Wednesday, September 07, 2011
Floppyfoot chapter 2 - the floppyfoot blues
Some time ago, on a road trip to Waimarama, I stopped in for a week-long visit with an old pal, an eremite in Haumoana. He lives in a shack on a couple of acres, alongside the river. It is here that I met Floppyfoot - a good sized goat endowed with a deformed front foot. He could walk ok, but that foot sort of flopped around; his walking signature best described using onomatopoeia: plack, plack, plack (x 2) then… flooof. Every seventh, floppy step was an extended ‘flooof’ sound as that foot tried to catch up with the others. If you relate this to music, Floppyfoot’s time signature was not 4/4 time as is the usual case in nature - his walk was in 7/8 time as the floppy foot stalled the rhythm on each alternate cycle. A 7/8 time signature is quite rare in music; Money, by Pink Floyd is one of the better-known examples.
The common 4/4 time signature makes it a lot easier to find the groove in music, no more so than in the blues. 12 bar, 4/4 time blues. It all started in Mississippi, early 1900s, with the Delta sound – raw, stripped down and, mostly, mournful. John Lee Hooker once pointed out that this was no surprise: “Because it is the worst state” he said. “You have the blues all right, if you’re down in Mississippi.”
But opposites can be attractive: just as a really hot curry can be a refreshing meal on a hot summer night, even the saddest blues songs somehow have a way of being uplifting.
Many of the early Delta bluesmen were solitary transients who lived on the edge, harvesting heavy-shouldered melancholy from which they brewed the blues. None was more enigmatic than the legendary Robert Johnson who, it is claimed, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for his musical genius. Like any good story, Johnson’s status was enhanced by the outright lack of information about him. He was the original member of the ‘27 club’, dying in 1938, from poisoning they say. And it wasn’t until decades after his death that the first photograph of Johnson was found. He liked to keep things on the down low this man; he worked under numerous names and tended to put on a new face for every new town. As Martin Scorsese once noted, Johnson only really “existed on his records”.
Even today his burial site has only been ‘narrowed down’ to three possible locations.
Yes, the Delta is where it all started, and the (12) bar was set high by the likes of Johnson and Son House. Over time, the Delta sound travelled through many crossroads, to an amplified metamorphosis in Chicago and – eventually – to ‘polite, white society’ with a performance in the White House by BB King.
Seeded by African chants carried on the slave ships, the blues in turn seeded pretty much everything we have listened to since. Without the blues, there would be no rock, no roll, no folk, no soul. (You’d have nothing but awful 70s West Coast soft rock and 90s Epic Trance music and a few days of this would have us all peeling our ears off and throwing ourselves into the mouths of active volcanoes.)
But the big question remains: why does a genre that is so often built on despairing stories and forlorn, minor key melodies, make us feel so astonishingly good? It just doesn’t make sense, yet if you put on a decent Delta Blues mix, it will invariably change the room in a positive way. It will uplift.
Perhaps it’s like Floppyfoot – flawed and scratchy and pained, but somehow, good company by being so darned honest – the blues is an open heart songbook. Despite the fact that Floppyfoot ate my car keys and my hair – and my host’s remote control (every time this goat yawned, the TV channel changed) – he became good company over that stay in Haumoana. I used to take the teapot and morning paper down to his spot on the riverbank every morning. I drank the tea, he would eat the paper.
Then I’d grab my first real six string (a National Steel copy) and play some blues riffs, down by the river.
‘Down by the river’. Now there’s a blues song, right there. 4/4 time, 12 bar. Good company music.
The common 4/4 time signature makes it a lot easier to find the groove in music, no more so than in the blues. 12 bar, 4/4 time blues. It all started in Mississippi, early 1900s, with the Delta sound – raw, stripped down and, mostly, mournful. John Lee Hooker once pointed out that this was no surprise: “Because it is the worst state” he said. “You have the blues all right, if you’re down in Mississippi.”
But opposites can be attractive: just as a really hot curry can be a refreshing meal on a hot summer night, even the saddest blues songs somehow have a way of being uplifting.
Many of the early Delta bluesmen were solitary transients who lived on the edge, harvesting heavy-shouldered melancholy from which they brewed the blues. None was more enigmatic than the legendary Robert Johnson who, it is claimed, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for his musical genius. Like any good story, Johnson’s status was enhanced by the outright lack of information about him. He was the original member of the ‘27 club’, dying in 1938, from poisoning they say. And it wasn’t until decades after his death that the first photograph of Johnson was found. He liked to keep things on the down low this man; he worked under numerous names and tended to put on a new face for every new town. As Martin Scorsese once noted, Johnson only really “existed on his records”.
Even today his burial site has only been ‘narrowed down’ to three possible locations.
Yes, the Delta is where it all started, and the (12) bar was set high by the likes of Johnson and Son House. Over time, the Delta sound travelled through many crossroads, to an amplified metamorphosis in Chicago and – eventually – to ‘polite, white society’ with a performance in the White House by BB King.
Seeded by African chants carried on the slave ships, the blues in turn seeded pretty much everything we have listened to since. Without the blues, there would be no rock, no roll, no folk, no soul. (You’d have nothing but awful 70s West Coast soft rock and 90s Epic Trance music and a few days of this would have us all peeling our ears off and throwing ourselves into the mouths of active volcanoes.)
But the big question remains: why does a genre that is so often built on despairing stories and forlorn, minor key melodies, make us feel so astonishingly good? It just doesn’t make sense, yet if you put on a decent Delta Blues mix, it will invariably change the room in a positive way. It will uplift.
Perhaps it’s like Floppyfoot – flawed and scratchy and pained, but somehow, good company by being so darned honest – the blues is an open heart songbook. Despite the fact that Floppyfoot ate my car keys and my hair – and my host’s remote control (every time this goat yawned, the TV channel changed) – he became good company over that stay in Haumoana. I used to take the teapot and morning paper down to his spot on the riverbank every morning. I drank the tea, he would eat the paper.
Then I’d grab my first real six string (a National Steel copy) and play some blues riffs, down by the river.
‘Down by the river’. Now there’s a blues song, right there. 4/4 time, 12 bar. Good company music.
Labels: Blues
