From the Horses's Mouths

Page 5 March–April 2008 From the horses’s Mouths Rick Madigan Since it’s nearly impossible to read John Sinclair ’s Delta Sound Suite Fattening Frogs for Snakes without succumbing to the temptation to listen to some of the music Sinclair chronicles and celebrates, as I work on this review, I am playing The Essential Sonny Boy Williamson (1993) on Chess, specifically “Help Me,” one of Sonny Boy’s ominous rolling blues that features his patented combination of vulnerability, impatience, and menace. Later in the afternoon, I’ll move on to Charley Patton, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and Mississippi Fred McDowell, among others. Be prepared to spend some serious cash on CDs if you read this book, since Sinclair’s feeling for the Delta blues is expansive and infectious. The desire to hear the voices of various first or second generation Delta bluesmen telling the story of the blues on their own terms must have been one of the basic motivations for this book, since that basic narrative strategy—getting the news straight from the horse’s mouth—is one that Sinclair puts to good use throughout. In nearly every piece here, the poetry contained in the speech patterns of these rural singers—similar to the poetry employed in their songs—is given prominent place. The book as a whole is an interesting hybrid of affiliated forms— part narrative/lyric poetry, part blues scholarship, part oral history—but it is the stories themselves, presented mainly in first person or eyewitness accounts , that make up the heart and soul of Sinclair’s suite. Sinclair is interested in carefully delineating the social place of the blues, where the blues came from and the role the music played in the daily lives of the black field laborers of the Mississippi Delta. Poems like “Country Blues” and “Some of These Days” painstakingly recreate the social dynamic of a particular time and place, and let readers see the necessary social role blues music played in the lives of an oppressed and maligned people with little opportunity for relaxation or release. This inevitably leads to a discussion of how political blues music has always been, something Sinclair never lets readers forget: In the air, everywhere, the land soaked with their blood, the night alive with the spirit voices wailing over their crops. Here and elsewhere Sinclair reminds readers that Delta blues music has always been a source of potent political protest created by a people who at the beginning of the twentieth century continued to be haunted by their violent separation from a cultural past and by their continued exclusion from any real American future.Although a number of poems speak of the power of the blues to cross racial and cultural lines—when white people hear the blues, they like the music, too, and are drawn to it—righteous anger at the exploitation of the music by unscrupulous promoters and record producers is presented in no uncertain terms: & the music of the Delta would be appropriated & exploited beyond measure by the descendants of the slave holders, & their bank rollers to swell their bulging coffers. Many of the most enjoyable poems in the collection are character portraits of some of the most influential and charismatic bluesmen, or are blues legacy stories involving the various ways the blues were handed down from one generation to the next. (It was always a plus for a young aspiring blues player to have a pretty female cousin or older sister.) A number of poems—“Hellhound on My Trail,” “Stones in My Passway,” “Come On in My Kitchen,” among others—tell the Robert Johnson story from various perspectives. Other blues greats—Charley Patton, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson—are the subjects of similar portraits. A poem like “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” about Muddy Waters, provides a fair glimpse of Sinclair’s method. After beginning with some scene-setting information out of blues history (or sometimes a quote from tutelary blues spirits such as Peter Guralnick or Robert Palmer, whose Deep Blues [1982] is a primary source), Sinclair quickly brings on Waters himself to let him tell his own story: I had a hot blues out, man. I...