Word: bluesmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This music is raw, rude and visceral and is delivered with relentless power. Yet in its own way it reflects the hard, fast, brutal realities of the modern urban ghetto which produced it. This music reached its peak in the late fifties and early sixties when Bluesmen like Elmore James, Sonny Boy Wiliamson, The Muddy Waters Band, B. B. King and others sold thousands of records in the black ghettos of the North and dusty darktowns of the South. Depits its success in black communiites, it was considered too raw, earthy and sexual for the white teenage audience...
...this began to change with such English rock 'n' roll groups as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Animals, who made a point of crediting their sources?not only R & B figures such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but also country and urban bluesmen such as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker and B. B. King. "Until the Beatles exposed the origins," says Waters, "the white kids didn't know anything about the music. But now they've learned that it was in their backyard all the time...
Typical of the new bluesmen is Mississippi-born Junior Wells, 31, who was raised in Memphis and moved to Chicago when he was twelve. As he tells it, his musical career was launched when he was arrested for stealing a $2 "harp" (harmonica) that a pawnbroker refused to sell him for $1.50; the judge listened to a sample of his playing, then gave the pawnbroker the other 50? and dismissed the case. Blues, says Junior, "gets in my whole body, my whole soul. It knocks me out. It kills me. If I couldn't do that, I wouldn...
...Otis Rush, 32, another Mississippian, is the smoothest of the new city stylists. He eschews the leaping and gyrating that other bluesmen indulge in because "anybody can jive around like that." Instead, he takes the "more soulful" approach by standing stock-still and concentrating on his inventive, left-handed guitar playing. His voice is lighter and cleaner-textured than those of most blues singers, but when it swoops and curls around a blues line, it carries an electrifying current of feeling...
...Blues, about his brother in Viet Nam ("You know they say you don't have no reason to fight, baby,/ But Lord, Lord, you think you're right"). But social comment is only a faint note in the sound of Chicago blues. For the most part, the bluesmen rework the traditional twelve-bar songs that have three-line verses dealing with common troubles, travels, cars, relief checks, jails, loneliness or joys. Above all, they sing about the vagaries of physical love, since, as Junior Wells puts it, "a woman is the biggest damn trouble you could ever have...