Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues by Peter Guralnick

Author:Peter Guralnick [Guralnick, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-062-02908-9
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-02-08T13:00:00+00:00

Louis Armstrong poses with two Tennessee fans, circa 1957.

So this piece is by way of apology, some forty-six years later, and to note that when I hear him singing (on Satch Plays Fats, another of my favorite albums), “What did I do/to be so black and blue,” I still ponder the meaning of those words, and the firsthand lesson I had in the blues that day, and the way he dealt with it all. And I remember as well the price and complexity of his joyousness.

Sam Phillips (right) opened his Memphis Recording Service in January 1950 to provide an opportunity “for some of the great Negro artists of the mid-South.” Rosco Gordon (left) and Ike Turner were the first of those artists to have Number One R&B hits. Phillips also recorded Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and Bobby “Blue” Bland, among others, before a nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley cut his first single for Phillips’ Sun label in July 1954.

“You know, I never had the feeling of categories of music as a whole being necessarily good or bad. Country, symphony, pop music were just fine—I didn’t really care what it sounded like, or what category it might fall into. If you had something distinctive to say, it was up to you to go ahead and say it. But gutbucket blues—that was the kind of music I wanted to hear. And that was the kind of music I set out to record.

When I started, I had to pursue it singularly, because nobody was going to back me up in the idea that you’re going to bring a bunch of black folks in here and record them. But that was what I was determined to do. And I was prepared to risk everything for it—my job, my family’s future welfare, my own damn sanity—because it was an absolute inspiration that I carried with me. I knew the sound I had heard in the cotton fields, and I also knew that had I not tried to do it, I would have been the biggest damn coward that God ever put on this earth.

There’s nothing that tells the truth like gutbucket blues. I mean, you got Jimmie Rodgers—you know I love Jimmie Rodgers—and Hank Williams, too, even if he didn’t get down all the way like the Howlin’ Wolf. But with the Wolf and some of those other great blues singers you have something that is so absolutely true, so close to the life that so many of our Southern people, black and white, have experienced, that how in the hell is the soul of man ever going to die when that is coming along to remind you of the most fundamental things-things that were so tough at the time, tough on the person that lived it, tough on the person that’s singing about it? These things you can’t buy in a book. You got to be there when it happens. And I guess I ought to know. It will always stay there. You won’t forget it.

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