Mississippi-born blues belong to all the world
By Andrew Dansby
Houston Chronicle
Note: this article is from April 29, 2015
Where are the blues?
They're in Mississippi, in particular. Blues music as we know it makes more sense after a drive through the state, especially along U.S. Route 61 - a highway Bob Dylan sang about.
Mississippi has done an admirable job planting markers that testify to its musical heritage. Scores of signs tell stories about blues musicians like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, "Mississippi" John Hurt, Hubert Sumlin and Furry Lewis.
Other markers point out important cultural locations. "Catfish Alley" in Columbus, Miss., is where fishermen would bring their catches to cook and sell while musicians played; the Rabbit Foot Minstrels staged shows at a theater in Port Gibson. Perhaps most important is Dockery Plantation, the closest thing we may ever have to a "birthplace of the blues." Many players, including Patton, earned wages there by day and performed music by night.
Today, the blues are most everywhere beyond Mississippi, too. They may not sound exactly as they once did, but the music recorded decades ago by those Mississippi blues men seeded nearly a century of recorded music.
MORE INFORMATION
ZZ Top and Jeff Beck
When: 7 p.m. Saturday
Where: Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, 2005 Lake Robbins, The Woodlands
Tickets: $25-$99.50; 281-364-3024,woodlandscenter.org
Bob Dylan
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Bayou Music Center, 520 Texas
Tickets: $59.50-$89.50; 713-230-1600,livenation.com
Gregg Allman
When: 8 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Stafford Centre, 10505 Cash, Stafford
Tickets: $50-$125; 281-208-6500,staffordcentre.com
Jimbo Mathus
When: 5:30 p.m. Thursday
Where: Cactus Music, 2110 Portsmouth
Free
Steve Earle
When: 7:30 p.m. May 12
Where: House of Blues, 1204 Caroline
Tickets: $20-$35; 888-402-5837, hob.com
The next few weeks in Houston offer a number of diverse rock 'n' roll acts offering their mutations of the blues. That their ages are so tightly clustered speaks to the revelation of the blues as it circulated during the 1950s and 1960s.
Minnesota native Dylan, who plays the Bayou Music Center next week, is 73. The three members of ZZ Top, all from Texas, are all 65. They perform Saturday at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion with Jeff Beck, a 70-year-old Brit. Gregg Allman - whose military family moved around the South - plays the Stafford Centre Wednesday. He's 67.
Cultural appropriation is a touchy subject. The financial side of the recording industry was clearly uneven during those decades. White businessmen offered up-front money and took back-end payments for publishing and royalties from sales by black musicians. And white musicians enamored with the blues clearly were able to cash in, in a way that black blues musicians could not. Mance Lipscomb, the great Navasota songster, shouldn't have had to trade his art to get dental work done. But he did.
From a creative standpoint, though, the evolution of the blues is as logical as any other music's. ZZ Top singer and guitarist Billy Gibbons, the son of an orchestra conductor, put it well in a song: "I'm shuffling through the Texas sand, but my head's in Mississippi."
Like the other acts performing in Houston soon, ZZ Top used the blues as a point of embarkation: boots in Texas, head in Mississippi, three chords, with a heavy emphasis on the boogie. Gibbons, singer-bassist Dusty Hill and drummer Frank Beard grew up in a rich blues scene in Texas. The music got into their bones. They've spent nearly 50 years mutating it, much like other white performers who lived part of the '60s in Houston, including Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle.
Earle is a particularly interesting case because, like Gibbons, his formative years were spent listening to both blues performers and the British guitarists who emulated them.
As much as the music has been studied, written about and shared, it still possesses a mystery that brings these guys back.
"Gibbons said on that show, 'Sonic Highways,' people approach the blues and try to play it because it looks easy," Earle said about "Terraplane," his new blues record, which he'll draw from May 12 at House of Blues. "And it's not. I'm not the first rock singer to make a blues record. Bob Dylan's been doing it for a long time. But doing it, you're cutting things back. It's like being issued the 32-color crayon box, and then they take away everything but six colors. It was a real challenge."
He also acknowledged the blues' influence on virtually all American vocal music that followed. "People say Robert Johnson went to the crossroads," he said. "It's a good legend. But it's a legend. He's as important as he is because he wrote seven or eight of the most important songs in the genre and created the template for nearly all songs in the genre. Almost all blues and rock songs are Robert Johnson songs, with very few exceptions."
The blues played heavily into some of Dylan's best-known albums in the '60s. And in 2001 he released "Love and Theft," a title that could apply to all of the above-mentioned musicians' relationship to the blues. Some of his tips of the fedora were to the music itself. Others were more obvious, like the song titled "High Water (for Charley Patton)."
Venerable as Dylan, et al., are, they're not blues guys as much as they're children or stepchildren of the blues.
Jimbo Mathus, a Mississippi native who plays his second Houston show Thursday, performs music that by all measures would be called rock 'n' roll. But he said the blues is part of his DNA: It's all part of a folk-music tradition of taking something old and trying to restate it as something new.
"Folk music lives as long as people who see and hear and breathe interpret things - as long as they find ways to integrate modern life into the roots of American music," he said.
Mathus' childhood nanny was the daughter of Charley Patton.
Patton's name bubbles up repeatedly for good reasons. He was born in the late 1800s - possibly of mixed racial ancestry - and died in 1934. Patton is a crucial figure in American music, having made some of the most important early blues records, which still sound remarkable and vital today, even though technology was primitive at the time.
We have little biographical information about him, which provides mystique to the bedrock of his small discography. Patton's songs are wildly varied, and by no means emblematic of the clichéd view of the blues as music made of three chords and woe.
Which isn't to say they don't contain hard times, but the blues also needed to be uplifting to get people dancing on Saturday nights. The strife is a thread, but so are joy and perseverance. Patton's music is visceral, barked and yelped vocals with tempos that shift at odd times.
If one person picks up a Patton record because of Dylan or Mathus, if ZZ Top's show prompts one person to look into Robert Petway - another mysterious figure whose "Catfish Blues" the band has been covering lately - these musicians will have done some small service to the music.
Failing that, they've still participated in a process that brought the music to them, worked with it and passed it on to the next guy with a guitar.