Black History : DEMYTHOLOGIZING THE BLUES...

halleluJah!

MississippiRed said:
I just re-read that first article again and am shocked to find out old boy is Black......I thought a white cat wrote that......he's sadly mistaken on a lot of points.....one being the fact that basically it was the poor imitation and corruption of Blues that lead to the demise of Blues.....unless of course you like Kenny Wayne Sheppard or the Yardbirds or any number of white Blues musicians out and about now.....the quality of the music the soul of the Blues is all but gone like some old folk at home used to say...white mane ain't got no soul....(in more ways than one)

and yeah Brother Isaiah....I must've missed London the first time or my mind just couldn't conceive of someone actually putting London and Blues in the same sentence.....on W.C.Handy...great musician but I've never liked his music much and never considered him a major contributor to the type of Blues I love the Country Blues....Handy even called Blues Primitive at one point.....he was the self-claimed "Father of the Blues"....even though his first exposure was at a performance where he was playing for white folk and they asked him to play what they called (your music) when he couldn't and his band took a brake some Brothers got on stage and played Country Blues which forced the classically trained Handy to take another look at the Blues.....but even then he didn't really get it until that day in 03 at a train station where he heard a taildragger singing bout the Southern crossing the dog....Handy was never a Bluesman in my estimation he is thought as such by some due to commercial success among whites and well to do Blacks he didn't love the Blues because of what they were he did the Blues because of what it could do for his pockets....this cat was playing what he and whites called Blues with an orchestra..an orchestra..come on ....and as such I get kind of hot whenever folk through Handy in the mix......

His assumption that Blues needed a revival which of course was led by intellectual Blacks and whites is way off.....no revival was needed because to the regular Black folk in the South they never died..folk still played Blues in the jukes and thangs and we still listened I think the more correct statement would have been"people like myself finally opened our eyes and ears to the foundation of modern American music and in an attempt to not look behind the times or hypocritcal of what we for so long put at the bottom of the musical and traditional pile we had to now claim it as our own and put out a revisionist history making us look as smart and forward as we think we are"....now that's better......

You're right though Isaiah....don't nobody care bout Blues,Jazz,Jug,Zydeco,Work Songs,Stompin non of that....it's too backward and makes Black folk look bad so they say sets us back makes us look ignorant.....if that's the case set me back and make me look bad....send be back to when Black folk in a community looked out for each other and each others kids and thangs now we act like we can't ebem speak to one another....just be looking crazy when I say "hey" or chunk the deuce at em....we just ain't got no home training no mo.... :)....guess we done give that up like we gave up our Southern music and Tradition....



MississippiRed

Right on point!
:great:

Man, now I want to move even deeper South!
 
Let me comment on this W C Handy controversy that's floating around. When Black Jazz or Blues musicians talk about the ancestral legacy of "actual musicians", you rarely here the name WC Handy, if at all; not to dishonor this brothers greatness or contributions.

W C Handy was more so a great Black composer…A good example is his St Louis Blues. It wasn’t that he was a great Blues performer, because who talks about him as a musician? He became well know because he wrote some well-known recorded pieces.

Black music has its power based on the way we interpret melodies and form and not just on its compositional or orchestral merits alone. Blues and Jazz musicians embrace the sound and are absolutely and completely immersed, imposing their spirit, experiences and soul into the instrument and music, becoming one with music in the tradition of African. A good example is that, we really only know WC Handy compositions via the great Black musicians who interpreted them. St Louis Blues has been song and played by all the great Black musicians, from down-home Delta Blues musicians to Louis Armstrong to modern Jazz cats and many others.

To see some more powerful examples of how Black musicians and singers Africanize almost everything they interpret or touch…The call and response Dr. Watts spirituals singed in the Black Baptist church were originally written by a European or early American white Minster named Dr. Watt, but they are some of the most Africanized spirituals in the Black church. Most people don’t know that the lyrics to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is from a poem written by a white Jewish poet.

A lot of Be Bop musicians used compositions of white composers, stripped of their melodies down to the “structural bone” and then they replaced simple melodies with very complex lines that made Be Bop the music that it was and is. Summertime is another example of this.

We Africanize everything that comes in contact with us…we are the soul of the music.
 
Sun Ship said:
Let me comment on this W C Handy controversy that's floating around. When Black Jazz or Blues musicians talk about the ancestral legacy of "actual musicians", you rarely here the name WC Handy, if at all; not to dishonor this brothers greatness or contributions.

W C Handy was more so a great Black composer…A good example is his St Louis Blues. It wasn’t that he was a great Blues performer, because who talks about him as a musician? He became well know because he wrote some well-known recorded pieces.

Black music has its power based on the way we interpret melodies and form and not just on its compositional or orchestral merits alone. Blues and Jazz musicians embrace the sound and are absolutely and completely immersed, imposing their spirit, experiences and soul into the instrument and music, becoming one with music in the tradition of African. A good example is that, we really only know WC Handy compositions via the great Black musicians who interpreted them. St Louis Blues has been song and played by all the great Black musicians, from down-home Delta Blues musicians to Louis Armstrong to modern Jazz cats and many others.

To see some more powerful examples of how Black musicians and singers Africanize almost everything they interpret or touch…The call and response Dr. Watts spirituals singed in the Black Baptist church were originally written by a European or early American white Minster named Dr. Watt, but they are some of the most Africanized spirituals in the Black church. Most people don’t know that the lyrics to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” is from a poem written by a white Jewish poet.

A lot of Be Bop musicians used compositions of white composers, stripped of their melodies down to the “structural bone” and then they replaced simple melodies with very complex lines that made Be Bop the music that it was and is. Summertime is another example of this.

We Africanize everything that comes in contact with us…we are the soul of the music.

Great points in your post, brother SUNSHIP! Can I add some info I gleaned from THE LAND WHERE THE BLUES BEGAN, as well as, some other books I've read on the subject???(smile!)

Firstly, Africans, it is said, made and make music for movement, for commentary on social and politcal issues and events in our lives... This might explain why African Americans moved away from JAZZ, which became a far more cerebral, sit-down, and listen music in the mid to late 1940's, as BEBOP became more popular among the musicians...

Africans use instruments as an extension of the human voice, as well as, the animal kingdom, thus we had talking drums in Africa, as well as, I learned recently, stringed instruments used to replicate the tonality of African speech and languages...

Africans, as you pointed out brother Sun, Africanized the playing of European instruments not only by rhythmic approach, but by using them to "talk", or replicate our lexicon, which is essential to Black Music in the United States....

Africans think it unimaginative to frontally attack a subject in speech, or a note in music, thus we get our tendency toward a rhythmically cadenced speech and voice/instrumental pattern... Whomever among the speakers or musicians masters this art is considered someone to be honored... This feeds, also, the powerful improvisational current in African and African Diasporan music, the tendency toward spontanaiety and virtuosity in Black Music...


Back with some more later...


Peace!
Isaiah
 
Isaiah said:
Great points in your post, brother SUNSHIP! Can I add some info I gleaned from THE LAND WHERE THE BLUES BEGAN, as well as, some other books I've read on the subject???(smile!)

Firstly, Africans, it is said, made and make music for movement, for commentary on social and politcal issues and events in our lives... This might explain why African Americans moved away from JAZZ, which became a far more cerebral, sit-down, and listen music in the mid to late 1940's, as BEBOP became more popular among the musicians...

Africans use instruments as an extension of the human voice, as well as, the animal kingdom, thus we had talking drums in Africa, as well as, I learned recently, stringed instruments used to replicate the tonality of African speech and languages...

Africans, as you pointed out brother Sun, Africanized the playing of European instruments not only by rhythmic approach, but by using them to "talk", or replicate our lexicon, which is essential to Black Music in the United States....

Africans think it unimaginative to frontally attack a subject in speech, or a note in music, thus we get our tendency toward a rhythmically cadenced speech and voice/instrumental pattern... Whomever among the speakers or musicians masters this art is considered someone to be honored... This feeds, also, the powerful improvisational current in African and African Diasporan music, the tendency toward spontanaiety and virtuosity in Black Music...


Back with some more later...


Peace!
Isaiah

You got this thread movin' Brother Isaiah...!

Brother every time you post some comments, it gets my mind churning. I like what I'm hearing, but I have some other insight on why our people left the music (Jazz) as far listening, which was a move that was as late, as the late 70's.

I’ll at least say this much, Disco and Rap didn't help...but I’ll have to get into this deeper later


Peace!
 
omowalejabali said:
As a former Trumpet player, I stopped listening to jazz for a while after the death of Woody Shaw (1989). I got turned off when the critics started propping up a young Wynton Marsalis and then I would have folks continually asking me what I thought about him, finding it difficult to answer considering the disdain that Wynton openly displayed for Miles Davis. I believe this was around 1979 that i started listening more to reggae, and later "rap music" until the mid 90s when I started performing again, but on Cornet instead of trumpet..

Brother O and Brother Sun, sorry about that... Reading my post again, I see where what I said can easily be misconstrued, because it was badly written(smile!)

When I talked of AFrican Americans moving away from Jazz as a popular music, I speak of it's origins as a Dance and Party music, with none of the kind of deep, cerebral stuff that came out of the the Dizzy-Parker School of the late '30's and '40's... Mind you, we're all still listening to the "deep, cerebral" stuff into the 21st century, because we've got a tremendous variety to draw from... In the 1940's it was Jazz, the Blues, and the new JUMP music that was happening... This JUMP music, later called Rhythm & Blues, was what it name implied - JUMPIN'! - and we all know what that means... Hence, our people began to gravitate toward the party music, more devoted to making the crowd move...

It's interesting, too, that the musicians themselves were making their move away from the big band stuff that was coming to be dominated by White boys... Like our young people today, young Parker/Gillespie/Monk/Roach, and others, were making their own sound... I think it was far too complex for what African Americans WANTED then or now... What do you cats think about that???

Brother O, I gotta say that I agree with you regarding WYNDTON, and my musician friends aren't too fond of the cat either... Guy is a good musician, but the way he cuts down other artists can easily be misconstrued... I heard the comments about Miles back in the day, and I found them self-serving then, but a little more understandable now... Wynton is a purist - and extreme purist... I give him props because he has made his mark doing things on his own terms... His musicianship, however, has never been in a class with Miles - never...


Peace!
isaiah
 

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