World Music

When the Beatles arrived in America a reporter asked them what they wanted to do first in the USA.

“Oh, man. We’ve got to go and see Muddy Waters.” John Lennon told him.

“Oh really?” The reporter replied. “Where’s that?”

With the exception perhaps of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, black musicians were hardly known in their own country and were only followed by a specialised audience. What many of the artists came to discover was that they were greatly admired and listened to across the Atlantic in England and Europe.

The Beatles, the Rolling Stones (their name comes from a Muddy Waters song) and Eric Clapton all acknowledged their profound debt to the early bluesmen of the Mississippi and Chicago. Bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Jesse Fuller were brought over to play and the experience was overwhelming for them.

“I done jumped on freight trains at 30mph with a guitar on my back but you fall out one of them airplanes you’d dead.” Jessie Fuller told a reporter. The American blues artists were loved and treated as celebrities for the first time. Then they returned home to become second-class citizens again.

However now that bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones started out copying the styles of artists like Little Richard and Chuck Berry, American audiences began to appreciate the music of the old blues masters. Artists like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters eventually gained wide-spread notoriety now that they had already reached middle age.

The blues exploded in the late 60’s and early 70’s as white artists like Eric Clapton, John Mayall and the Animals covered old blues classics like “House of the Rising Sun” and “Down at the Crossroads”. Some have suggested that it seemed a little foolish to hear middle class white boys singing about the hardships of picking cotton and hopping freight trains.

That’s true without a doubt and with the exception of maybe, Joe Cocker, few white people can sing like the blacks did. Yet the blues don’t belong to any race or nationality. They are a feeling of despair, pain and sorrow that’s common to people all across the world. You feel it, you can sing it.

As B.B King sang:

“_Yeah, you know the company told me_
Guess you’re born to lose
Everybody around me, people
_It seems like everybody got the blues_”

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