Freddy King, Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, Barney Kessell, Chet Atkins, Merle Travis and Scotty Moore. A lot of them aren’t known as blues players, but any one of them could sit down and play blues.... Nowadays, though, I very seldom listen to records. When I do, I’m often searching for something, but it’s more of a feeling, not a musical idea. When I worked with Otis Rush, I didn’t learn notes or anything—it was the way he uses his voice and guitar to put his point across. What he’s about is that he has so much to say, and he’s able to use his voice and guitar to share it. And what he has to say is real heavy. He’s a guy who can run chills up and down your spine; he’s scary, he’s real intense. From him I learned that the blues is a serious business and not to be taken lightly. Some of the tales he told me about his personal tragedies were heap powerful medicine. He inspires me to go on and he backs up the feeling that I don’t have any choice about it anyway. Be Yourself When I play a standard blues tune now, I feel like I’m making it my own. Although at an early age J realized you can’t “imitate” somebody, for a time I was still an apprentice, trying to live up to the standards of the original, and I knew I’d get into making the tune my own after I became more sure of my footing. If you’ve done the background, and then do something new, it’s got more authority. When I was just beginning, me and my friends in Grants Pass used to talk about getting this “black sound.” What it means is a certain quality of soul that is projected through a certain tone. It’s being able to really get your feelings out, but also having these certain kinds of feelings, which have to do with maturity—and I don’t mean acting “adult.” But I don’t try to “sound black.” I realized early on that I was indeed white; why try to be what I’m not? Increasingly, I have tried to sound more and more like myself. And the more I do that, the deeper I get into these certain kinds of feelings. In the blues, it’s important to be yourself, because it’s the only way to come across not only with original sound, but with anything that’s worthwhile. To be yourself you’ve got to know who you are, and if you don’t know who you are, you can’t tell anybody anything. For example, a lot of blues guys will have a long cord, and they’ll walk out into the audience to interact with the people. Now when I first went to San Francisco, I was trying to develop that: I really liked the other guys who The blues takes everything you’ve been going through and throws it back at you. It has feeling, and if you listen to the blues you have to feel. did it, the audience really liked them doing it, and I’d just worked with Albert Collins, who does it all the time. But it just didn’t feel natural to me. I was faking it, and so I don’t do it anymore. I’m not that outgoing. One thing you can't do in the blues is force it, either the playing or the way you present it. If it’s phoney, people are going to know, and they’re not going to buy it.... So when people say I “sound black,” what they’re hearing is music that has that particular kind of personal expression to it. When someone asked B.B. King about white people playing the blues, he said, “Man, if you’ve ever been in love, you know what the blues are about.” When people say white people can’t play the blues, they’re wrong. I was the house band for a black club in the Richmond ghetto for eight months, and they were the most consistently satisfying audience I’ve ever had. They had a good time and made me feel like I was accepted, that I was glad I was there, that I was expressing their feelings. Now of course I’ve never had the experiences of a 55-year-old black man, but on the other hand, I’ve had enough experience that I can sing about something and he’ll know that I know what I’m talking about. If people like the blues it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white. On a midwest tour with Charlie Musselwhite, we went to a club on the South Side of Chicago, a place where white people aren’t supposed to hang around. There we were, five white guys in this big red Cadillac that Charlie’s agent loaned us. When we got out of the car, we saw this group of black people coming down the sidewalk towards us, in a hurry, and I thought, “Oh shit.” But they were there to throw their arms around Charlie and welcome him home.... Once you get inside a blues club, there’s no problems at all, because everyone knows why you’re there. Working Blues When I got out of the Army, I went through a period when I wasn’t playing gigs at all, just teaching guitar and making money without anyone to spend it on but myself. At that time, when I was twenty and twenty-one, I really wondered if I was screwing up by being a musician. I thought maybe I should get married and get a straight job and try to make some real money like everyone else. Finally I got disgusted with the way I was living and dropped out, and then everything got more interesting. I enjoyed playing again, and one of things that really did it for me was the fact that Paul Butterfield’s band was making it. When I saw those guys doing it, I felt it was all right to do it myself. I loosened up. And that’s when I jumped into being a real professional musician. Since then it’s been a constant struggle, but I haven’t experienced any more doubts about why I’m doing it or if it’s OK. The best part of being a blues musician for me is this: if you have to be labeled, I feel good that I can say I’m a blues musician and really mean it. The one real drag about being a musician is that you have to do something everyone hates, all the time: look for a job. IVIlirmrflWBnDtMHaHHnHIWBBMi That’s the best part, to know what you are and to be able to be that thing to the best of your abilities. And there’s a lot of tradition behind me. During times when I’m not making enough money, when things go wrong on the job, or when I sit around in complete depression because of my status in life, I can always draw solace from the fact that it’s very traditional for blues musicians, and that it’s happening to my brother down the street too. The one real drag about being a musician is that you have to do something everyone hates, all the time: look for a job. If you really want to stay on top of it, just about every day of your life you’re looking for a job. And the blues is not a popular music. There’s only one person who’s a superstar in blues, and that’s B.B. King. Beneath him there’s a layer of about ten or twelve guys who make a pretty good living, and underneath them everyone else is scuffling. How many millionaire rock stars are there? You see, people who like blues generally don’t have much money themselves, so they can’t go to some fancy place to hear somebody at seven bucks to get in and $2.50 a drink. You've got to play dives because that’s all your audience can afford. When people go to a night club to hear music, one of the things a lot of them want is to forget their daily life, forget their jobs, forget their troubles with their old man or old lady; they want to escape. But with the blues you can’t escape. The blues takes everything you’ve been going through and throws it back at you. It has feeling, and if you listen to the blues you have to feel. If you don’t want to feel, then you don’t want to hear some guy say, “Well I went down to the night club and the boss fired me and now I don’t know what to do.” You’re going to want to hear, “Oh Baby, you got a nice ass so let’s dance.” So I’ve worked a lot of dives, but some nice places too, like the Great American Music Hall, and outside of the fact that the sound was nice and the crowd was big, the benefits you get from working a place like that are 12 Clinton St. Quarterly
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