University of Virginia Library

Delta Bluesman To Play On Prism Stage

By Victor N. Cabas

The age of the minstrel is now
forever dead. The Woody
Guthries, the Blind Lemon Jeffersons,
the Leadbellys who roamed
country side and town plucking
out blues and ballads on cheap
flat-top guitars, sometimes literally
for bread, in the twenties and
thirties are gone. And gone is the
honest, lusty feel for life that was
an intrinsic part of their music.
The music of today is the music
of today's youth, and to many
the songs of Lennon-McCartney
and Dylan are the poetry of this
generation. Yet in a country where
most people have access to radios
or record players, and where there
is such a great variety of popular
music, few care enough to trace
the origin of it all.

Popular music today has evolved
largely from the country blues of
the Mississippi Delta. To be sure,
the field hollers and gospel music
came first, but these forms were
more the Negro's occupational and
religious therapy than entertainment.
Through the Blues the
Negro was able for the first time
to communicate something of the
ugliness, the beauty, the boredom
of his life.

Early Bluesmen

It is no coincidence that many
of the early bluesmen were, by
society's standards, immoral men
who lived and died violent lives.
Their music was open rebellion
against the white man's dominance,
the white man's justice
and the white man's religion. They
were the illiterate chroniclers, the
Boswelles if you will, of the Negro
in the post-reconstruction South
and their songs, the novels, the
autobiographies of that era, told it
like it was.

The Blues approach to the complex
problems of love, sorrow and
despair is universally simple and
direct, for the blues are the
essence of life set to music. Above
all, the Blues attempt to record
the everyday emotions that man
must experience. More than any
other form of music the Blues requires
an emotional response from
the singer to the content of the
song. If the singer ignores or is
unable to feel and communicate
the message, then the song is a
failure. Many performers are unable
to play the Blues because the
music is simply too demanding,
both emotionally and physically.
As one veteran remarked, "I got
tired of entertaining people with my
life story." The Blues also demands
that the singer be able to
give, spontaneously, something of
himself to every song, and a good
blues singer never sings a song
in the same way twice.

'White' blues

A few of the Negro pioneers of
the Blues are still around: Son
House, Skip James, Muddy
Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins, and
Bukka White, but they are old
men now, and there has been no

significant revival of interest
among Negro youth in the Blues
for the last decade or more. As
Mabel Hillary aptly remarked at
her concert here last fall, "these
skinny little white boys the only
one's playin' the Blues now." A
great many contemporary electric
groups have worked with the Blues,
notably the Butterfield Blues
Band, the Cream, the Doors, the
Canned Heat and they now defunct
Blues Project, to name a few.
They have worked with, skirted
around, and commercialized the
Blues without ever really playing
them. As one Blues veteran from
St. Louis remarked, "these boys
is OK on that psychedelic stuff,
but when they mess with the Blues,
they mess'em bad."

The myth that no white man
could play the blues was largely
repudiated by the short-lived blues
revolution of the '60's. This produced
white bluesman like
"Snaker" Ray, John Hammond,
Eric Von Schmidt and Dave Von
Runk, who proved if nothing else
that, given a chance, the white
man could play black music at
least as well as the Negro. Currently
the blues is being heard only
in isolated coffee houses and die
hard culture festivals. For all this
there is little danger that the Blues
will die out, having survived two
World Wars, the depression,
Lawrence Welk's Bubble Blues"
and other musical dry spells.

Aiken At Prism

The Blues will be in Charlottesville
tomorrow night in the Prism
Coffee House in the person of Bob
Aiken (the "skinny little white
boy" to whom Mabel Hillary referred).
Aiken's repertoire, learned
from scratchy old 78's and live
tapes of the Blues, including arrangements
by Leadbelly, Blind
Blake, Blind Lemmon Jefferson,
Bukka White, Robert Johnson,
Howlin' Wolf, and Mississippi
John Hurt. A graduate of the
University, Aiken has spent
the last year playing Blues and
working on guitar technique as an
employee of Arkay Music. "The
Blues is something that comes before
the music," says Aiken. "The
feeling's been there for a long
time."

Aiken's near flawless guitar
work suggests a practiced hand
but he is also a ready innovator
and creative musician-as I found
one night after jamming Twelve
Bar Blues with him into the morning
hours. Aiken is in best form
playing "bottle necking," a type
of guitar work almost entirely
peculiar to Blues. Unlike many
modern Blues men he prefers the
traditional glass bottle neck to a
steel slider because of its mellow
tone. Aiken is a versatile performer
whose selections range from
Howlin's Wolf's bawdy, two-fisted
City Blues, "Dit, Dit, Dit," to
Blind Lemon's bluesy-ballad
rendition of "See That My Grave
is Kept Clean." His taste rooted
deep in Country Blues, Aiken's
personal preference is divided between
the gentle, rippling style of
John Hurt and the raw, "soul
blues" of Robert Johnson.

On stage Aiken enjoys himself
tremendously, and he is likely to
do what ever he feels like doing
at the moment. His voice is a
deep-throated cross, somewhere
between Dave Ray and Bukka
White, that lends itself naturally
to the blues. At present, pondering
a professional career as a blues
performer, Aiken has reached an
impasse, he would like to retain
his musical integrity by playing
his own music without succumbing
to commercial pollution, but as
he acknowledged, a trifle bitterly,
"the paying audience is just
too small."

Modern Talent Gap

It is a sad commentary on our
generation of "music" lovers that
we often patronize performers who
mutilate music without adding anything
in the bargain(this does not
include innovators like the Beatles
or the Cream) while ignoring performers
who try to play the music
they feel. When Bob Aiken walks
on stage, he brings only his guitar-there
are no screeching sound effects,
no extravagant contraptions
to disguise the performers talent
gap. The songs Aiken sings concern
the everyday living of life.
Perhaps, if you listen hard enough,
the Blues can teach you something-but
that really isn't necessary,
the Blues are there just for
the listening-if you only wish to
get involved. Your chance is this
Saturday night at the Prism.