Endangered Blues Part IV: Big Biz Squashes Out Good Music

 This month Latin jazz musicians are suing the Recording Academy over a controversial decision to eliminate two dozen Grammy awards categories of ethnic and roots music

http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/record-labels/neil-portnow-on-latin-jazz-grammy-elimination-1005304552.story

Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich, just before the 2011 Chicago Blues Fest, shedded some light on the under-valuing of American roots music. Like many things it can be traced to the shortsighted non-leadership of big business.

HOWARD REICH , 21^st Century Blues: Can an Ancestral Art Form Survive? Chicago Tribune June 3, 2011 (print version June 5)

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-03/entertainment/ct-ae-0605-blues-three-generations-20110603_1_chicago-blues-festival-country-music-21st-century-blues

Reich quotes  singer Shemekia Copeland, age 32: "My big dream was to make blues music mainstream…I love the music so much, and I think it has a right to be just as big as, say, country music is. But, unfortunately, we just don't have the resources."

The infrastructure of music in America, Reich points out— the ways in which sounds are disseminated online, through the airwaves and via cable — gives little push to any musical genre that doesn't already command massive sales.  This doesn’t mean one can’t make money on blues, jazz, folk, Native American music—maybe just not millions. But who is to say what might be possible if promotion were put behind it?

"Why is the blues marginal? Because in America, everything is about what's new, what's new, what's new," Reich quotes Copeland, daughter of the late blues-guitar master Johnny "Clyde" Copeland. "They don't respect old people, they don't respect anything old. And it irritates me when I go to other places (such as Europe) and I see how they treat things, and how much they respect things. Here, it's like: Who's got the new album? Who's got the No. 1 thing? When's the new iPod 6 coming out?"

The irony is that all this new stuff is here today, gone tomorrow—while blues and other rooted music that expresses true human feelings, goes on for years and years.

Like Copeland, veteran Chicago singer-harmonica player Billy Branch — a generation older — also bristles at the neglect accorded this music, which is why he and others have been bringing it into the Chicago public schools for more than three decades. His Blues in the Schools program has introduced songs of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon and Big Walter Horton to kids who otherwise wouldn't hear them.

"It's about cultural heritage — that children don't know their past," Branch, 59, told Reich. "I have talked to every ethnic group on the planet. I've even done Blues in the Schools in Japan.  But in the case of younger African-American children in the inner city, they have very little to hold on to, and a lot of times they come in, their heads are down and they look sad. This isn't all the time or across the board. But the main thing I try to impart to them is that this is your people's music, and without this there would be no Beyonce, there would be no Michael Jackson.

Branch notes that the blues blossomed from the bloody fields of slavery. Ever since, the blues and the culture that created it have fought mightily to be heard.

"Willie Dixon sent a mimeographed letter to every member of Congress…(saying) there was a conspiracy to keep the blues off the radio," recalled Branch, who toured and recorded with Dixon for years.  "His reasoning was this: If it becomes apparent that my music is just as rich or valuable as your music — or even more so — then what basis do I have to discriminate against you?
"So he linked the culture and discrimination and social injustice to the lack of airplay of the blues. Which was pretty deep. Willie also used to say that we were fooled into believing that blues was low-class and dirty, lowdown music."

So this may be one reason blues men and women have gone along for years with their second class status, while the industry passes them by in favor of the bland, robotic, noisy, insulting trash that now fills the airways. Hiphop artists even complain that within their genre, thoughtful songs seem to get bypassed in favor of dirty lyrics.

 Maybe it’s time to quit accepting this state of things. Billy Branch tells young Black kids: "This is something to be proud of. Your people gave birth to this music we call the blues." 

All of us as Americans should lift up this music. These days, we need the blues to combat the blues being politically and economically forced upon us.  Shemekia says there are no “resources” to promote blues and soul music. But Frederick Douglass said power concedes nothing without a fight.  Maybe we need to demand a share of the pie.

Endangered Chicago Blues I: The Root

I.                   Blues is the Root          

Feeling vulnerable to the Great Recession and at the mercy of illogical governments and corporate bullies, we can all use a little musical relief. The futuristic writer Kurt Vonnegut, shortly before his death in 2007, called African American music “America’s greatest contribution to the world.” He added, “Blues is the remedy for a world-wide epidemic of depression.” 

Blues is music of survival. It’s about real feelings. It grew up from the ground. It gives voice to the human spirit.  As Chicago’s esteemed producer, composer and bass player, the late Willie Dixon, often said, “Blues is the root. Other music is the fruit.”  

Singing together about feelings, joys and sorrows, both in church and in the juke joint, helped African Americans in the early 20^th century South cope with long work hours, low pay, unfair and racist bosses. Blues shares one’s personal story with the community. Blues has a call and a response, a rhythm and a swing.  The music makes you feel better. Watch a blues audience, eyes half closed, tapping their toes—or in a lively mood, shouting out their comments on the singer’s story.

If it’s so good, why is real live heritage blues so hard to find?

Some say Chicago blues is dead. The British author of the definitive book Chicago Blues, was saying that already in 1972. It died the same year as America’s innocence, in 2001, when the city tore down the historic musical haunts, Maxwell Street and Gerri’s Palm Tavern.

Still, 10 years later, you can find African American bands playing to their neighborhood crowd in a handful of tiny juke joints on the West and South Side. A few musicians sling a guitar, bass or drumsticks in downtown clubs for mostly-white tourists, but they are underpaid. Why is the blues, the root of all rock’n’roll, R&B and parent of hiphop, revered around the world—barely visible in Sweet Home Chicago and other American cities?  Some possible answers:

As baby boomers growing up, we were exposed to all types of music on the radio:  classical, folk, bluegrass, R&B, jazz. It’s hard to tune in anything now except hiphop, rock, country, and a bit of Christian contemporary music. Some of the words are clever but the music is often very lame.  Most pop music these days is not created by artists, but manufactured by corporations who design and mass-test it to reach what they think appeals to the greatest number of people.

Many young people are not developing a taste for different kinds of music, because they get little or no instruction in music and art (or phys ed; and often no recess) in school, thanks to the No Child Left Behind law.  Students can find blues on the internet, including videos of Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Koko Taylor and Howlin’ Wolf—if they know to look for it. Unless they’ve seen the movie Cadillac Records, featuring Beyonce, many youth have never heard of the blues. 

American corporate culture constantly preaches the next new thing to buy. Music from the past is scorned. The media has reinforced this amnesia so many adults are no longer aware of our own cultural heritage. We forget to respect our elders and fail to inherit the musical soundtrack of their lives. Further impediments to both respecting older music and creating new include onerous performing arts licensing requirements and hassling of small restaurant music venues for large fees by  performing rights bureacracies like BMI, ASCAP and SESAC. (These organizations supposedly help songwriters get royalties when their work is performed, but what part of these royalties ever go to blues men and women, as opposed to major pop writers and singers?)

Despite these barriers, today’s kids are resilient, curious and open to anything that’s fun. When our traveling blues workshop, Chicago School of Blues, www.chicagoschoolofblues.org , shows a grade school class how to make up and sing a blues tune, they’ll catch the groove and throw in some rap rhymes. One South Side youngster observed, “This music is relaxing.” A seventh grader said, “I learned how to walk away from my problem and that blues can cool me down.” Starved for adult role models and relief from relentless standardized testing, the kids cheer when local professional blues men and women come to play.

In addition to the overall American neglect of history and the arts, there’s a racial dimension.  The natural progression of music being handed down in African American families and neighborhoods has been interrupted. And while some promoters in the majority European-American culture prize Black music, they don’t respect the people who are its creators. Disrespect and greed have led to the music ripoffs that nobody wants to talk about, but we must try to understand. I will address this history in the next column.