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PBS Blues Epic and Our Blues Poetry Manifesto
About the Martin Scorcese PBS 7-Night Blues Epic I say ‘bully!’ Yeah, Martin is not the Blues. Right, some players are overlooked. Haven’t heard my favorite’s name. Well aint that just like life. Is. So, no mincing.
But a major thing came out of it which is I think the reality of Blues as more than a musical genre. That and some unworldly footage that was totally precious.
Blues is seen as a way of thinking. As a way of life. As a feeling [though Gatemouth Brown demurs ‘its not my feeling, it’s how I make you feel’]. No one single definition will stand, says Little Milton Campbell. But what comes out of this series is the truth I think that blues is a sensibility, a sense.
Said one of Mali musicians “it began the moment of melancholy.”
“It’s a world,” said Peter Guralnick.
And the show enforces the notion of blues as a poetic form.
The performances as captioned remind me of the days when you would dig to decipher, even slow down the Victrola, to hear the words. Robert Johnson was as involving as Shakespeare cause it had to be grabbed. The captioned performances havet he effect like Eric Sackheim’s book to impress the poetry of the words on the mind’s eye. Why didn’t they caption Van Morrison? That I don’t get. There’s that mincing.
Memorable to me when Dick Waters said of Skip James: “Skip worked in the abstract. He played in your head to the great beyond.”
This application of abstraction may be worth picking up on at a future point.
Taj Mahal talked about the accessibility of the blues players – and the natural inclination to ask where the wisdom of the music came from, before it might go away. That was a heck of a good point. Get with it, into it, and tell somebody. It’s going to live to the end of everybody, said Hubert Sumlin. There it is from an original source.
Related
Blues Poetry Manifesto circa 1995
Al Wilson crica 1999 |
