GOT BLUES?

History, though easy to misunderstand, has substance that may keep generations-to-come with better self-awareness (instead of self-contamination).
Though things are meant to evolve and change, our understandings of the past can be easily skewed. Ghosts are so frequently disrespected in our cartoonish attempts to play dress up via songwriting and wardrobes, not that this is a horrible thing - the past is quite interesting, inspiring - but it would do us good to actually PAY ATTENTION to the root of things.


It's pretty well known that rock'n'roll came from the blues. Somewhere in the riffs of our current garage songs by 25-year-old white boys from the suburbs is an underlying spirit lurks around in our young American skulls:  a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a poor black man on a Southeast-style porch holding an instrument made of pure magick. Yes, this is a stereotype, but the IDEA behind the cliche should be honored as sacred stuff.


THE GUITAR CHANGED THIS ENTIRE COUNTRY. How many souls were saved by the golden sound that felt like the release from energies that bind us? How many kept keeping on and didn't die thanks to the emotional outlet of making music? How many empathized and aligned to THINK, PLAY, DANCE, SCREAM, SHAKE, LAUGH, KISS, CRY? No matter what, no matter how diluted/damaged, music possibly still saves some from insanity. Blues is based in that kind of transformation (possibly due to the emotional human response to the turmoil African Americans in the early 1900's endured). Since I don't really know much about blues and how its presence helped along rock-based music, I've gotten a friend to answer about what blues is, where it came from, and how it eventually morphed into rock'n'roll. George Asimakos, blues enthusiast and guitarist, shares his knowledge:
"From what I've read, blues originated as a result of like people hollering songs in the fields and shit like that. Some people say that it came from Africa. Blues and jazz were basically developing in the United States around the same time period - early 1900's. Jazz is associated with New Orleans and blues is more like the southeast - Georgia, the Carolinas, and Mississippi.



"Also, the whole 'lone blues guitar-man from the 1920's' thing is a myth. The only reason that those early blues recordings aren't by bands is because the record labels were too cheap to bring the whole band from Mississippi or wherever all the way to Chicago to record. They would just bring the one guy. Also, there were a handful of female-led blues bands playing in the 1920's before Charlie Patton and those other guys recorded.

"After WWII when electric guitars and amps got popular, that revitalized blues from around 1948 to about 1960. By the mid '60s the only black blues guys still selling records were like B.B. King and Bobby Bland. Black audiences were into like James Brown, Otis Redding, and stuff like that by then. Those styles are faster and are more about having a good time or loving someone.
"The postwar period is very similar to rock and roll. Ike Turner was on one of Otis Rush's first records in about 1956 which he did for Cobra Records, and that's a pure blues record. However, in 1951 he recorded "Rocket 88" which is pretty much straight rock and roll. "Rocket 88" is considered by some to be the first rock and roll song. So, blues was already entwined with rock and roll from the introduction of electric instruments. It was just a matter of time before it became its own style.

"There were basically three white bands playing pure blues in the mid-60's: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton in England, the Butterfield Blues Band in Chicago and Canned Heat out in California. They were all preservationists. That's the role that white people took playing pure blues from the mid-60's through the early 70's. The late 60's bands that were playing pure blues included Fleetwood Mac and Ten Years After in England as well as ZZ Top, The Allman Brothers, and some others in the US.


"As far as Led Zeppelin and others, I would include them in a category of crossover bands because they certainly weren't playing pure blues. Same with The Rolling Stones, CCR, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, and any garage bands. They were all doing different types of songs and the structure was branching out way beyond anything that a blues group would play. For instance, CCR does rockabilly, blues, rock and roll, and country. Zeppelin does all of that English folk type stuff as well as blues and heavy rock. The Beatles and The Stones did the same. So those bands were more versatile than, say, Canned Heat. They weren't pure blues like Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, and Butterfield. ZZ Top began as pure blues and branched out into other styles later on. Same with the Allman Brothers.

"Black Sabbath is a whole different story. They began as a blues group, but had already made the transition to pure heavy metal right on their first LP. I mean in 1970 they were like a fucking grenade going off or something. By the third LP they had detuned to C# standard. They were already doing stoner metal in like 1972. I'm digressing now.
"Ultimately, my point is that eventually the designation between rock and roll and blues became more and more distinct as the late-60's and early-70's 'crossover bands' became replaced by bands that were doing pure rock and roll without any pure blues songs. Also, the music that was considered 'rock and roll' was so unlike blues by the mid-70's that I would hesitate to say that some of the examples of rock and roll from that time period are blues-based at all."