The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing

Walking After Midnight: I BEGAN TO SEE THAT THE BLUES IS REALLY NEWS FROM AN OLDER PLACE

Authenticity Be Damned! A DIRTY BLUES ALCHEMY THAT IS CORRUPT AND ALIVE by Will Blythe Isn’t one of the horrible secrets of the blues how boring they can sometimes be? ConsiderthegreatEricClapton,whocancopaFreddieKinglickbetterthananyone ,butwhosebluestributealbumsfeeltoopreciseandmannerlyandultimately vitiated—like repertory, for God’s sake. They make you wish he’d left the key to thehighwaybackunderthematathome.Theylacktheanguishedsoulofhismagisterial Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. And Clapton loves the blues like no other,yessir.Butmaybeyoucanlovesomethingsomuchthatyoukillitwithreverence . Maybe then it stops loving you back. There’s no question, though, that the blues still loves R.L. Burnside, the seventy-six-year-old Mississippian, and that’s probably because the records he makesthesedaysdon’tkissitshoaryass.Throughsomemiracleofdirtyalchemy, hisbluesjukesrightpastissuesofauthenticityandpuritythatbedevilthedevil’s music, or at least its fans. Anxious to maintain their special connection to the music, many blues buffs want it to stay the same forever, like lovers in the first onslaught of romance want their beloveds to never change. Born on November 23, 1926, R.L. Burnside grew up on a plantation near Oxford, Mississippi,wherehisfamilymembersweresharecroppers.Hefirsttriedtoplay harmonica, but as he says, “I never could get that to work.” As is frequently the case with his generation of Mississippi musicians, Burnside serendipitously enjoyedthemostcasualofconnectionstothebluesgods—asifMountOlympus stood just outside his screen door. In his late teens, he learned guitar from the 229 1SMIRNOFF_pages.qxd 8/27/08 10:43 AM Page 229 magnificent Fred McDowell, who lived no more than a mile or two from Burnside’s family. Often, after taking cotton to the gin, Burnside would stop by McDowell’s to hear him make that slide guitar whine. When Burnside moved from Mississippi to Chicago in the ’40s to try and make a little more money—that classic migration—he learned that his first cousin, Anna Mae, was married to none other than Muddy Waters. The two men worked at the same Chicago foundry, and after their shifts, Burnside routinely ended up at the Zanzibar Club and Waters’s home, where the master showed Burnside plenty of licks on the slide guitar. Chicago, however, turned out to be a horror. Within a single year, five membersofBurnside ’sfamily,includinghisfather,weremurderedthere.Intwosongs on Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down (Fat Possum), “Hard Time Killing Floor” and“R.L.’sStory,”Burnsidematter-of-factlyrecitesthedetailsofthekillingswhile electronica swirls around his narration like ghosts of the dead. Two brothers and my father was killed in Chicago That’s why I don’t like living there . . . Hard times, yea, everywhere I go It’s rough, rough, rougher than ever before. The details take the songs out of the realm of myth, in which it is possible to seedeathasmerefolklore,andintothevicinityofBurnside’sownhistory,where it still hurts. He went back to Mississippi, working again as a sharecropper (he picked cottononaplantationaslateas1984 ).Around1960,hekilledalocalmanwhomhehad accused of being a bully. In a New Yorker profile of Matthew Johnson, the founder ofFatPossumRecords,JayMcInerneynotesthebadassexchangeBurnsidehadwith thejudgeafterthesingerwaschargedwithhomicide.“Thejudgeasked[Burnside] if he had intended to kill the man. ‘It was between him and the Lord, him dyin’,’ Burnsidesays.‘Ijustshothiminthehead.’”HewassentuptotheParchmanprison farm,whereheservedonlysixmonthsbeforebeingreleased. R.L.Burnsidewasthekindofbluesman—or“magicNegro,”toborrowSpikeLee’s phrase—whoIwentinsearchofasayoungman.WhenIwasgrowingupinNorth Carolina,IparticipatedinanotuncommonwhiteSoutherntraditionofrevering black people (a custom probably closely related to the other white Southern tradition of abusing black people). In college, this reverence took the form of driving over to Durham every other week or so of my senior spring to imbibe the wisdom of Richard Trice, who had been a bluesman back in the ’30s and ’40s and aconfederateofthemorenotoriousBlindBoyFuller.InanactofChristianrepentance ,Tricehadgivenupplayingtheblues.Toridhimselfoftheevidence,hesold 230 THE OXFORD AMERICAN 1SMIRNOFF_pages.qxd 8/27/08 10:43 AM Page 230 me his electric guitar—which didn’t work—and case for sixty dollars. We would sitinhislittlewoodhouse,hiswifewatchingTVintheotherroom,andhewould tell me about his life. I hung on every word as if he were a drawling, hard-living Greekphilosopher.Myaccentandexpressionstendedtoapehisown.Ihavetapes ofourtalksandtheyareembarrassinginthatrespect.Tohearthetapes,youwould have thought you were listening to two grizzled black survivors of the ’30s. Of course, one of us actually was. I saw Richard—and other blues singers—as repositories of secret wisdom, alternative strategies for life. Real poverty was so foreign to my experience that itlookedpicturesque.Shotgunhouses,flappingtinroofs,newspaperinsulation, turnippatches—thesewerethebeautifulvisualsinathemeparkofroughhistory. Richard’s wisdom seemed to come from chthonic depths—something out of a tree, out of the dirt—that had nothing to do with hard living. Hard living struck me as quaint, not hard. So,attwenty-one,IwasfarmoreofanEtchASketchthanIshouldhavebeen. It’struethatnaïvetéhassomecharm—Iwasopen,solicitous,interested.Butstupid .IwassearchingforauthenticexemplarsofSouthernculture,menwhoselives seemed pulpier, more extravagant than my own. Not so overdetermined. In my ownway,Imusthavefeltlikeanoutsider.Iwastryingtofindsomethingmorereal thanIwas—aquestasoldasPlato,I...