered by the pio — neering book length studies, "The Country Blues" by Samuel Charters In 1969 and "Blues Fell This Morning" by British blues writer Paul Oliver In 1960, serious attention was begun to be paid the archaic blues styles, and artists, many of whom were sought out, re-discovered, re-recorded (often with a frequency far beyond their ability to sustain), and introduced to the new, adulatory folk music audience. A circuit of folk music clubs, coffee houses, and university and "festival" stages rapidly developed, and many an aged blues veteran suddenly found himself in the midst of a renewed career in the twilight of his life.
But the music has also been revealed as a living continuum, thanks to recordings — such as this album — made in the Sixties which have introduced the music of a large number of carriers of the state's characteristic musical traditions. The most notable new performer of this blues renaissance was the gifted, exciting Fred McDowell, who sang and played as though time had stood still, so fully had his powerful music been shaped by the old precepts. And after him comes a large body of singers, guitarists, harmonica players, violinists etc., all of whose music is firmly allied to the oldest strains of the Mississippi blues. Most of these performers were older than forty years the last generation of Mississippians to have grown to maturity free of the influences of the mass communications media of radio, records, films and television. For them, music was still largely something to be self-generated in the family circle or for friends and neighbors; moreover the music they created was by and large still shaped by the older traditions.
Such to the music contained in this album .All the performers were over forty: most of them were amateur music makers for whom music provided a release from the day-to-day tensions of earning a living, served as catharsis and furnished a ready means of maintaining identity in an alien world. It must be pointed out that the bulk of the recordings comprising this set were not made in Mississippi, they ware recorded mainly in Chicago and St.Louis, northern industrial cities to which a huge number of Mississippi blacks immigrated in the 1940s to staff the factories and industries of the war elfort. Most have remained. And they have been remarkably successful in maintaining the older musical values of their native state — this in spite of mass dosages of alternative, and often conflicting, musical fare. Part of the reason is. of course, that many of these oioer Mississippi reared blues performers were simply not virtuosic enough to learn the supercharged new blues styles of the postwar years Hence the survival of a great number of prewar — even archaic — playing and singing styles in the industrial cities of the North.
Likewise Bert and Russ Logan, uncles of the wandering Mississippi bluesman Big Jos Williams, preserved an approach that was at least as old as their close to fifty years experience as performers Williams himself made remarkably few concessions to musical trends that occured since be look up guitar in bis native Crawford in the early part of this century. Nor had age in any way dulled the strength or intensity of his performance skills if anything, hi fact, he was even more incisive and skilled a musician when these recordings were made, than ever before, as he repeatedly demonstrates throughout this colIection. He surrounded himself with a group of younger bluesmen who, like he, continued to profess allegiance to the oldest blues traditions of their state.
Goot Venson took up blues harmonica at the age of eight in his native Belzoni; though he became a Chicagoan, his singing and ptlaying — at 53 — remained true to their origins Fiddler Jimmy Brown, a native of Jackson, and harmonica player Willie Lee Harris, originally from Artesia, both lived and worked in St.Louis where they continued, to play with Williams whenever his round of traveling took him there, usually several times a year. Another St.Louie resident was Buby McCoy, then a 45-year-ofd housewife who hailed from BooneviIIe, near Tupelo. Her superb moving singing vividly conjures up the ghost of Bessie Tucker, whose recordings exerted a profound influence on the younger woman.
Also residing in St.Louis at the time were singer-guitarist Arthur Weston, whose crude, stinging music was totally shaped by its point of origin, and harmonica player George Robertson, onto whose basic Mississippi inflected mouth-harp style was grafted a strongly felt influence from Sonny Boy Williamson, the popular blues recording artist who died in 1948 Blind Chicago street-siager Jimmy Brewer, originally from Brookhaven, pays homage to the influential Tommy Johnson in his solo performance of Johnson's best-known song. Vicksburg native Johnny Young, more widely known as an exponent of the postwar Chicago blues style (itself deeply rooted in Mississippi) demonstrates his roots in a personal reworking of the Mississippi blues standard, "Pony blues." Another Chicagoan, Avery Brady — then 65 — likewise acknowledged his youth and musical upbringing in Garksdale in his strongly rhythmic guitar and painfilled singing on "I Don't Want Vou No More."
Arthur "Big Boy" Spires — from Yazoo City — and the late John Henry Miller — a native at Starkville — ware both representative of the older generation of Mississippi bluesmen yet both ovolved markedly satisfy ing approaches to the electric guitar, approaches in which the basic character of the older musical traditions has been handsomely retained
Pete Welding
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