Lamenting The Future Of the Blues

In early May, I traveled to Memphis to attend the Blues Foundation's 31st annual two-day gala, which included its Hall of Fame induction ceremony and awards banquet. Buddy Guy received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Pinetop Perkins, now 96 years old, turned up, as did 80-year-old Bobby "Blue" Bland and 78-year-old Hubert Sumlin. I heard folk blues, country blues, jump blues, Chicago blues, Delta blues, Texas blues, fast blues, slow blues, good blues and bad blues. What I didn't hear was new blues, and I flew back home no less relieved of my own blues over the genre's troubling future.

Got the blues flying bqack from the blues 'cause of the state of the blues.

Today's blues music isn't only steeped in the past; it's anchored to it. During the performances before and during the banquet, I could trace to almost every song, instrumental solo or vocal style I heard its originator or its most celebrated proponent—and I'm far from an expert on the history of the blues. These tales of heartache, oppression and fleeting joy sounded all too familar.
According to Jay Sieleman, the Blues Foundation's executive director, most blues fans aren't looking for something new. "We all don't want the blues to be the same ol', same ol'," he said, "but it'd better be close."

Laying down the law.

The blues establishment seems to have little interest in reaching out to other musical communities. No rock, hip-hop or jazz artists with a musical debt to the blues were part of the activities in Memphis. Perhaps in turn, blues musicians aren't invited to participate in most major rock festivals...

Keep it pure, ensuring it atrophies; well done.

"We're all worrisome about getting a young audience," XM Satellite Radio's Bill Wax said over sweet tea in Memphis. At the same time, though, he said: "I don't believe the blues world looks for the next big thing. We love people who play around with the form, but we don't want people to mess with the tradition."

Nonsense: keep it pure, resist change, and the music will wither away.

For the blues to have a future in which daring artists bring in new listeners, the establishment needs to share the blues with people who have a different idea of what it is. The future can be built on new modes of expression if musicians and fans remember the blues isn't merely a form. It's a feeling. Capture it, as so many artists did in decades past in so many ways, and you're playing the blues, whether it's with a bottleneck, a big band or a studio full of digital effects.

Jason Moran, the gifted jazz pianist who eagerly explores the blues, explains how he connects with a feeling necessary to make authentic music: "I remember saying to an older musician that I wanted to play bebop, and he said, 'You can't. You didn't live in that time.' That really fired me up to think about what was going on in that time to make those musicians play that way."

That's nonsense, that one can't play it if one didn't live in a particular time; that would make all music die.

"The blues is getting to be like an endangered species," Mr. Guy said by phone. "It's like somebody put a spell on it."

Traditionalists closed to change.

As for Mr. Guy, he profited from some outreach when his daughter Shawnna asked him to appear on "Block Music," her 2006 platinum album. "It's a new thing, a different way," Mr. Guy said of the rap-blues marriage. "Like when Muddy put electricity to the harmonica."

Exactly.

Definin' the Blues

When I was 12 years old, I found a Count Basie album in my father's record collection that contained a 1941 performance of "Goin' to Chicago Blues" by Jimmy Rushing and the Basie band. That was the record that made me fall in love with the blues—though it goes without saying that I couldn't understand all of the lyrics, especially when they touched on what for me was the still-unexplored land of adult relationships. I found the first stanza in particular to be impenetrably puzzling: Goin' to Chicago, sorry that I can't take you / There's nothin' in Chicago that a monkey woman can do. What on earth, I wondered, was a "monkey woman"? Teetering as I was on the edge of puberty, I boggled at the exotic possibilities.

“As much as a method of music making, blues were a medium of language. ” Read the full excerpt from 'Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary'

On top of everything else, Mr. Calt's book answers a question that has vexed me at odd moments for the past four decades. No sooner did I open "Barrelhouse Words" for the first time than I turned to page 164, where I found this admirably concise definition of "monkey woman": "An overly obliging or compliant female." Now I can die happy.