Charles Keil wrote the majority of Urban Blues (University of Chicago Press, 1966) as a master’s thesis in anthropology at Yale, when he was 25. An elegant, yet thoroughly academic work, it veers between contemporary, personal interpretations of Malcolm X and confident applications of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism while laying out interviews and impressionistic sketches of live gigs. All of this in a then unheard-of effort to analyze a contemporary musical idiom—electric blues.
In an encomium of Keil’s career in a 1998 issue of the Village Voice, Robert Christgau observed that Keil’s anthropology was itself really just an excuse to write about music. It’s true: as in many of the worthwhile products of academia, Keil is manifestly more interested in his subject than his praxis; but it’s significant that the devices of anthropology don’t seem to encumber him either—if anything, much of the persuasive power is conveyed by the terms of the study. Christgau contextualizes the book as “Laying out scholarly debts, pinpointing the mouldy-fig fallacies of the gullible blues buff Samuel Charters and the sacrosanct amateur culture theorist LeRoi Jones, offering up a credible phylogeny of blues and a knowledgeable account of the then uncodified concept of soul, and—crucially—paying detailed, candidly enthusiastic attention to both artists and fans, Keil not only broke academic ground but wrote more eloquently than all but a handful of the thousands who followed.”
Keil’s footnote about LeRoi Jones1 is typical:
Perhaps I should both mollify and amplify this accusation [about LeRoi Jones’ ethnic affectation] slightly with two brief but relevant comparisons. Jones’ more recent anti-white tirades and plays have stirred up some needed controversy but lack power when compared to the pro-black statements of Malcolm X. There is, I think an important difference between a man who burns up hatred as a fuel and one who parades and peddles the stuff as art—the pragmaticist who holds some things sacred, and the polemicist who finds all things profane. They are perhaps equally capable of dramatizing the terrors and atrocities that currently sustain the “American way of life,” but that man who can diminish some of the terror as he exposes it is at a premium. Similarly, men like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman who attain a certain hard-won serenity through their musical struggles should perhaps be differentiated from musicians like the late Eric Dolphy, whose scrambling, strident, and sometimes brilliant improvisations sounded like those of a driven man looking vainly for solid footing. Like Dolphy, Jones has often produced more fury than sound.
In the Paris Review, John Jeremiah Sullivan on a rediscovery of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away”:
you know me as a man not prone to get overly excited about digital-remastering projects, nevertheless there are instances in which the beauty of the original song lay precisely in a primary attempt to expose its elements, and in these cases the additional stripping away of hiss and other shit can be revelatory, or in this instance (Best Ever: Buddy Holly, Techniche 2009), transformative.
That plane crash was a Hindenburg of pop. It’s taken me into my midthirties to mentally recover the true damage of it from Don McLean’s rhymes. Ever really listen to “La Bamba”? You’ve probably unconsciously sold yourself on the idea that the Los Lobos version is slightly superior. Not so! It’s not the guitar, either, but the voice. When angels sing rock for fun they sound like Ritchie Valens. Did you know it’s Carol Kaye playing rhythm guitar there? Did you know Valens was seventeen when he died, that “La Bamba” hadn’t even been released yet? Snowy field in northern Iowa, flames.
If you listen to the live versions of “La Bamba,” Valens played it basically like a sped-up Mexican folk song. Only in the studio did the ecstatic thing happen—at the point of intersection. I read somewhere that Valens didn’t even like it.
On “Not Fade Away,” Jerry Allison plays a cardboard box (he’d ripped the idea from Buddy Knox’s lyrically creepy “Party Doll”). The beat is cartoonishly African. If you want to hear where it came from, listen to the song I hope to keep if the people in charge of the survival pod say you can keep only one, Charles Barnett’s “Run to My Jesus for Refuge.” Barnett was a Georgia man in his nineties. Alan Lomax met him at the end of a sand lane near the Sea Islands, right around the time Buddy Holly was making his song. Lomak asked, “Know Any Tunes?”. Barnett flipped a washtub over and started beating on it with two sticks, playing some of the most tenth-dimensional counterpoint you’ve ever heard, with galloping runs that suddenly freeze into cosmic pauses. “Mary, she wore a golden chain, / Every link was Jesus’ name. / I’m gonna run to my Jesus for refuge.” Supposedly Barnett could still jump into the air and click his heels together, at ninety-he-didn’t-even-know-what.
The Barnett tune, which is also incredible, is included in the post.
When we put out “Little Red Rooster,” a raw Willie Dixon blues with slide guitar and all, it was a daring move at the time, November 1964. We were getting no-no’s from the record company, management, everyone else. But we felt we were on the crest of a wave and we could push it. It was almost in defiance of pop. In our arrogance at the time, we wanted to make a statement. “I am the little red rooster / Too lazy to crow for day.” See if you can get that to the top of the charts, motherfucker. Song about a chicken. Mick and I stood up and said, come on, let’s push it. That is what we’re fucking about. And the floodgates burst after that, suddenly … And the record got to number one.
Delbert McClinton and the Ron-Dels put out a handful of 45s in the mid-60s. The second, “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go,” was cut in 1963, in an era where Texas seemed uniquely blessed at combining blues and country music: blues structure and sentiment were married to country subjects and instrumentation. This combination seemed on the whole less conscious than that of examples elsewhere—e.g., the brilliant, but more deliberate musicians at Muscle Shoals. (And in later decades, much of the work in this direction dressed itself a motley of the exterior tics and lyric tropes of both genres.) McClinton’s lyric is as simple as any: somewhat repetitively emphasizing the sense of desperation at the prospect of loss. It’s the strain in his voice, reinforced at intervals with harmony, that provides necessary dimension. I would contrast this with typical genre-form lyrics, which may be successful combinations of words and music, but fail to convey a particular sense of the speaker: they are songs—often good songs—but songs without a voice. McClinton connects.
McClinton was a professional musician from fifteen—not quite as prodigious as Doug Sahm1—at which point he was in a Ft. Worth house band backing Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Parker, and Bobby Bland. In a story recounted in Hit Parader he says:
One night we were playing a song called “Fanny Mae” by Buster Brown. We were backing him up and Jimmy Reed in the same night, and I had just bought me a harmonica because they were two of the best, ya know, and I was ready to learn. Well, we were sittin’ in the dressing room before the show—I didn’t drink at the time—but they were both passing a quart of Old Grand-Dad, and I was sittin’ in the middle helping em drink it—never did see the show.
But anyway the harmonica took him on a European tour for Bruce Channell’s “Hey Baby” in 1962, where he met the Beatles and, as quoted in Hit Parader “taught whichever one to play something on blues harp” (some other accounts have it as Lennon). A certain resemblance also follows between “If You Really Want” and the Beatles’ “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party.” Perhaps that was what helped it eventually hit Billboard, if two years after its initial release. It finally became something of a Texas country standard probably thanks to a version recorded by Waylon Jennings. But success eluded McClinton himself until the late-70s, when he penned “Two More Bottles Of Wine,” which became a number one hit for Emmylou Harris. And in the ’80s—on, as it happens, the Muscle Shoals label—his music became commercially successful but slackened compositionally, trading its hard-earned blues for what sounds to these ears like second-hand soul.
1. Sahm was a San Antonio blues-country musician asked on as a permanent member of the Grand Ole Opry while still in primary school. In fact, Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet covered this tune on their first LP, Mendocino — in 1969, by which point they were hippies and this song was firmly an oldie; yet reconfigured on that album to accommodate Augie March’s Vox transistor organ, it melds in perfectly with their repertoire: McClinton and Sahm, as different as their lyric personalities may be, do seem to share that particular Texas country-blues sensibility.
