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Interesting Quote by Bob Koester


paul secor

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3 hours ago, JSngry said:

What did Muddy Waters say?

. I can't remember any exact quotes, but I know that Muddy Waters also stressed the importance of vocals in the blues.

Great vocals is what I miss in a lot of the blues played today. 

 

 

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Who are those "most whites"? Do you know any of 'em?

Seems like an absurd notion to me, honestly. Meaning I'm in full agreement with the first sentence, but double-guessing the second. (But then I don't know many American "whites" other than those here, and I guess those here tend to be more knowledgeable about such things than others).

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Yeah, okay, in light of that most whites (most people, I guess) don't care to even know what "blues" is supposed to be ... the phrase may be true (but then it runs close to being a truism - if you consider white rock music audience, yeah, but what's the point? Not trying to get on anyone's nerves, just trying to figure out what's so interesting about the quote).

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Good point/good question ...

Maybe a case of drawing a line between "those in the know" and "those all too clueless" and making those who embrace that statement feel oh so much better in nodding wisely to themselves "yeah, I am not one of those 'most' ones ..."? :D

As for what you call a "truism"; I would call it a case of "stating the obvious" ...

And maybe Koester DID refer to "white blues fans" after all - in the sense that he may have been thinking of Johnny Winter,  et al and their white followers. And if you think of it he may have a point because there were quite a few of those who, when their status in blues is evoked, were invariably praised as oh so excellent "blues guitarists". But just as excellent "blues vocalists"??

Which of course begs the question of where to draw the line and who still is legitimately filed under "blues" and who isn't and is in fact "just rock" ...;)

 

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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2 hours ago, king ubu said:

Yeah, okay, in light of that most whites (most people, I guess) don't care to even know what "blues" is supposed to be ... the phrase may be true (but then it runs close to being a truism - if you consider white rock music audience, yeah, but what's the point? Not trying to get on anyone's nerves, just trying to figure out what's so interesting about the quote).

The valuable part of Koester's quote, for me, is that the blues is a vocal music (with instrumental accompaniment).  Worth saying and/or saying again. The part about what white fans think the blues is and/or like about the blues is also true, but it's not that those fans have made/are making a mistake or anything like it; rather, they've reshaped the music over time to suit their own tastes/needs. Do I myself like that reshaped music? Not much. Is this reshaping some sort of moral crime? Meh. Re-shapings of many sorts and in many directions are common in America's more or less vernacular music. More interesting, perhaps, at least in this case, is the sheer musical interest and proliferation of all the musical twists and turns that stemmed from those instrumental accompaniments to what primarily was a vocal music -- from Scrapper Blackwell, to Jab Jones, to Mississippi John Hurt, to Skip James, to Sleepy John Estes, to Furry Lewis, to Hammie Nixon, to Yank Rachel, to Big Joe Williams, ad infinitum.

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Assuming that you name these countriest of country blues artists (and granting that country blues is but one of the strains of blues)  for what they did with their (guitar) accompaniment, where exactly does the guitar begin to dominate the vocals?

What about

Brownie McGhee?

Elmore James?

T-Bone Walker?

Gatemouth Brown?

etc.

(I was tempted to name Johnny "Guitar" Watson next but refrained for obvious reasons ... ;) )

And if these blues artists would indeed be rated more as guitarists than as vocalists then would Bob Koester's statement about "most WHITES" still hold true or wouldn't there maybe have been a split (or "remodeling") earlier on when blues still was primarily a music for the black community?

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I agree with you as for the importance of their vocals, I just am pretty sure that others would place more emphasis on their guitar mastery in the overall picture. Or to put it another way, the "subordinate" role of their "guitar accompaniment" seemed to be less clear-cut than with other (particularly earlier) bluesmen. Hence my question.

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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1 hour ago, paul secor said:

I'll just say that vocals were a major part of Elmore's, T-Bone's, and Gatemouth's music. And I'll also say that there have been a fair number of white players who could imitate/copy their guitar playing to varying degrees, but couldn't touch their vocals.

paul, I'd put B.B. King in that same category. B.B.'s guitar-playing is completely distinctive -- but it's his singing that slays me. :tup 

That falsetto thing... Phew!

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Okay, one more question: The true bluesmen (therefore excluding many of those "followers" worshipped by "most whites" - after all, Eric Clapton is surely not God) ... isn't their guitar playing so good because it's "vocal" in some or other way? I'm speaking of pitch, of bending tones and bending times, doing that rocking chair thing that makes time stand still (or at least lets you forget time, completely, when you listen) - it's so completely human, no matter how technically adroit it may be (and that's where, say, Gary Moore, totally falls flat in my book, his playing sounds like plastic to me.

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Trying to remember the Muddy quote, trying to find it so I get it right, but can't, so...I think this is almost it, something along the lines of "White boy can play the blues, sure, white boy can play rings around me. But ain't no way a white boy is gonna SING the blues better than me, no way".

I get that, just as I get that it's not as much a "black thing" as it is a somewhat chrono-geo black thing that relates not just to blackness (although, god, yes) but to a type of blackness that involved aspects or region, labor, class, morals, aspirations, self-image, all that good stuff, that as time goes by has either disappeared (almost), evolved, or been corrupted both from without and within.

I had a funny feeling when Robert Cray came on the scene as some kind of "blues" figure. It's only increased since. Whatever all that is, it's not that.

Hell - some people make it a point today to learn dialects at a more than superficial level. And if you learn to lie to somebody in their own voice, shit, hello ALL the money you can eat.

I can tell you this - there are still places in the American South where it is hotter than hell in the summer (people who have never lived in a warm-weather climate...you should try it, just because), and there are still fields and woods where you can find yourself alone with just you and the voices inside your head and all of sudden somebody or something pops up and you god only knows what that's gonna be, and where you can still find people who have this perverse need to swing their dick into your head and leave it there, there's still all of that, but there's also satellite, cell, fast cars and trucks, and people of all colors & first-languages who run up against that these days. The borders are different now than they were then.

But Koester is right about what it is, I've had the experience of going to see friend's grandparents in rural southern areas, and...I don't think there's that many people who talk like that left, not unconsciously. Seriously, the sounds, the rhythms and pitches and inflections...the slurs, the merges, all of it in the service of just talking. Geez, voice is awesome, words are not voice, voice is sound, words are notes. And yes, "blues" is primarily a vocal music, not just for the singers, but for everybody involved.

But as far as what it "isn't", I don't know. And as far as "most whites", geez, I say this advisedly, because it's a rightly loaded subject...I know very few whites or blacks these days who speak as they speak in a fully unconscious manner. We are not those people anymore, none of us are, not unless you go waaaaay back in the woods, rural or urban. And the more you get lied to in your own voice, the more normal it becomes, and then when you hear the real real deal, it gets hard to not think that it's just a better lie than you're used to hearing.

And of course, that leads the cynic in me to ask - is Koester observing here, or is he selling?

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Also, consider this - in the American south of yore, the Venn Diagram of Black SpeechSound & White SpeechSound probably had a bigger intersection than not. I remember as a kid going up north to visit my dad's family and they all joked how my Mom "talked funny", and then coming back home and hearing blackfolk talk and it sounding like home. And then, travelling through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, good lord, there were white people there whose speech sounded like the black folk's back home, as far as just sound went.

There's plenty to consider in all of this if you want to really get into it. Maybe not so much if you're just looking to brand or otherwise distinguish your product, honorable as that can end up being.

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10 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

Assuming that you name these countriest of country blues artists (and granting that country blues is but one of the strains of blues)  for what they did with their (guitar) accompaniment, where exactly does the guitar begin to dominate the vocals?

What about

Brownie McGhee?

Elmore James?

T-Bone Walker?

Gatemouth Brown?

etc.

(I was tempted to name Johnny "Guitar" Watson next but refrained for obvious reasons ... ;) )

And if these blues artists would indeed be rated more as guitarists than as vocalists then would Bob Koester's statement about "most WHITES" still hold true or wouldn't there maybe have been a split (or "remodeling") earlier on when blues still was primarily a music for the black community?

I named them because what they did instrumentally was identical in time and in inspiration/necessity of response to when the primary vocal aspect of the blues was undeniable. Also, they weren't all guitarists -- Jab Jones was a pianist, Hammie Nixon played harmonica, Yank Rachel played mandolin.

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I think it's OK to know the difference between a chicken and a duck, if only so you don't bring it to the table with it's legs straight up, or do, if that's the intent. Otherwise all them childrens line up for the assjuice and nobody's the wiser.

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A few thoughts here - Sure, blues can be great both in instrumental and vocal form.  Here at this forum, we are particularly aware that some of the greatest blues ever played was in strictly instrumental form. 

Nevertheless, when we think about blues as a genre of music in the narrow sense of the word, there are very different perceptions in black and white America, and those perceptions are related to vocals versus guitar.   I remember one year in the early 90s when they had Oakland and San Francisco blues festivals in the same month.  No overlap of players. The San Francisco affair featured mostly guitar slingers, both white and black, and the Oakland blues festival featured almost only singers: Johnnie Taylor, Tyrone Davis, Latimore, Clarence Carter, Denise Lasalle, and a few others.   There were almost no white people at the Oakland event and the San Francisco event was dominated by whites.  

Today on the "blues" bandstand, good guitar playing is accepted by most as a license to sing, no matter how terribly, i.e. you can't make on the blues bandstand playing poor guitar and singing well, but playing guitar well and singing poorly is accepted as the norm.     That is the sense in which a lot of people now think of the blues as guitar music.   

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Good point and very easy to imagine ... and probably furthered by the fact that even "way back" there were (male) blues singers who were no great vocalists in the stricter (technical) sense of the term as compared to, say, black singers across the spectrum from Jimmy Rushing to Billy Eckstine etc. (and I'm not even seriously including Bon Bon ;)  ) but by strictly technical standards would rather qualify as "croakers". However, considering their background and the message they conveyed this was totally immaterial and beside the point and the way they sang was the way they felt and that's that, rough and unpolished or not. But maybe in later years this has been turned around into what you describe as a "license to sing" by those who by ANY yardstick really cannot sing ... Singing poorly today as an imitation of singing in an "rough-hewn" manner back then ...?

Though I'd venture a guess there is also some idolatry at work today when evaluating the "real" blues from long ago when there were singers with thin, weak, wavering, unfitting voices too, though it is not always openly admitted by diehard blues fans that such cases did exist (but rather this lack of competence is glossed over as "proof of authenticity") Am just reading "South to Louisiana" where Guitar Gable (no coincidence, that name) makes the point of never having wanted to sing on record because he was aware of his shortcomings as a singer but calling in King Karl instead ... etc. etc.

 

 

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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