Chris Thomas King, another take on the birth of the Blues

[creolian]

Hello All,

Chris is the son of the late Tabby Thomas. Tabby was a great guy and not a bad guitar player. He ran a joint in Baton Rouge ( Tabby's Blues Box) that was one of the last real juke joints around and a regular stop in my youth. It was literally a concrete block cube maybe 450 square ft. With a great juke box and Tabby hosting various players with his house band Saturday nights

I don't completely agree with Chris's take but I do believe NOLA was a terminus for trade and culture and was a place where cultures collided, the melting pot stirred and new music was just one result. I've read some of the musicologist's and cultural historians version of the development of blues and I just can't countenance the idea that the blues just appeared in the delta without considering that the only road to the delta for over a hundred years was the Mississippi river on which everything either came from or went to NOLA.

www.nola.com/community/st-tammany/index.ssf/2017/10/bluesman_chris_thomas_king_rel.html

All best,

Jeff

[bonzo]

Thanks for posting Jeff, interesting article. I suppose it depends on where you start thinking 'what is blues music'.
To mention guitar players as early adopters is fair enough, but I always understood that singing and the use of other instruments pre dates guitar by quite a few years.
An interesting take on things though, I'll look out for the book.
Best wishes to you all, John

[Pickers Ditch]

That thinking makes a lot of sense to me.

...much more so than those "folkey" guys mafia ideas in the 1960s which just didn't seem to ring totally true at all.

I could go on and on, but I won't as some people are too blinkered and sometimes get upset with alternative views.

'nuff said.

I'll await Mr. Thomas book with bated breath...

[creolian]

Oct 18, 2017 15:50:58 GMT bonzo said:

Thanks for posting Jeff, interesting article. I suppose it depends on where you start thinking 'what is blues music'.
To mention guitar players as early adopters is fair enough, but I always understood that singing and the use of other instruments pre dates guitar by quite a few years.
An interesting take on things though, I'll look out for the book.
Best wishes to you all, John

I think you are 100% correct in that there was a long gestation of what became known as blues.  My opinion comes mostly from working on the Mud Island museum in Memphis and a variety of documentary film work over the last few decades.   For a couple years I got to travel the river between Cairo Il and the Gulf documenting the rivers history in the development of the country.    long before roads and rail, The French in New Orleans, The Scotch Irish of the east coast and the Africans as well as indegenious peoples all got together as a result of commerce on the rivers.   I guess we'll never know who first put a shuffle beat to a 1,4,5 progression but that's what I consider the birth of the blues.

As an aside on Chris ; the first time I saw him it was one of those "this guy is a young Hendrix, we gotta go see him". He dressed the part with his headband, bell bottoms and Stratocaster... He tore up Tipitinas with his VooDoo Chile etc.   He really is a child of the music and I'm glad he's getting his voice published.

All best, 

Jeff

Edit: "folksy guys mafia"... I never quite thought of them as Mafia but many did bring a certainty about the unknown that I've had a tough time understanding. I'm just glad someone took the effort to document things in whatever way they thought was right. What would this world be with no 145 or flat fifths ?

[pete1951]

Don't suppose we will even know the 'truth', though I think a list of pre-war'Blues Greats' from the Delta will be a lot longer than a list from anywhere else.
PT

[Michael Messer]

I didn't know until now that Chris Thomas King is the son of the late Tabby Thomas. Now you mention it, it's so obvious, but I had not read or heard that before. Thanks :-)

I am not sure I agree with what Chris is saying, but I do agree that New Orleans played a pretty big part in the whole thing, and that the origins are not necessarily from the Mississippi delta.

PD, don't forget that those folkie hippy guys in the sixties were just kids. They were completely blown away to be in the company of these giants of American music and probably didn't handle it as well as they would if they had been older and more experienced. I know lots of these people and that is how it was. Imagine it, your 22 years old living in the south of England and Mississippi Fred McDowell is asleep on your sofa! The proper researchers like Paul Oliver and Sam Charters, were getting closer to the truth than the hippy musicians were. Also, the African-American musicians that came to Europe were trying to protect their 'patch' and didn't want the real truth to be known, they just wanted the work for themselves. Big Bill Broonzy told Alexis Korner, in the late 50s, that Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf were dead!

An interesting fact that has always fascinated me, is that contrary to popular mythology, the first recording of blues slide guitar was not made in, or even near the Mississippi delta. The first recording by an African-American of blues slide guitar was made in New York City in 1923 by a musician from Louisville, Kentucky, named Sylvester Weaver.

Weaver was in New York recording with singer, Sara Martin, and while he was there he did a solo session and recorded two instrumental masterpieces, ‘Guitar Blues’ and ‘Guitar Rag’. ‘Guitar Blues’ is a classic blues played Hawaiian lap-style in sebastopol tuning and uses all six strings to play the melody. Based on a piano rag, ‘Guitar Rag’ is played Hawaiian lap-style using four chords and the slide on all six strings. These recordings are far from being primitive and draw more from Hawaiian steel playing than from the type of music played on a one string diddley bow.

Weaver recorded the tune again in 1927 and it was this recording that was ‘borrowed’ and slightly renamed by Leon McAuliffe of Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys and became an enormous hit. ‘Steel Guitar Rag’ is one of the staples of the Western Swing and pedal steel guitar repertoire.

Shine On
Michael

[Pickers Ditch]

Oct 18, 2017 17:15:18 GMT creolian said:

Oct 18, 2017 15:50:58 GMT bonzo said:

Oct 18, 2017 18:15:18 GMT 1 creolian said:

Edit: "folksy guys mafia"... I never quite thought of them as Mafia but many did bring a certainty about the unknown that I've had a tough time understanding. I'm just glad someone took the effort to document things in whatever way they thought was right. What would this world be with no 145 or flat fifths ?

Jeff, what I meant by the "folky" guys mafia were those middle class East Coast US and British academics who wrote screeds on "the down trodden, blah blah..." trying to come up with a conclusion from their analyses of the blues and its players whilst contemplating their navels in coffee shops and nice warm houses.
To me "blues" is good time music played and sung by people for others whilst they have a drink, have a dance and have a generally good time when "relaxing".
The "blues" players were musicians who didn't want to work at other manual jobs if they could help it, had some talent for playing and made a living accordingly.
They would play anything and everything if they got paid.
Like everyone else they would have been influenced by EVERYTHING around them most predominately by the music and other instruments they heard.
All IMHO, of course.

Honeyboy Edwards said to me in Colchester UK "We tells the white folks what they want to hear." - that sums it all up for me.

Michael - I was typing as you were posting!

[Pickers Ditch]

Michael, I was around as a late teen in those days and was lucky enough to see a lot who came over.

I think I've mentioned somewhere on the forum before that I was never comfortable even at that age with the "academia" surrounding the folky blues crowd in the UK at that time.

[creolian]

Oct 18, 2017 17:42:06 GMT Pickers Ditch said:

Oct 18, 2017 17:15:18 GMT creolian said:

Jeff, what I meant by the "folky" guys mafia were those middle class East Coast US and British academics who wrote screeds on "the down trodden, blah blah..." trying to come up with a conclusion from their analyses of the blues and its players whilst contemplating their navels in coffee shops and nice warm houses.
To me "blues" is good time music played and sung by people for others whilst they have a drink, have a dance and have a generally good time when "relaxing".
The "blues" players were musicians who didn't want to work at other manual jobs if they could help it, had some talent for playing and made a living accordingly.
They would play anything and everything if they got paid.
Like everyone else they would have been influenced by EVERYTHING around them most predominately by the music and other instruments they heard.
All IMHO, of course.

Honeyboy Edwards said to me in Colchester UK "We tells the white folks what they want to hear." - that sums it all up for me.

Michael - I was typing as you were posting!

I got a pretty good laugh ! It's not a scholarly subject for me either but it is fun to wonder what went on musically before recording technology existed. Ive heard a lot of opinion, have my home town centric views and I'm glad someone found the culture worth preserving even if they are "carpet bagging navel gazers". Yeah, I'm guilty

Even in what is racially tolerant New Orleans, segregation was the norm until the late 60s and even our jazz culture was a parody then. Numerous stages in the French Quarter and not a single black person on one until Mac Rebbenack hired black sidemen for his Boubon St Gig in 1961... He was subsequently deported to Los Angeles by the law until he came back as Dr John.

. It kind of changes ones perspective when you realize these young white people took some big risks to their personal safety at a time when blacks in parts of the south were still being lynched for no real reason other than inbred hate... All in all, I'm afraid if we didn't have interested folksters and subsequently the British, We might all be listening to Ethyl Merman, Don Ho and Pat Boon. I shudder...

Off to da races !

Jeff

[pete1951]

Oct 18, 2017 17:24:28 GMT pete1951 said:

Don't suppose we will even know the 'truth', though I think a list of pre-war'Blues Greats' from the Delta will be a lot longer than a list from anywhere else.
PT

I'm guessing that a list of pre-war Jazz greats from the Delta would be much shorter than a list from New Orleans. Jazz (I think) need a pool of musicians to feed on, instruments have to work well (have had a reed player and a brass player in the family ,a repairer is vital)
So, even if the 'first' Blues as we know it, started somewhere other than the Delta ,the simplicity of the music ment it grew in a rural area with ,at that time, a large , low paid population.
PT

[ricks]

Kind of like the Sylvester Weaver example, jazz-wise, I find it interesting that the first to popularise jazz coming out of New Orleans were the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a bunch of Italian-extraction white guys ( they weren't too bad, either! ) - I'd guess that the origins of it all involved a huge amount of cultural cross-fertilisation, but still I'd put my money on N'awlins being the cradle ( Buddy Bolden etc )..

[washboardchris]

Bit of useless information, the piano player for the Original Dixieland Jazz Band settled in Romford in Essex Dont know if he played in the pubs in the area

[Pickers Ditch]

So Chris, are you suggesting that it could have started in the badlands of the Thames delta, then?