I don't personally sort blues singers into "authentic" and "inauthentic," much less presume that one's racial identity tells us most of what we need to know about whether you can sing the blues. There are different kinds of good blues singing. I like Charles Brown's smooth, playful approach, for example, just as much as I like John Lee Hooker's air of self-contained menace.
What I don't much like is people who mock or burlesque the music even as they sing it. I hear enough of this among contemporary white blues singers that I've taken note of it as one fairly common aspect of white blues performance. There's a fine line between burlesque and self-mockery; the black blues tradition is quite familiar with the latter quality--the moment when the singer, after engaging in a specific sort of wild exaggeration, tosses his bass player a little smirk. Bobby Rush is extremely good at working this line. Sterling Magee knew how to work it; he could sing with full power and absolute sincerity, then throw in some humor that took nothing away from the music.
In contrast, listening to Sirius XM, I often hear white singers, male and female, whose melodic sense and aesthetic approach leads them into put-ons of various sorts--growls that feel unearned or rock-based, little yips and yelps (from the women) that feel as though they've been appropriated from cabaret. At worst, what seems to happen is a combination of OVERemoting and burlesque pulling-back-from-real-feeling.
The white blues singers I most enjoy don't have any of this. They know how to sing, and they just sing, with power and style and feeling. Tab Benoit and Bonnie Raitt come first to mind, but Mitch Kashmar is right up there, too. I could name (and have in the past) named many other names.
This is all just a prelude to a video I recently came across that reminded me of what I like about the blues. It's a young Luther Johnson. I'm honestly not sure WHICH Luther Johnson this is: Guitar Junior or Snakeboy. I'm sure somebody will clarify. But what struck me immediately is: this guy MEANS what he's singing. He means it. And this moves me. There are many kinds of blues singing. This is one kind that I really like--and that, to state the obvious, I can't pull off. Not just me: I don't think there are very many living blues singers, black or white, who can sing like this. (Lurrie Bell can; the late Luther Allison very much could.) Most contemporary blues singers don't have this quality. There's a kind of anger, maybe even mean-ness and desperation, behind his words--or at least that's the vibe I'm getting. He needs the music. He needs to get his blues out through the music.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 14, 2015 2:54 PM
Yeah, that's Snake Boy, or also called Georgia Boy. I've got the first LP he put out under his own name called Come On Home on the Douglas label. Great release and worth seeking out. The later one on Evidence, Lonesome In My Bedroom is also a good 'un and should still be available.
Off the top of my head, I'd say that Louisiana Red really meant it. I ain't got the post video thang down, but youtube Alabama Train with Bill Dicey on harp. ---------- Ricky B http://www.bushdogblues.blogspot.com RIVER BOTTOM BLUES--crime novel for blues fans available at Amazon/B&N, iTunes, iBook THE DEVIL'S BLUES--ditto HOWLING MOUNTAIN BLUES--Ditto too, now available
Not stating the obvious BIG blues names cat's like Son Seals was a great singer to my ears and of course Live and Burning is one of the great live Chicago blues albums in my opinion!
What interests me most, and what I find most satisfying as a picky listener are white singers who, though lacking the technical equipment to produce clever impersonsations of black singers, have none the less assimilated the blues and gospel derived style and made it their own with the voice they were born with. Though obviously influenced by superior black signers, they work terrific vocal magic with the voice that is theirs, with out airs or pretense. I mean singers like
Peter Wolf Paul Butterfield Mose Allison Al Wilson Van Morrison Daryl Hall Felix Cavalari Mick Jagger Eric Burdon
The list can go on for many names. The inability to sound black, the limits on their range help, in fact, in establish these singers and others as singers who "mean it" who can shake a lyric down to the down and dirty root. ---------- Ted Burke ---------- Ted Burke __________________ ted-burke.com tburke4@san.rr.com
Before I hit the hay....Buddy Guy can't resist this vocal workout! This is gut wrenching!!! First heard this in the 80's and even listening to it right now his voice just gave me goosebumps like the first time I heard it!
Ted: To my ears, Peter Wolf and Mick Jagger are prime examples of the sad burlesque phenomenon I'm talking about--at least if what one hopes to hear is blues and the feeling it expresses. Their singing styles are the definition of put-on. Jagger arguably defines the rock swerve AWAY from blues feeling, and that's his genius as a rock performer. Same for Peter Wolf. (As you know, the J. Geils Band was thought of by many as America's answer to the Rolling Stones.) Jagger could sing beautifully, with feeling; "Angie" is a great example. But he's an atrocious blues singer. Peter Wolf arguably did a little better as a party blues singer, but his aesthetic approach begins and ends, ultimately, as a burlesque of black blues seriousness. "Take out ya false teeth, mama, ah wanna sssssssuck on yo' gums!"
I agree with your other choices and what you say about them.
rogonzab: Yes: I've always loved that particular video of Lonnie Johnson for precisely the reason you've posted it. He's a hurt guy and in his own quiet, intense, perfectly smooth and controlled way, he makes you feel that. (His blues came directly from his life. He lost almost his entire family to the influenza epidemic of 1919. A few years later he married a blues singer. She bore him six kids in six years. He fooled around with Bessie Smith while he was on tour. His wife fooled around on him, then left him and took the six kids. Gone.)
Amen to Son Seals. Chicago guys of that generation--the generation after Muddy, and especially on the West Side, sang with serious feeling.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 14, 2015 4:15 PM
Singers that do it for me are the ones successful in telling a story, keeping me involved turning the page to see what happens next.
Not always in the blues genre, either.
For instance, I love the way Tony Bennett will tell a story - even classic tunes that I've heard many times by other artists - with his style of singing. In contrast, I don't enjoy Ella Fitzgerald nearly as well. She doesn't tell a story as much as use her voice as an instrument and play it as such.
I find a lot of white (and some black) blues singers are singing the right notes, but lack that story unfolding in their delivery.
I believe Mighty Sam McLain when he says he's sorry. Very authentic. If this isn't my favorite blues vocal, its on the short list. No harp but tasteful and soulful guitar playing.
Further on this topic. I went many years ago to the Jazz Fest in New Orleans. On (I think) consecutive days I saw James Taylor and then Joe Cocker.
Although he has some wonderfully emotional songs in his repertoire, James Taylor sang every tune like he was sharing a joke with the audience - as if he was too cool to be invested emotionally in his own music, but was happy to lead a sing-along. It was fun but not moving.
Joe Cocker seemed to be living every song and sang like he was pleading for his life. It was fun AND very moving. You just wanted somebody to unchain that poor man's heart.
My respect for James Taylor was diminished by the experience but my respect for Mr. Cocker grew enormously, may he rest in peace.
I posted this before, only a year and a half ago. Adam has posted it once, too. Here it is again. Tab Benoit, a blues singer who really means it. He's got a relaxed, easygoing way with the audience before he sings, but when he starts singing at the 1:52 mark, no-one would say he doesn't mean it. I never tire of this video.
"When I'm singing, I don't want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling." ---------- The Iceman
Jason: This thread isn't about categories. It's about sharing videos that we like for a specific reason.
I'll reiterate what I said up front: there are many kinds of good blues singing. I consider that first video by Luther "Snakeboy" Johnson to exemplify one particular and important kind of good blues singing. But as far as I'm concerned, so does the Rory Block video I just posted.
Here's another kind of good blues singing--great blues singing, actually--that is much more playful and has absolutely NO bad or evil feelings going on it. But I guess you'd have to say they're really feeling it; "it" is a warm, runny, sexy, playful mood. Charles Brown and Bonnie Raitt. This may be one of Bonnie's all-time greatest vocal performances:
Since I love strong counterstatements as much as the statements that provoked them, I'd like to share another video that I just came across: the "vocalese" trio of Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross backed by the Count Basie Band with Joe Williams sitting in, performing "Every Day I Have the Blues." This is exquisite musicianship, to my ears, but it sits at the opposite extreme from Luther Johnson. This is a signature blues song (one that Williams in particular had made famous with Basie) reinvented as pure lighthearted play. It goes one of the places that blues goes. It's not burlesque; it's not making fun of people who feel the music. Or at least I don't think it does. Of course it features two black male singers, equally brilliant in very different ways, with contrasting affects. Williams is dead-pan, much moreso than usual (he's usually big and bright); Hendricks plays Mr. Jazz to Williams Mr. Blues. The deep lesson is one that Albert Murray, a great blues writer/critic, tried to teach, which is the importance that black culture places NOT on "feeling" but on conspicuous stylization: grade under pressure. They key thing is, you need the stylization BECAUSE life is full of incapacitating pressures. You need the blues, and a sense of style, because otherwise the Man--or life in general--has ground you down.
I didn't realize that Ross was Scottish. Here's a bit of her Wikipedia biography:
"In 1949, Ross had a brief affair with drummer Kenny Clarke. This affair produced a son, Kenny Clarke Jr, who was brought up by Clarke's family.[4] During her time with Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, she became addicted to heroin, and in the late 1950s had an affair with the comedian Lenny Bruce, who was also having drug problems. By 1960, Carol Sloane was regularly substituting for her on tour. After a performance by the trio in London in May 1962, she stayed there to kick the habit.[4]
In 1963, she married the actor Sean Lynch; they divorced in 1975, and he died in a car crash soon afterwards.[4][5] By that time, she had also lost her home and declared bankruptcy.[4]"
I guess all sorts of people have all sorts of reasons for singing the blues in all sorts of ways.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on May 15, 2015 11:50 AM
I ought to have clarified because my point is that there are white singers who have technically awful voices who brandish blues influences all the same and who have managed to fashion vocal styles that are instantly distinct, unique, recognizable. Mick Jagger is a vocalist who learned to work brilliantly with the little singing ability God deigned to give him: knowing that he didn't have the basic equipment to even come close to simulating Muddy Waters or Wilson Pickett, he did something else instead in trying to sing black and black informed music-- talk-singing, the whiny, mewling purr, the bull moose grunt, the roar, the grunts and groans, the slurs and little noises , all of which he could orchestrate into amazing, memorable performances. One Plus One(Sympathy for the Devil)Godard's film of the Stones writing, rehearsing and finally recording the song of the title, is especially good because it captures the irresolute tedium of studio existence (in between Godard's didactic absurdist sketches attempting to address the conundrum of leftist media figures being used by invisible powers to squelch true revolutionary change). More than that, we see Jagger piecing together his vocal, his mewling reading of the lyrics from the lyric sheet; his voice is awful, in its natural state. But we do witness Jagger getting bolder as the song progresses through the endless stoned jamming, a grunt added here, a raised syllable here, a wavering croon there. Finally, we are at the last take, and Jagger is seen with headphones on, isolated from the others, screaming his head off into a microphone while the instrumental playback pours forth, in what is presumably the final take. Jagger, all irony and self-awareness, created something riveting and for all time with the marginal instrument he was born with, and is part of what I think is a grand tradition of white performers who haven't a prayer of sounding actually black who none the less molded a style of black-nuanced singing that's perfectly credible: Mose Allison, Van Morrison, Felix Cavalari (Rascals), Eric Burdon (early Animals), Peter Wolf, late of the under appreciated J.Geils Band.We cannot underestimate Keith Richard's contribution to Jagger's success as a vocalist. Someone had to know how to write tunes Jagger could handle, and Keith was just the man to do it. Richard's guitar work, as well, riffs and attacks and staggers in ways that match Jagger's strutting and mincing. Writing is everything, as always.
I've always been a big fan of Fenton Robinson's high, lilting, soulful voice.
Besides being a fantastic blues singer and guitar player, based on the one time I met him at Blind Willie's in Atlanta, he was also a mighty nice guy, real supportive of young folks' interest in the blues. Class act. RIP.
Last Edited by MN on May 15, 2015 1:20 PM
Eva Cassidy was one of those rare vocalists that could make any song her own. Her talent was so big she could sing just about anything but she started with the blues and R and B. This version of Rainbow is a classic and a rare performnce. She left us way too soon
