Hard Time Killing Floor

Over the last few months I've really struggled to be able to listen to the small amount of Delta Blues recordings I've collected over the past couple of years. I guess the listening kind of stalled after I had attempted to read one too many white, middle-aged blues 'thinkers' books. You know, the kind who are enamoured by the myth and romance of discovering a group of dirt-fucking-poor, beaten down musicians in your own country, just a couple of days drive from their cosy Atlantic coast cities. This book in particular was one by a Jewish blues guitarist from New York who travelled down to Clarkesdale in the seventies with a mind to help the townsfolk remember their blues tradition. Almost every person he encountered had never heard of Robert Johnson and the image of this pale gangling performer and his band trying to organise a concert of traditional blues songs in a Mississippi church hall was hard not to get a little squirmy with its complete lack of cultural understanding and sympathy. Colonialism will probably exist as long as people around, it'll just continue to take on stranger and more absurd forms.

I probably first heard the blues when I was about seventeen late late late one night at a friend's basement room in Hobart. My other friend was their goading our host to play his Charley Patton songs. He had a discman plugged into a tiny one speaker transistor radio type thing. We sat on the floor and drank and smoked and listened to Patton's aching low moan and along with other blues. One was particularly memorable: a holler blues by a ragged lady singer that was titled 'Pig Meat Mama.' They had some of the most sexually charged purely animal lyrics I've ever heard: "I'm a pig meat mama/pig meat is all I crave."

Since then I guess you could say I skirted the edges of early country and delta blues. Finding songs through reading and seeking out the artists that were mentioned most and held in high regard by other (predominately white) blues appreciators and seeing it as integral part of--vomit--'the History of Rock.' It also helped having Jack White and the Rolling Stones talking in such reverential tones about the blues players they had encountered and reinterpreted.

Now, this is probably the only black american music I have sought out in my few brief years as a music, er, seeker. And I've had to come to terms with why I'm more likely to respond a group of sexually and emotionally retarded white kids clutching guitars with their stick-thin arms than I am to, say, a brash, bouncing Hip-hop jam. Its was pretty easy to understand really: I'm a skinny white kid who gets fucked up about girls and not a streetwise black American dude intent on owning everything 'real big.' I can understand and appreciate the Hip-hop but there isn't much in it that speaks even in the slightest way about my own or my friend's lives.

Not so with the blues.

Part of the reason why so many white folks have fallen for the blues, and delta blues in particular, is because the artists are all dead. Anyone scared of exploiting the music or artists or of re-doing their songs have less worries than if they were alive and wanting a stake of the prize. Not that this would that much of a concern. It wasn't one of Alan Lomax's. The image of this white dude dragging his tape recorder around the cotton fields and juke-joints and churches of the deep South to collect hours and hours of black music and artist interviews is still a hard one to swallow. The mindlessness of walking into a Negro bar in the middle of a southern summer to copy down the list of songs on the jukebox and take notes on how people were dancing has an odd insensitivity to it. Or getting an interview and recording from a blind, homeless guitarist busking on a street corner for nothing more than survival or just his malted milk. Of course Lomax exploited these people out of love, I guess, and with a mind for posterity: an intellectial vision for wanting to keep a culture that was always going to disappear alive somehow in the annals of American history.

The same sort of cultural preservation exists here in Australia, too, with plenty of art graduates and art dealers travelling to remote Indeginous communities to help set up galleries and artist spaces with an idea to inject the funds from sales of works back into the same community. This is done with a lot more reverence and respect than whatever a Lomax or a Scorcese was attempting to record. Its the same white colonist vision, yes, but it is becoming--thank christ--a more measured and sympathetic one.

I made sure I pulled out all my blues music before writing this to help remind myself of why I listened to and sought it out to begin with. And it was all still there. All the songs were still filled with those sad, hopeless stories of travelling and friends and hilariously masked sexual exploits. The African-Americans being forced to create their own coded languages so that they could get by in the white man's world whilst still being able to relate to each other their own tales and senses of humour is surely one of the world's saddest and most troubling linguistic lineages. But after listening long enough to the dusty, scratchy 78 records repackaged and resold and finally being able to decipher the code and actually understand what the artists are singing about is definitely one of the most satisfying thing about the songs.

Robert Johnson mashing down on his little vehicle's starter motor, Charley Patton not being able to make it up to the hill country during a flood because he's been barred by the authorities, Son House watching his girlfriend being lowered into her grave. All these images are intensely personal, expressions made out of desperate, broken necessity as opposed to poses made for the artist's own ego boost--the source of pretty much any white musician's catalogue of performances.

It would be inhumane not to have sympathy for the stories blues made, the beatings the performers endured. But there is something perverse in making what these people sang about, lived through and sometimes died for into a mysteroius, romantic time and place that is only worthy of white theories and confused attempts to return a music to a people that had a relationship with it that they themselves were trying to get away from. The myths and legendary figures that rock'n'roll has attempted to create with the blues over the last few decades has given audiences much much less of an understanding of the troubles that existed in the Pre-war southern United States. And listening to it myself I can't help but feel guilty for helping to exploit whoever might have been trying to survive by this music back then. Its not my music, has never and will never come close to my own personal experiences and as a result I have trouble with my desire to use it to shape my own further experience, as I do with all music I listen to.

But the music is still made by humans. They're human troubles, human lives, human deaths. And you can't help but feel for it.