Click on the headline to link
to a YouTube film clip of Howlin’
Wolf performing Killing Floor.
CD Review
Putamayo Presents: American
Blues, various artists, Putamayo Word Music, 2003
The blues ain’t nothing but…
He, Daddy Fingers (strictly a stage front name, with a no will power Clarence
Mark Smith real name needing, desperately needing, cover just like a million
other guys trying to reach for the big lights, trying to reach heyday early
1950s Maxwell Street, hell, maybe trying
get a record contract, a valued Chess contract, and that first sweet easy
credit, no down payment, low monthly payments Cadillac, pink or yellow, with
all the trimming and some sweet mama sitting high tit proud in front), had to
laugh, laugh out loud sometimes when these white hipsters asked him what the
blues were (he, well behind the white bread fad times, having spent the last
twenty years mostly in the hidden down South, the chittlin’ circuit down South,
from Biloxi to Beaumont, working bowling alleys, barbecue joints (the best
places where even if the money was short you had your ribs and beer, a few
whisky shots maybe, some young brown skin with lonely eyes woman lookin’ for a
high-flying brown skin man in need of a woman’s cooking , or at least a
friendly bed for a few nights), an odd juke house now electrified, some back
road road-side diner converted for an evening into a house of entertainment,
hell even a church basement when the good lord wasn’t looking or was out on an
off Saturday night had not noticed that these kids asking that august question
were not his old Chi town, New Jack City, ‘Frisco Bay hipsters but mostly fresh-faced kids in guy plaid
short shirts and chinos and girl cashmere sweaters and floppy skirts were not
hip, not black-hearted, black dressed devil’s music hip. For one thing no
hipster, and hell certainly no wanna-be hipster would even pose the question
but just dig on the beat, dig on the phantom guitar work as he worked the fret
board raw, dig on being one with the note progression. Being, well, beat.).
Plaid and cashmere sweater
crowding around some makeshift juke stage, some old corner barroom flop spot or
like tonight here on this elegant stage with all the glitter lights at Smokin’ Joe’s
Place, Cambridge’s now the home of the blues for all who were interested in the
genealogy of such things came around looking, searching for some explanation
like it was some lost code recently discovered like that Rosetta Stone they found a while back to figure out what
old pharaoh and his kind said (hell, he could
have deciphered that easy enough for those interested- work the black
bastards to death and if they slack up, whip them, whip them bad, whip them
white, and ain’t it always been so). So he told them, plaid guy and cashmere
bump sweater girl, told them straight lie, or straight amusing thing, that like
his daddy, his real daddy who had passed down the blues to him, and who got it
from his daddy, and so on back, hell, maybe back to pharaoh times when those
slave needed something to keep them working at a steady death-defying pace,
that the blues wasn’t nothing but a good woman on your mind. And if some
un-cool, or maybe dope addled wanna-be Chi town hipster, or some white bread
all glimmering girl from Forest Hills out for negro kicks, had been naïve
enough to ask the question that would have been enough but plaid and cashmere
wanted more.
Wanted to know why the three
chord progression thing was done this way instead of that, or whether the whole
blues thing came from the Georgia Sea Islands (by way of ancient homeland
Africa) like they had never heard of Mister’s Mississippi cotton boll
plantation, Captain’s lashes, broiling suns, their great grandfathers marching
through broken down Vicksburg, about Brother Jim Crow, or about trying to scratch
two dollars out of one dollar land. Wanted to know if in Daddy Finger’s exalted
opinion Mister Charley Patton was the sweet daddy daddy of the blues, wanted to
know if Mister Robert Johnson did in fact sell his soul to the devil out on
Highway 61, 51, 49 take a number that 1930 take a number night, wanted to know
if Mister Mississippi John Hurt was a sweet daddy of an old man (also
“discovered” of late) like he seemed to be down in Newport, wanted to know if
black-hearted Mister Muddy really was a man-child with man-child young girl
appetites, wanted to know if Mister Howlin’ Wolf ever swallowed that harmonica when
he did that heated version they had heard about of How Many More Years (not knowing that Wolf was drunk as a skunk,
high shelf whisky not some Sonny Boy’s home brew, when he did that one or that, he Daddy Fingers, had backed Wolf up many a night when Mister
Huber Sumlin was in his cups or was on the outs with the big man), wanted to
know, laugh, if Mister Woody Guthrie spoke a better talking blues that Mister
Leady Belly, or Mister Pete Seeger was truer to the blues tradition that Mister
Bob Dylan (like he, Daddy Fingers, spent his time thinking about such things
rather than trying to keep body and soul together from one back of the bus Mister
James Crow bus station to the next in order to get to some godforsaken hidden
juke joint to make a couple of bucks, have some of Sonny Boy’s son’s golden
liquor, and maybe catch a stray lonesome Saturday woman without a man, or if
with a man, a man without the look of a guy who settled his disputes, his woman
disputes, at the sharp end of a knife, wanted
to know, wanted to know, wanted to know more than the cold hard fact that,
truth or lie, the blues wasn’t nothing but a good girl on your mind. Nothing
but having your wanting habits on. But that never was good enough for them, and
thus the fool questions. And always, tonight included, the fool Hey Daddy
Fingers what are the blues. Okay, baby boy, baby girl, the blues is … And thus
this compilation
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