***Out In The Be-Bop 1960s Folk Blues Revival Night- The 1964 American Folk Blues Festival- A CD Review-Take Two

A YouTube film clip of the Robert Johnson/Elmore James electric blues classic, Dust My Broom.

Howlin’ Wolf holding forth on Little Red Rooster

The Rolling Stones sitting at the feet of the master playing How Many More Years

CD Review

American Folk Blues Festival ‘64, various artists, Optimism Records, 1982

Let’s go by the numbers, the musical year numbers for my generation, the generation of ’68. We all came of musical age, more or less with Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee in the mid-1950s when the music was hot, we were naïve (or worst), just kids trying to figure stuff out, mainly sex stuff, or rather boy-girl stuff mostly, but also, for some of us anyway our place in the sun, small dream stuff, and let’s just let it go at that. The music, that music “spoke” of jail-break, or the tip of it, from our parents’ mushy music, and maybe from a lot more things but that was later. Later after a musical counter-revolution in the late 1950s engineered by those very same parents. In collusion, there is no other way to put it, with the record company executives who were freaked out, cut off junior and missy’s record-buying allowance freaked out, by their negative response, to the jungle music, devil’s music, degenerate music and you can fill in whatever your own parents labelled it. We had to put up with some awful Bobby Vee/Fabian/Johnny Somebody stuff, stuff that today is totally forgettable, bobby-soxer, teary-eyed lost guy stuff, and worst, before we stepped right into back into hard rock and roll, The hard beat of the Rolling Stones and later groups, the British invasion of the 1960s groups plus American groups that finally got hip to one of the key roots to rock ‘n’ roll’s development, that early work on the blues, the American- etched blues. You cannot listen to early Stones with thinking about Little Red Rooster, Baby Don’t Go, Hoochie Goochie Man, and a million other Chess Record classics. Hell even the Beatles were crazy to cover some of that music. Go figure.

Yes, go figure. Go figure that much of early rock and roll was derived from the blues, city blues mainly, meaning electric blues, Chicago mainly (Kansas City and Detroit some too, wherever blacks and white hipsters were looking for up-to-date music and not that down home stuff. Not knowing, or conveniently forgetting that those self-same city blues were derived from you guessed it, the old country blues from down in the Mister James Crow Delta, the North Carolina Piedmont and the hills and hollows of Appalachia where all the hip Chicago cats (Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Well, etc.,) and white poor boy players came from. It is not until the next generation that the guys were born in northern cities.

All of this is just around about way to pay tribute to the roots, or one of the significant roots, of our generational genre. Hell Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl, and you know for sure that Chuck, Ike and Bo were listening, listening hard, at the juke joint doors when Saturday night liquor and women turned into Sunday righteousness. And then they listened to the sanctified music that was meant to wash away that Devil’s music blues. But never quite did.

But more than that search for the roots of rock business it was a question of revivals, here the American Folk Blues Festival of 1964, which was indirectly brought about by our generation of ’68’s search for meaning to explain our angst and alienation, including the search for authentic roots music. See once rock and roll hit our mid-1950s brains like an, well like an atomic bomb, we lost sight of where the music had come from. We just wanted to dance, or think we could dance so we could more smoothly be around that certain she (or he for she) without having to learn the fox- trot or some old fogey dance. And not have to get sweaty-palms, strange-smelling breathe close and be cool at the same time.

More importantly we didn’t “hit the books” back then, probably didn’t enough knowledge or concern to ask the questions, unlike later, to find out what happened to those who created the music that once was the staple of hip music. It was only after we figured out the social graces stuff and needed to do more than dance cool with that certain she (oh yes, and he for she) that we went roots hunting. And guess what? Some of the boys (mainly) were still around in places like Maxwell Street in Chicago or down picking cotton in the Delta or holed up in some skid row hotel just waiting to be “discovered,” or really rediscovered.

That may not be the exact genesis of the folk blues revival when that movement hit high stride in the Newport folk festivals of the early 1960s reintroducing a young audience to the likes of Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James and Son House but it will do here. And of course the artists on this CD-the likes of Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, the legendary producer and writer Willie Dixon, and the “max daddy of them all,” Howlin’ Wolf. This is history, maybe not world-shaking, change-the course-of civilization history but a very important slice of the people’s history. Listen up.