The Irish in the Atlantic World

“Blues Coming down Royal Avenue”: Van Morrison’s Belfast Blues

“Blues Coming down Royal Avenue” Van Morrison’s Belfast Blues Lauren Onkey See, Belfast is not like England, even though it’s a part of Great Britain. It’s got its own trip going. The American influences are stronger than the English influences because of all the Irish who have emigrated to the United States in the last few generations. Van Morrison, 1972 The Maritime Hotel became a place that people made pilgrimages to. It became the fount of blues learning in Ireland. Billy Harrison, Them guitarist In 1964 nineteen-year-old Van Morrison was at a loose end in Belfast. He was a hardened veteran of the Irish showband scene, having played in the Monarchs since 1960, playing shows in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Germany, and England. Showbands were lucrative, but the limitations of the form frustrated Morrison. He was looking for an outlet to play more blues and rhythm and blues music, the music he learned from his father’s record collection and fell in love with as a young boy. The rest of Britain’s burgeoning rock music world had finally caught up with him; blues, as served up by bands such as the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, was popular. In a recent interview Morrison recalled his response to the British blues boom: “When the blues started getting noticed, I could hardly believe it. It was like all my Christmases come at once. Because this stuff wasn’t new to me at all. I’d been listening to it most of my life. By the time that stuff started to be popular, it was in my bones. It was like breathing by then. Blues was my calling card. People tend to forget that I was discovered as a blues singer. It was nothing to do with rock music. To start with, Them was a blues thing.”1 196 | Lauren Onkey In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United Kingdom witnessed what was often called a “blues boom.” American blues music became extremely popular among young people, in some cases to a fanatical degree. African American musicians toured more successfully in Britain than they did at home. Blues societies formed. Many fans categorized the blues as an authentic form of African American expression, especially when played on acoustic instruments. This investment in authenticity could sometimes reach absurd levels. Big Bill Broonzy, for example, who had moved from Mississippi to Chicago in the 1940s and reveled in the style and sophistication of big city life, felt compelled to don overalls for his first U.K. tours to live up to the image of the suffering Mississippi Delta bluesman. When Muddy Waters first toured Britain in 1958 with Otis Spann, he was criticized for playing electric blues, since the audience had expected only acoustic music.2 The first wave of blues fans were not especially interested in the hybridity of black Atlantic culture, its movement, adaptability and sense of displacement . Ireland did not experience the blues boom to the degree that England did, in part because of the showband tradition, which eclipsed rock and roll. Blues hit in Ireland in the mid-1960s in response to the popularity of English bands and especially because of the impact of Them, from Northern Ireland. Belfast was the most vibrant place for blues in Ireland and produced Ireland’s most important blues and rhythm and blues performer, Van Morrison, the lead singer and saxophone player in Them. In this chapter I map Morrison’s roots in the blues revival and examine the site of Belfast itself as a fertile transatlantic crossroads where the blues took root. I argue that we can read the blues in Belfast as an example of transatlantic racial exchange that opened up the possibility for new identities to emerge; in particular Van Morrison and Them created a transatlantic relationship that avoided the rhetoric of well-intended but destructive black and Irish authenticity, thereby creating a positive, productive, transracial alliance that represented an optimistic albeit brief challenge to sectarianism. I read Them as a precursor to attempts by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) to build a nonsectarian movement for social change through the creative transatlantic racial exchange of adopting symbols and tactics from the American civil rights movement.3 Them’s blues, like the NICRA’s use of the song “We Shall Overcome,” is a moment of modern cultural hybridity rather than nostalgic recreation , a distinction that has important implications for the racial politics of...