The area known as the Mississippi Delta has produced the largest number of influential and important blues artists.  This area in west Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi was never a major center of music business but it is considered the emotional heart for many blues musicians, fans, and historians.  It was fertile ground for the roots of the blues.

The Delta was a cruel place for African Americas in the middle of the 20^th century.  Slavery, oppression, the KKK, Jim Crow laws mixed with Southern heat, illiteracy and poverty was the perfect recipe for an expression of the culture of southern blacks of this time like no other.  Blues music is an important documentation of this era.

Early Delta blues songs were simply passed down orally, then in written form.  But they were later preserved in recording made by traveling musicologists such as the father and son team of John and Alan Lomax.  In the early 40’s this duo would go on field trips to the south to make these recordings and it wasn’t until later that artists would travel around the country to record their music.  After their travels, they would return to the Delta to continue playing in the juke joints, and social dances and gatherings

In the 1920s and ‘30s Delta bluesmen Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson influenced the next generation of Mississippi born blues greats like Muddy Waters.  Musician such as he took the music north as the mass exodus from the rural south of blacks happened in the ‘40s and ‘50s.  Originally the Delta blues was simply one instrument and a vocalist but in Chicago the sound was amplified and electrified to accommodate the new urban tastes of the black population.  The growth of this industry once it hit Chicago was huge and soon Chicago eclipsed the Delta as the center of the blues.

Epistle 11 – Test Patterns

Once upon a time doctors and TV repairmen made house calls. Now, neither do. TV repairmen are extinct and doctors think they will be if the government has its way. Of the two species, the TV guys were clearly the more critical in the early days of television. On average, they showed up about once a month with their medical bags filled with nifty little pliers and screwdrivers and an assortment of vacuum tubes to replace the mysterious, dusty ones that burned out just before your favorite program. We watched with baited breath to see if the picture tube had flat-lined, the kiss of death for months of entertainment.

The geeks of that era actually took their own tubes to the neighborhood drug store and soda fountain and tested them on a gadget that was converted from an old carnival fortune-telling machine. I tried it once, replacing two tubes at $3.95 each that the gypsy said were evil, and I still couldn’t remove the snow storm from the screen. After another panic call to Harold, our friendly repairman who was now treated as a member of the family, the snow and the vertical flickering were restored through alchemy.

Thanks to his video voodoo, we were all overjoyed to turn on the magic box in time for hours of the test pattern instead of I Love Lucy. The TV Guide said there was boxing on Fridays, Gunsmoke on Saturdays, and Ed Sullivan on Sundays, but they were just standbys in case the test pattern went off the air. We didn’t know why our local station preferred the test pattern instead of James Arness as Matt Dillon—maybe someone thought the test pattern was a better actor—but to its credit, the station occasionally displayed a bit of creativity by showing us a disconnected plug with an entertaining “oops”. No matter, we watched anyway. Can you imagine what the rest of life was like?

At our house, we were blessed with radio until I was 10, so I was forced to use my imagination (which became extinct with the TV repairman), to see Matt and Chester clean up Dodge instead of hanging around the Long Branch ogling Miss Kitty. Radio also saved me from a life of crime because The Shadow and Jack Webb convinced me it did not pay. But then TV sets with grand cabinets and tiny screens showed up at the local appliance store and I began living on the edge, watching Crusader Rabbit through the shop window until my father placed two fingers in his mouth and whistled loud enough to be heard across town. Since we didn’t have a dog, it was my job to race back home.

How do we cope today with our desolation, our lives bereft of test patterns, dusty tubes and trusted repairmen in our living rooms? Maybe government bureaucrats will make house calls. I’ll serve them coffee on a TV tray while they take my blood pressure.

We Will Win

In the early 1900s is when the Blues as we know it today took shape in this country.  But if you have studied the Blues you know that it’s roots stem back hundreds of years and many miles across the Atlantic Ocean to both Africa and Europe before taking root in the American South.

It was actually the blending and clashing of African and European music where it all started.  Add to that the spice of the American South and you have the Blues as it is today.

The use of flatted notes (the 3^rd, 5^th, and 7^th) come from the indigenous music of West Africa, therefore the Blues have mostly been influenced by African-American culture.  And interestingly enough the lyrics of Blues stem from the “field hollers” of slaves. The instruments most associated with the Blues are guitar, harmonica, and piano, which are not African in origin but they come from Europe.

Then during the Reconstruction Era in America (post Civil War period), proto-blues music began to develop due to dance halls and bars that were frequented by the rural working class.  These “Juke Joints” began to sprout up all over the South.

The music created and listened to in these joints was made for dancing, and in time a shuffling beat similar to the “ragtime beat” became popular.  This rhythm would soon become well known and associated with the Blues.

As the Reconstruction Era ended, African Americans were faced with much racism and poverty.  They were forced to travel from place to place to find work.  Many of them made an attempt to make a living with their music, and so they traveled with guitar in hand via train.  No wonder trains are such a common symbol in Blues music.  As these musicians traveled, the incredible music and lyrics of the Blues was spread and is now a world wide passion.

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Epistle 10 – The Family Car Trip

Before jetting off to Monte Carlo, Cancun or a Carnival cruise ship, boomer families used to pile into the family Ford or Chevy and creep along beastly hot, two-lane roads in quest of some exotic Ray and Ruby’s Cabin Court motel that let you park right in front of the door to your room.

Talk about convenience. If you wanted to spend the night in your car, which might have been more comfortable than Ray and Ruby’s room, you could completely block the door for safety, except that nobody cared about safety back then and didn’t lock the doors to their houses or their cars.

They didn’t use seat belts either, which gave birth to the annual mid-summer statistics about the slaughter of thousands on the highways, probably in the family sedan, and certainly gave inspiration to the lovely, lyrical:

Around the curve,

Lickety split.

Beautiful car,

Wasn’t it?

Burma Shave

I’ll bet somebody actually got paid to write that.

Anyway, back to the family car trip, which was mostly spent in the oppressively hot back seat with the hot air from the open windows (1950’s air conditioning) blowing the smoke from my father’s cigarette in my face. Although I valiantly tried to improve my mind by reading my comic books, and vicariously improve my body by watching Charles Atlas kick sand in some bully’s face after he had turned a pale, scrawny body like mine into a stack of rippling muscles, there were just too many distractions.

My brother always wanted to play Hangman or Battleship–with paper and pencil for God’s sake, not even a game board. As soon as he cheated me out of my rightful victory by quoting some new rule that always seemed to favor his situation, it was time to ask for the twelfth time if we were there yet, and start whining about some place to eat, invariably a contest between a cozy tavern where my father could get a frosty mug of Schlitz and a drive-in where we could get a frosty mug of A&W root beer.

Because the driver could keep going and torture our bladders into submission, the tavern generally won the day, but at least we got a burger, potato chips, a Pepsi, and ten minutes to slide steel discs down the shuffleboard, all in all, not a bad consolation prize, considering we could have been forced to eat real food.

Of course, you can’t make a long, torturous car trip to somewhere without making another one back, which was even worse. There’s no sense of eager anticipation of the pleasures of Ray and Ruby’s Cabin Court motel; the comic books have all been read, and my body is covered with pink calamine lotion to ease the itch of poison ivy, contracted in search of frogs in the dark with a flashlight. Was the calamine lotion bright pink to match my sun-browned skin? I looked like I had been dipped in liquid bubble gum.

At least my misery got me an A&W root beer.

We Will Win