To understand the transformation of blues music in our society, consider how it has been used to market other products. Go back forty years to Memphis where Riley King, former Mississippi Delta sharecropper, was on his way to becoming B.B. King, world-reknowned blues singer and guitarist, the man widely acknowledged as the greatest blues musician of our time. Before he was B.B., the Blues Boy of Beale Street, he was known briefly as "The Pepticon Boy". This was during the time when King hosted a daily music program on Memphis radio station WDIA. The sponsor was Pepticon, a health tonic, competitor to Hadacol, which sponsored a program on KWEM, broadcasting from West Helena, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi River. Pepticon had King on 'DIA; Hadacol had Sonny Boy Williamson on 'WEM. [Sonny Boy was actually Rice Miller, a blues singer and harmonica player, whose appearance under a name reknowned down through the Delta and up into Tennessee, and Arkansas, was a deliberate ruse of the station owners. By the time listeners got wise his popularity was so well established that he became Sonny Boy Williamson II.] Here is the point: as a marketing device blues music was seen as good for nothing more than selling diluted grain alcohol, laced with herbs and caramel coloring, to blacks too poor to afford decent housing, if they'd had access to it, yet able to scrape together the price of a bottle of pep tonic to soothe their depression or a can of lye to straighten their hair.
In contrast, today, between innings of the World Series, you may see a Levi's commercial, with all its mass marketing imagery; long lens shots of sleek young couples crossing big city boulevards or bounding down beaches beside roiling surf; tight shots of strong, youthful, male hands -- unsullied by hard physical labor -- with their thumbs hooked into belt loops, pulling faded blue denims over powerful thighs. The music heard under the pitchman's smooth voice is "Mannish Boy" by Muddy Waters, the very same musician whose identity was virtually a secret in the years when Mick Jagger and Van Morrison were singing his songs and even imitating the Mississippi twang in his voice. So here is the latest edition of what Madison Avenue believes will get the juices flowing in its market, orchestrated to the unmistakable sound of Muddy wailing "I'm a man./A nat'chal born man". There's another sound there, too. A Mississippi saxophone. James Cotton's harmonica. Twenty five years ago that sound was as alien to the mass audience as the sound of Balkan bagpipes. But this is Middle America in the 1990's where blues music can induce millions to believe that buying this sponsor's product will make them mannish, make them way cool.
The migration of blues, which is the heart and soul of all the music America claims as its own, from the world of Pepticon to the Land of Levi's, from the ghetto of Hadacol to the suburbs of Bud Lite, makes one of the great American stories of our time. I gave a brief account of the story in The Arrival Of B.B. King . What was missing from that sketch was a full account of the role played by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
The Butterfield Band was exceptional in many ways but none so much as the fact that it was the first integrated blues band. The white members of the band came from middle class families. Had they not fallen in love with this music they probably would have become professionals like their fathers. Instead, they gave themselves to the power of a music that had been hidden away in a part of America where few whites ever ventured. The black members of the band had known little else besides a life of ghetto bars and rural roadhouses, places where you could get shot just for standing in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
Paul Butterfield grew up in Chicago. In high school he played classical flute and starred on the track team. Through the influence of an older brother and with the urging of a chum, Nick Gravenites, Butterfield set out to find the music he had heard on the black radio stations in Chicago. This music could be heard live only on the South and West Sides in bars where the only white faces belonged to policemen.
Somehow Butterfield and Gravenites made that musical culture their own. They learned all its varieties, from the hard-edged slide guitar of Elmore James to the smooth big band sound of Bobby Blue Bland. One particular blues musician captured Butterfield's imagination, Marion Walter Jacobs, known as "Little Walter". Little Walter created a new blues instrument, the amplified harmonica. A cheap instrument, invented in Germany in the 19th century, the harmonica was designed, not mainly for playing melody, but, rather, to play chords. Harmonica was not new to blues music, but its voice in the hands of Little Walter, blowing it through a cheap microphone plugged into a guitar amplifier, was brand new. The sound of vibrating brass reeds, moving a column of air that reached down into a man's innards, driving a crystal microphone in the confines of a small, air-tight accoustic space, this sound was a new voice, raw and primal, and Butterfield took it for his own. More precisely, in his own words, "the instrument chose me". He sang, too, with a strong, chesty tone and a delivery full of authority.
Elvin Bishop was the original guitarist in the Butterfield Band. Bishop came to Chicago from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to study physics at the Univeristy of Chicago on a Merit Scholarship. This award marked him as among the two or three hundred most talented high school students in the country. Bishop's stay at the University was extremely short, indeed, undoubtedly one of the shortest among his Merit peers. He left his studies to play the blues with Butterfield.
When they got a steady gig at Big John's club, Bishop and Butterfield persuaded the rhythm section of Howlin' Wolf's band to join them. Sam Lay played drums with weight-lifters' arms and a relentless, staccatto rhythm, coupled with a powerful right foot on bass drum. He was handsome, with a great processed pompadour and a deep voice that supplemented Butterfield's on certain tunes like Muddy Waters' signature song "Got My Mojo Workin'". Though one would never suspect it to look at him, his health was fragile, perhaps aggravated by a bullet wound he had suffered some years before. Illness caused him to leave the band before the sessions for the second album.
The other half of the rhythm section was Jerome Arnold, younger brother of a blues singer/harmonica-player of wide repute, Billy Boy Arnold. Jerome was quiet and unassuming; a conservative dresser given to double knits and loafers, in contrast to Sam Lay, who liked outrageous shoes and dazzling colors. As the harmonic half of the rhythm section he played the bass like a bricklayer lays bricks, in heavy, solid lines. Together Lay, Arnold and Bishop provided an unshakable, rhythmic and harmonic foundation for the Butterfield's brilliant solos.
In 1964 Elektra Records producer Paul Rothchild heard Butterfield and recognized the potential. He wanted to record the band, but he wanted Butterfield to add another guitarist, Mike Bloomfield. Bishop, the regular guitarist, had met Bloomfield before on one of his outings to neighborhood pawn shops in search of a guitar. Bishop was strumming a guitar in one pawn shop when a fast-talking kid standing behind the counter took the guitar from him and ripped of a dazzling blues arpeggio. It was Bloomfield, tending the store for his pawn brokeruncle.
Bishop voiced no objection to adding Bloomfield to the band. It was Bloomfield who had to be convinced he could stand next to Butterfield on the bandstand without looking diminished. "He was bad, man," Bloomfield later said about Butterfield in a recorded interview. "That cat was bad. It took all the persuading to get me to join."
Michael Bloomfield was heir to a fortune his father made as a manufacturer of restaurant furniture. At age 21 he became the beneficiary of a $2 million trust. He was set for life, free to pursue his passion: blues guitar. As the foil to Butterfield's harp playing he become the leader of a generation of guitar heros that included Jimmi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Duane Allan, and Alvin Lee. Bloomfield had the frantic energy of a 10-year old boy, right to the end when he died in his mid-30's. When the press idolized him he was quick to tell them that he was a mere imitator of the master, B.B. King.
The seminal event that launched the Butterfield Band on the way to stardom was the Newport Folk Festival of 1965. Folk music had made its own journey in the previous decade, from the coffee house to the pop charts, led by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. No longer was it the special province of left wing intellectuals. There was still the old folk mafia and its most famous don, Pete Seeger, but the younger musicians had taken the genre to primetime air play on the new medium of FM radio. Now it was music that could make culture heros and win Grammys. Newport had become a kind of summit for the practitioners from both generations and now there was a new excitement that invested this annual rite. That year, 1965, the festival featured an afternoon session devoted to blues. A distinguished procession of old blues masters played to a worshipful crowd, who were thrilled just to see these historic figures of American music. At the session's end the M.C.introduced the Butterfield Band, who stood waiting in front of a wall of amplifiers.
The very sight of all this gear was an offense to many present. Folk music appealed to the romantic notion of the common man, the dignified peasant, the itinerant minstrel. Woody Guthrie was the patron saint of this school. According to his legend Woody was the voice of the people, defying the powers that be who would take from the poor all that was rightfully theirs -- the land, their simple dignity. Blues music was to them the music of sharecroppers exploited by rich white landowners, fieldhands who picked cotton all day in the burning sun, and none typified the blues quite so much as Mississippi John Hurt, the gentle, soft-spoken singer with parchment skin and sad eyes, who had entertained the crowd earlier in the day. A close second was Son House, the brooding, scrawny singer whose delivery made him seem possessed; eyes rolled back in his head, fingers choking the neck of his guitar. Now here came a high-wattage, racially mixed band of urbanites headed by a sullen-looking white man.
