Folk Music And Jazz

[Daniel Andresen]

lots of Jelly Roll Morton has folk sources - listen to the Library of Congress/Lomax recordings in which he delineates, with fascinating detail, the connections -

Does anyone know if these are still available? I am in the process of discovering Morton's music, and would love to hear the Library of Congress/Lomax tecordings

[couw]

lots of Jelly Roll Morton has folk sources - listen to the Library of Congress/Lomax recordings in which he delineates, with fascinating detail, the connections -

Does anyone know if these are still available? I am in the process of discovering Morton's music, and would love to hear the Library of Congress/Lomax tecordings

http://www.rounder.com/series/lomax_alan/jllyroll.html

[AllenLowe]

the only problem with the Rounder is that they have edited out, as I recall, most of the interviews - there are old Swaggie LPS, but they are probably pretty pricey by now -

[Dr. Rat]

well, you caught me at a tired moment and I wanted to appear to be gracious -

your points are well taken, it's just that I've spent a lot of time listening and studying this stuff and you're right, in common usage people have different ideas of what it is and what it isn't. It's just that once you look at this incredible universe of black music it's so damned complicated and multi-layered. My arguments are not with audiences but with academics who have created these very convenient categories and who have spent so much time "contextualizing" that they never really listen to the music. Fortunately there are people like yourself who actually have real-life experience with the music and I have no real argument with your perspective.

Can you give us an example of an academic who is doing this?

--eric

[Daniel Andresen]

Thanks for the info, although this seems to be a "processed product" not the originals.

I think I read somewere that there were eight volumes issued some 11 years ago, which included some interviews.

[JSngry]

on the other hand - I was thinking about this last night just before I fell asleep - many people call Kenny G jazz; would we accept that designation just because so many people use it as part of their own musical points of view and just because it has its own sociological justification? I'm not so sure we can really accept it without some challenge -

That's a good point. The only "counter" to it that I could make (and this is really a case of everybody here thinking the same thing but just using different terminology, I think) is that the people who call Kenny G "jazz" most likely don't have a familial/cultural/environmental point of reference to make that call. to them, it's instrumental, it's got a beat, so hey - it's "jazz", right? Whereas the people who call Marvin Sease "blues" probably have an at least subliminal awareness that there's somet part of his music that connects to something that they might have heard from their parents, grandparents, neighbors, etc. that'a a little bit more directly "blues".

A lot of this goes back to the huge popularity that ZZ Hill (and subsequently, Malaco records) had in this part of the country about 25 or so years ago. When I first heard people calling it "blues", I thought to myself, "Blues? No man, that's SOUL." But since "soul" IS a direct offshoot of blues, and since not too many people at the time who listened to ZZ Hill gave a rat's ass about Charley Patton, son house, or Robert Johnson (and barely Muddy Waters), I could see how the semantic evolution could occur - it was referring not as muc to the musical specifcs as to something else, some basic "cultural impulse" that drove the music. So I just figured, "hey, I'm coming to this from the outside, so..." and let it be what it was going to be.

Now, as to the lady who considered Luther Vandross (at his best a great singer, I think, and certainly one with an obvious gospel rooting), well, hey - she doesn't have a clue what she's talking about. But she's a nice lady anyway, so I just smiled and let it slide.

Still, though, if we want to look at her cluelessness from a macro-cultural standpoint, a case could be made, if you wanted to really go there, that Luther's gospel rooting taps into a bigger well of "cultural subconsciousness" that genuinely does exist, with or without a name, and, in this lady's case, the only name she knew to give it was "blues". Of course, that'll never fly critically, but on the other hand, I think that there's too many academics who would not even concede the point that the lady's mistake actually pointed to some kind of truth anyway, so one has to ask - if you can't see the forest for the trees, just what he hell are you really seeing? And vice-versa, of course.

And, truthfully, I do think that you can make a Kenny G=jazz arguement from the satndpoint of collective cultural perspective. I mean, a lot of folks back in the day, not all of them totally ignunt, considered Glenn Miller "jazz", and, time being what it is and doing what it does, I'd at least consider the posibility that the proportionate gap between Glenn Miller and the "real" jazz of his day and Kenny G & the "real" jazz of his ain't too significantly different.

Of course, to consider that possibility would require me to take on a level of objectivity that I really have no interest in doing now that I'm married, middle-aged, and overweight. Dogma is less stressful, pays just as much (probably more!), and has a built-in audience. The choice is obvious!

[AllenLowe]

Dr. Rat - to answer your question: here's a few contextualizers with limited understanding of the actual music - and give me time and I'll get some more - Burton Peretti; Lewis Erenberg; Beebee Garafolo (might have the spelling wrong); Jeffrey Melnick; William Kenney; Cathy Ogren; Robin Kelley (not the singer, the guy at Columbia U) -

Edited March 8, 2005 by AllenLowe

[AllenLowe]

ahh, married, middle aged and overweight - now there's a context I can understand -

[JSngry]

ahh, married, middle aged and overweight - now there's a context I can understand -

It's blues, baby, BLUES!

[couw]

Thanks for the info, although this seems to be a "processed product" not the originals.

I think I read somewere that there were eight volumes issued some 11 years ago, which included some interviews.

From the LoC site:

In 1938 Jelly Roll Morton recorded several days' worth of spoken and musical memoirs for Alan Lomax at the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Four volumes focus on the musical portion of these memoirs, and for the first time the music is presented in its entirety -- several of these pieces had previously been available in shortened form only, and many of the blues songs that Morton recalled from his early days in New Orleans's Storyville District had never been previously released at all, because of their unbelievably raunchy lyrics. Best of all, the recordings are finally issued here at proper speed and pitch, and the annoying metallic resonances that marred earlier issues of this material are all but gone.

link

Pity there seems to be no truly complete version out there, with interviews. But then again, if "several days' worth" is to be taken literally, it may be too much of a good thing

[Dr. Rat]

Wouldn't spirituals and gospel be the more important "origins" of soul music rather than blues?

And I think we'd best separate out the two threads here: "blues" as a (hopefully) distinct set of musical practices of which we (hopefully) can trace the origins and influences; and "blues" as a general use category, which may get applied to a lot of things that have little or perhaps even nothing to do with those musical practices.

So I think you guys are really barking up two different trees, no? Or don't I get it?

--eric

[AllenLowe]

it's blues, baby, blues -

when you can't even see your shoes...

[JSngry]

It's a cold, cold world when a man has to pawn his shoes.

[AllenLowe]

eric - I agreee with you essentially - the point that has been made, however, is that blues has become something of a generic term -

[JSngry]

Wouldn't spirituals and gospel be the more important "origins" of soul music rather than blues?

And I think we'd best separate out the two threads here: "blues" as a (hopefully) distinct set of musical practices of which we (hopefully) can trace the origins and influences; and "blues" as a general use category, which may get applied to a lot of things that have little or perhaps even nothing to do with those musical practices.

So I think you guys are really barking up two different trees, no? Or don't I get it?

--eric

My POV is that there's some sort of African-American "primal stew" musically (and beyond), and that all the seperate styles, categories, etc. grew out of that, and share, at the least, some common roots, even if subliminally. Of course, you can say that about any culture, but the "diaspora" reality of the African-American experience maybe bumps it up a notch or two in terms of accentuating that.

And also, of course, it's clearly true that not all African-Americans have tapped into that "stew" in thier musical expressions. I'm not saying that the stew is an inescapable fact for all people that are potentially affected by it, just that it does exist and that a lot of people do/have tap into it reflexively (wahtever that means).

And speaking of the diaspora, there's Cuba, and how the African diaspora played out there, and from there into New Orleans, and so on and so on. None of this is easy, clear-cut, or able to be definitively pinned down and captured in a bottle, but to use that as an "excuse" for denying certain general realities won't fly either, I think. We're left with truth vs reality, and neither one gets a clear victory, as much as we'd like for it to.

Edited March 8, 2005 by JSngry

[Dr. Rat]

Dr. Rat - to answer your question: here's a few contextualizers with limited understanding of the actual music - and give me time and I'll get some more - Burton Peretti; Lewis Erenberg; Beebee Garafolo (might have the spelling wrong); Jeffrey Melnick; William Kenney; Cathy Ogren; Robin Kelley (not the singer, the guy at Columbia U) -

I've read some Peretti, and I think he does a good job of contextualizing. He could do better with the music, yes, but I don't think he's gone off the deep end. And I do think his contextualizing can enrich one's understanding of the music. But he definitely is not the sort of writer who sends me running back to my old records.

Some of the other folk you list seem to be New Historicists, and here, with music as with literature, context sometimes seems to completely overwhelm the art/artifact under discussion. So that discussion seems to drift toward "What X would have written/played/said given the historical circumstances" rather than what X actually did write/play/say.

Ironically, in many cases the art in question is one of the most important and evocative remnants of the period we have, so we ened up reading a vivid piece of art through a frame made of scanty and unreliable historical data.

A recent Atlantic article on this issue focusing on Stephen Greenblat and Shakespeare, but the criticisms applicable pretty broadly to new historicist criticism.

--eric

[JSngry]

my other problem (and this is NOT related to anything you guys have said) is that blues has become something of an ideology for the Wynton Marsalis's and Stanley Crouch's of the world, and sometimes I want to grab them by the scruff of the neck (not a good idea with Crouch, by the way) and tell them that the heritage of which they speak so fondly is much more complicated -

And while you're at it tell them that evolution is an ongoing process, that if you attempt to stop it, you're likely kill whatever it is that's evolving. Please tell them that.

Not that they'll listen...

[AllenLowe]

Eric: the problem with Peretti is that he makes outright mistakes and repeats conventional wisdom as though it's historical revelation - he just repeats what others have said and puts it into an obvious context (I know you're going to ask what mistakes but I don't have his books on hand - threw 'em away, to be honest); Lewis Erenburg is another - I'm reading his book (written not that long ago) and what does he do but cite the myth of Bessie Smith dying because she was not admitted to a White hospital! Embarrasing stuff - Cathy Ogren tells us that Ballin' the Jack had sexual connotations - HELP! This, however, is academia -

Edited March 8, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Dr. Rat]

Eric: the problem with Peretti is that he makes outright mistakes and repeats conventional wisdom as though it's historical revelation - he just repeats what others have said and puts it into an obvious context (I know you're going to ask what mistakes but I don't have his books on hand - threw 'em away, to be honest); Lewis Erenburg is another - I'm reading his book (written not that long ago) and what does he do but cite the myth of Bessie Smith dying because she was not admitted to a White hospital! Embarrasing stuff - Cathy Ogren tells us that Ballin' the Jack had sexual connotations - HELP! This, however, is academia -

Hmmm. I hadn't heard about the accuracy problems. I read his creation of jazz book when it first came out and found it to be a bit dull, but found my picture of turn of the century America filled in a bit.

I'll see if I can't find anyone else writing on this point.

The Bessie Smith myth is of course just too good not to be true for New Historicists!

--eric

[John L]

Wouldn't spirituals and gospel be the more important "origins" of soul music rather than blues?

I wouldn't really say so, myself.

This is an example where the precise evolution of different manifestations of the "primal stew" gets hard to document correctly. Blues and African American religious music have cross-fertilized themselves several times in the 20th century. "Soul" involved an infusion of modern gospel elements into R&B and jazz. In the 1930s, the infusion was in just the opposite direction. So has it also been, to a large degree, since the 1960s.

Some of the older bluesmen have associated the origin of blues with the revivalist camp meetings of the 19th century. These meetings encouraged the development of freer singing than was usually allowed in the church. I think that it is an interesting idea.

[Dr. Rat]

Wouldn't spirituals and gospel be the more important "origins" of soul music rather than blues?

I wouldn't really say so, myself.

This is an example where the precise evolution of different manifestations of the "primal stew" gets hard to document correctly. Blues and African American religious music have cross-fertilized themselves several times in the 20th century. "Soul" involved an infusion of modern gospel elements into R&B and jazz. In the 1930s, the infusion was in just the opposite direction. So has it also been, to a large degree, since the 1960s.

Some of the older bluesmen have associated the origin of blues with the revivalist camp meetings of the 19th century. These meetings encouraged the development of freer singing than was usually allowed in the church. I think that it is an interesting idea.

There's a certain slipperiness to the stew idea that seems to allow one to sometimes ignore categorical distinctions between something like "blues" and something like "gospel" and sometimes to make free use of said distinctions as if we all know what the distinctions are.

I'm not saying that you are being disingenuous--these are confusing matters. But we do quickly get to a point where we have to question why "gospel" seems to have a distinct identity and yet we steadfastly refuse to give one to blues--implying that, after all, all black music is suffused in the blues and all of it can be called blues or comes from blues and none can be said to be not blues.

To me this seems a lot like a reaction to Murray and company using "blues" as a stick. By emptying the word of any real significance we take the stick out of their hands. But "blues" just doesn't equal "good." It's not an evaluational term.

My reaction to most soul is that the blues elements in it are relatively small (and we have a show called "Blue Soul" here, mind, so I recognize there are exceptions) but soul music seems to me to come substantially out of church music traditions that in many cases explicitly repudiated blues and built a tradition that sounded disticntly different from the tradition they (the folks who helped create the gospel tradition) identified as "blues."

So I guess I see the stew--life always seems to be a stew--but I don't acknowledge referring to the stew as "blues" as a useful or desirable practice. I'm not sure I want to go all the way down the AllenLowe road by adopting a strict contructionist chord-sequence definition, but I think we need to have a more limited definition for the term to have much use.

--eric

[AllenLowe]

I have a feeling the origins of the blues will forever remain obscure - if I had to give an overall theory, the multi-stanza'd repeated format had been around for some time (eg "It takes a worried man..." or "going down the road feeling bad ") as well as the 1-4-1-5-4-1 (Frankie and Johnny) - somehow somewhere someone saw how nicely they fit together - and did so - it may very well have been a professional songwriter; there is a guy named Peter Muir who is doing some relevant research on Hughie Cannon, who wrote Bill Bailey, which contains, in the verse, a blues format - the reason I am such a stickler for calling the 1-4-1-5-4-1 progression the blues is because that is really what it is - anything else has other antecedents, other form, other origins and should be recognized as such - as for Peretti, I would not say his work is riddled with errors, it is just that he has no original insights, and we can get the info he gives from other places; he has just taken a lot of other people's work and cut and pasted it. If you need some better research sources I can probably help you -

Edited March 8, 2005 by AllenLowe

[John L]

Wouldn't spirituals and gospel be the more important "origins" of soul music rather than blues?

I wouldn't really say so, myself.

This is an example where the precise evolution of different manifestations of the "primal stew" gets hard to document correctly. Blues and African American religious music have cross-fertilized themselves several times in the 20th century. "Soul" involved an infusion of modern gospel elements into R&B and jazz. In the 1930s, the infusion was in just the opposite direction. So has it also been, to a large degree, since the 1960s.

Some of the older bluesmen have associated the origin of blues with the revivalist camp meetings of the 19th century. These meetings encouraged the development of freer singing than was usually allowed in the church. I think that it is an interesting idea.

There's a certain slipperiness to the stew idea that seems to allow one to sometimes ignore categorical distinctions between something like "blues" and something like "gospel" and sometimes to make free use of said distinctions as if we all know what the distinctions are.

I'm not saying that you are being disingenuous--these are confusing matters. But we do quickly get to a point where we have to question why "gospel" seems to have a distinct identity and yet we steadfastly refuse to give one to blues--implying that, after all, all black music is suffused in the blues and all of it can be called blues or comes from blues and none can be said to be not blues.

To me this seems a lot like a reaction to Murray and company using "blues" as a stick. By emptying the word of any real significance we take the stick out of their hands. But "blues" just doesn't equal "good." It's not an evaluational term.

My reaction to most soul is that the blues elements in it are relatively small (and we have a show called "Blue Soul" here, mind, so I recognize there are exceptions) but soul music seems to me to come substantially out of church music traditions that in many cases explicitly repudiated blues and built a tradition that sounded disticntly different from the tradition they (the folks who helped create the gospel tradition) identified as "blues."

So I guess I see the stew--life always seems to be a stew--but I don't acknowledge referring to the stew as "blues" as a useful or desirable practice. I'm not sure I want to go all the way down the AllenLowe road by adopting a strict contructionist chord-sequence definition, but I think we need to have a more limited definition for the term to have much use.

--eric

Eric: I think that the central point here is that we are dealing with an evolutionary process. For example, gospel music today is different than gospel music was in the 1950s. So one set definition beyond African American religious music is not going to work. The same is true for R&B, or "soul" as some still call it.

Rhythm and Blues changed in the 1960s with the advent of soul, yet it remained Rhythm and Blues. Singers with gospel-rooted backgrounds and approaches were hooked up together with R&B bands. Personally, I would not say that there was less blues than gospel, but the distinction itself is already murky because gospel of that period was already blues-drenched (although recognizable as a distinct musical direction, nevertheless). I think that the process was more evolutionary than is often appreciated. In the early 50s, you already had Roy Brown, Guitar Slim, Sonny Til, and others bringing gospel feeling into R&B. So Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman" was not as huge a musical revolution in 1955 as is sometimes suggested.

In fact, the distinction between R&B (soul) and gospel began to become very blurred toward the end of the 1960s. At that time, gospel began to borrow from Rhythm and Blues (soul) again, and the arrangements became often identical with different words. That was the blues again penetrating gospel, as it had done in a different way in the 1930s. Compare mainstream gospel quartet music in the 1950s and the end of the 1960s and you will hear the difference. The former is what influenced rhythm and blues to create soul. Much of the latter is essentially soul with religious lyrics.

The complexity is in the dynamics over time.

Edited March 8, 2005 by John L

[AllenLowe]

well, I would say the roots of soul are in the hard gospel movement, which has it's origins in the 1920s with the emergence of a freer, post-jubilee sound (greater use of floating lead singer); in 1937 the Soul Stirrers recorded "Walk Around" which is incredibly modern and free, and it is from this idea of lead singer vs group that we see the soul singer emerge (and later Archie Brownleee with the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi) - r&b has complicated roots and development; it's rhythms really come out, initially, of the swing era and can be traced through certain commercial big bands (like Lucky Millinder and Buddy Johnson) to the more small-group oriented work of the 1950s.

Let me add that, per all of this, that there is a book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, by Lawrence Levine, which is essential reading - no other source traces the roots and development and causes of AfricanAmerican culture as clearly and powerfully as Levin does. If you're at all intersted in the subject, you should check it out. It has helped me immeasurably in evalutating and clarifying my own positions -

[JSngry]

There's a certain slipperiness to the stew idea that seems to allow one to sometimes ignore categorical distinctions between something like "blues" and something like "gospel" and sometimes to make free use of said distinctions as if we all know what the distinctions are.

I'm not saying that you are being disingenuous--these are confusing matters. But we do quickly get to a point where we have to question why "gospel" seems to have a distinct identity and yet we steadfastly refuse to give one to blues--implying that, after all, all black music is suffused in the blues and all of it can be called blues or comes from blues and none can be said to be not blues.

To me this seems a lot like a reaction to Murray and company using "blues" as a stick. By emptying the word of any real significance we take the stick out of their hands. But "blues" just doesn't equal "good." It's not an evaluational term.

My reaction to most soul is that the blues elements in it are relatively small (and we have a show called "Blue Soul" here, mind, so I recognize there are exceptions) but soul music seems to me to come substantially out of church music traditions that in many cases explicitly repudiated blues and built a tradition that sounded disticntly different from the tradition they (the folks who helped create the gospel tradition) identified as "blues."

So I guess I see the stew--life always seems to be a stew--but I don't acknowledge referring to the stew as "blues" as a useful or desirable practice. I'm not sure I want to go all the way down the AllenLowe road by adopting a strict contructionist chord-sequence definition, but I think we need to have a more limited definition for the term to have much use.

--eric

It's "primal stew", not just "stew". Big difference. The basic ingredients-from which all evolution preceeds, to be found in various combinations, proportions, and mutations as the evolution proceeds. Yet, elements that can nevertheless be identified.

No need to ignore categorical distinctions, just as there's no need to overlook commonalities.

Gospel and blues have different identities simply because they are different strains of evolution and have picked up distinct traits along the way. Yet, the common traits allow for frequent and fertile cross-pollination, which in turn further the evolution of each. "Different" & "distinct" need not mean totally different or totally distinct.

No, not all African-American music is infused in the blues, simply because not all Africans became Americans under the same circumstances, nor have they experienced the cultural dynamics afterwards. Any talk such as this is (or should be) based on generalities, what can "safely" (hopefully...) be presumed to be "the norm", based on what can objectively, in terms of simple numbers, be observed to be the rule, rather than the exception. Anything that does not allow for variances, even minor ones, or consideration thereof, is barking up the wrong tree, I think. Absolut is a vodka, not a sound sociological principle.

As well, the notion that there is a primal stew should certainly not imply that influences from "outside" said stew can't or shouldn't find a place in the evolutional mix. Jazz itself is vivid proof of how wrong a notion that is. But they come into the mix, they don't destroy it. The same fundamental elements of the stew continue on. Change is not necessarily destruction.

Soul comes from gospel? Well, yeah, but Gospel itself came out an infusion of blues "elements", many of which themselves, as Mr. Litwack suggested, may well be traceable back to pre-blues music. "Gospel" and "spirituals" are two distinct, different types of African-American religious music, yet, again, they can't be said to be totally different musics that have nothing in common.

The primal stew is real enough. What we choose to call it is fair game for debate, but its existence isn't, I should think. If we chosse to deny its existence, we turn musical/cultural evolution into the equivalent of Creationist Absolutism, a set of forgone conclusions just waiting to happen - this is this, that is that, and there you have it. That just ain't so in any kind of life.

Considering the discussion we had about evolution a while back, the notion that it's basic principals somehow don't apply to music kinda tickles me!