Just down the road from where Sammie Walker, 18, listens to his hip-hop CDs, a young Indianola man named Riley B. King, later known as B.B. King, once played his guitar for people on the streets.
Nine miles east of 21-year-old Arnold Smith’s dorm room, where he turns up R&B stars Lil’ Kim and Destiny’s Child on the radio, Robert Johnson used to sing his song “Sweet Home, Chicago” at juke joints.
Walker and Smith, undergraduate students at Mississippi Valley State University, live in the absolute cradle of Mississippi Delta blues history. B.B. King, Guitar Slim, Furry Lewis, Albert King were born in this area; Robert Johnson died here; Clarksdale and Vicksburg, less than an hour’s drive away, were the hometowns of Ike Turner, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Junior Parker. Blues fans regularly arrive here by the busload, from Europe, Japan and all over the U.S., as if it’s a sort of humid, rideless Disney World.
But Walker and Smith are oblivious to the old legends — to them, blues belongs in a museum, not thumping from their car stereos. Smith, a junior, says he occasionally hears a blues song on the radio and vaguely recalls an Indianola billboard commemorating B.B. King.
Walker, a freshman, is less diplomatic: “A lot of people talk about it. Middle-aged people. Mostly older people,” he says. “My parents — they love it. I grew up hearing it. But you know, it just ain’t me.”
Unlike funk, soul or even disco, over the last two decades blues has had little credibility with young African-American music fans — even those who live in Chicago and Mississippi, places that are key to the birth of the genre. As anybody who has ever been to North Side nightclub Kingston Mines knows, most of today’s blues artists perform almost exclusively to white audiences.
For years, the blues world, from performers to nightclub promoters, has wrung its hands about the dearth of blacks in the crowd. But the reason is obvious to hip-hop critic Nelson George, who observes in his 1989 book “The Death of Rhythm & Blues” that blues hasn’t evolved as a musical form since the days of Jimi Hendrix. Thus, he writes, the genre alienates young African-Americans attuned to the next big innovation.
Criticizing “well-intentioned” blues researchers who “pick through old recordings, interview obscure guitarists and tramp through the Mississippi Delta with the determination of Egyptologists,” George makes a sweeping but apt generalization about racial differences. “Blacks create and then move on,” he writes. “Whites document and recycle. In the history of popular music, these truths are self-evident.”
This logic helps explain why hip-hop records, which have thoroughly delved into jazz and mined the James Brown and George Clinton funk-and-soul catalogs, have studiously avoided sampling even the most famous riffs from blues records.
That may change soon. Blues-sampling rap albums have been rare — Little Axe’s “The House That Wolf Built” (which samples Howlin’ Wolf) and Primitive Radio Gods’ “Standing in a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand” (which samples B.B. King) are two obscure ’90s examples. But Moby’s influential 1999 CD “Play,” filled with bluesy field recordings from the ’30s, stands to set trends for other artists. And “New Beats from the Delta,” a Fat Possum Records compilation that features rap producers combining the sounds of bluesmen with electronic rhythms, came out in late October.
“You’re going to start hearing it more, because brothers are playing more of it now,” says Ray Murray, a member of the Atlanta-based trio Organized Noize, which produced Johnny Farmer’s “Oh Death” on the Fat Possum remix album. “Brothers definitely feel the blues. That’s just what the sound is out here. That’s what your momma and your grandma were playing in the front room. That’s what we grew up on.”
The main reason hip-hop deejays have avoided blues songs, suggests Murray, whose group has produced hits for OutKast, SWV, Eric Clapton and Phil Collins, has been the copyrights. The most famous blues licks aren’t owned by the artists themselves, but by unsympathetic music publishers and record labels who demand payment when rappers sample their catalogs. “Brothers can’t afford it,” Murray says, adding that UGB and other underground rap artists have sampled blues records for years. “That kind of deterred everybody from sampling so much.”
Or it could be a marketing problem. Several students at Mississippi Valley State, a predominantly black college, say they like B.B. King, who regularly returns to his hometown for concerts. Other young Delta residents, in Clarksdale, Tutwiler and Greenwood, think of blues artists not as the jamming electric guitarists who fill North Side Chicago clubs but as soul men such as Bobby “Blue” Bland, Bobby Rush and, until he died in May, Johnnie Taylor. These singers have a high profile with black audiences through consistently playing the so-called “chitlin’ circuit.”
The marketing problem extends to tourism as well. In Greenwood, where Johnson died, there are a bevy of strip malls but no prominent monuments to the legendary bluesman. New Greenwood resident Stephen LaVere, the music publisher who oversees Johnson’s catalog, hopes to correct this deficiency in the near future.
“Robert Johnson came here and died, and who knew? Who cared? [Among locals,] it’s just a matter-of-fact kind of nonchalance,” he says. “They just don’t have an overview. There’s no national movement. There’s no national awareness.”
In fact, throughout the Delta, young music fans who prefer R. Kelly to R.L. Burnside profess to some fondness for the blues. But just as Chicagoans are blase about local Muddy Waters landmarks, Mississippians barely register the importance of their legends. In Tutwiler, contemporary R&B fan Brandi Burnett, a 21-year-old gas-station cashier, says she once visited the great harpist Sonny Boy Williamson’s grave. But she has never heard his music, and cites ’70s soul stars Marvin Gaye and Al Green as examples of “bluesmen” she admires.
At the Clarksdale crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, where Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil for guitar-playing talent, 38-year-old Pete Jefferson says he listens regularly to modern bluesmen such as Rush, but he adds that locals rarely discuss the soul-selling business. “It comes up now and then,” says the apartment-building employee, who was standing perhaps 50 yards from an elaborate crossroads monument. “I really haven’t paid that much attention to it.”
Maybe blues, as a whole, needs a new agent. Maybe the old stories, of Johnson at the crossroads, Bessie Smith dying in a Clarksdale hotel after a late-night car crash, Muddy Waters leaving his plantation cotton-picking job for a new life in Chicago, have been told too many times. To reach a new generation, maybe blues artists and marketers have to focus on the feelings that the blues create.
“Blues tells you meanings. It tells you about the facts of everyday life,” says Tokeia Powell, a 23-year-old homemaker in Tutwiler. “It meditates you.”
Organized Noize’s Murray applies Powell’s theory to the art of hip-hop recordmaking: “An old funk record [has] a lick somebody might do to make you do a certain dance. And a funk in a rock record is the way the guy sings against the beat. The funkiness of a blues player is in the whole emotion coming off on the record or the performance. Hip-hop really digs into every record — it pulls out that imperfection and makes the most of that.
“It’s cool to really dig into the blues. I always thought the blues was raw and uncut,” Murray adds. “Hip-hop has always been like that. I kind of felt it was natural to mix the two.”
