Can a Blue Man Sing the Whites?

Somewhere in childhood, I decided I wanted to learn how to play flamenco music. So when my parents decided it was time to have culture forced down my throat by an embittered hack ... I mean start music lessons, I picked guitar as my instrument. My first lessons came at an embarassingly earnest day camp the summer I turned eight, where we sat around in a circle learning the "cowboy chords" to "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" and "Tom Dooley".

I was spending that summer with my grandparents, so they assumed the role of practice cops. Each night, they sat me down with a wind-up oven timer and made me strum D, A, G, and C chords until the buzzed at the fifteen minute mark. Failing to see the connection between the length of time it took to cook brisket in a pressure cooker, a race horse named "Stewball," and learning flamenco, I failed to be inspired. Somewhere toward the end of the summer, the headstock of my guitar got snapped off in a doorway (imagine that!). It went unmourned. The lessons ended.

Over the years, I had more abortive attempts at learning music, each of which ended in frustration at being taught what the teacher knew, not what I wanted to learn. I did actually pick up a little bit of flamenco (the little bit one teacher knew), and sort of learned to read music. But the passion was gone. Along the way, a random adult passing through my parents social circle saw my guitar and showed me how to play a blues shuffle, which got filed away in deep storage. By about age 12, I'd completely had it with lessons and pretty much gave up the guitar.

Fast forward a few years to sophomore year of high school, and I became friends with a kid whose hippie older brother had disappeared into a cult, leaving behind a no-name acoustic guitar, a pre-CBS Fender Jazzmaster and an Ampeg Gemini amplifier. Discovery of these instruments coincided with discovery of certain combustible alkyloid plant matter, as well as the twelve-bar soundtrack often associated with said plant matter. Upon hearing Cream's "Crossroads" and the Doors' "Backdoor Man", I plugged in the Jazzmaster, and somehow that fragment of the blues shown to me in childhood defrosted itself. All of a sudden I kind of knew how to play music I liked on the guitar.

The credits on rock albums led me to names like Morganfield, Burnett, Dixon, Reed, King, King, and King, and, of course Johnson. It turned out that a whole bunch of other kids in my school were making the same journey with harmonicas, and I soon found myself as the only Brownie McGee in a sea Sonny Terry wannabes, all looking to cut class, drink Night Train, and jam. I also ran into names like Clapton, Butterfield, Bloomfield, Kalb, and Kooper. Eventually it struck me that some of these guys were black and some of them were white. I also discovered that there's this whole vein of weirdness on the subject, fueled by white liberal guilt and black militant anger.

Looked at one way, there is something to the debate. The blues was born out of the black experience in the south and the migration to northern cities. Country and early urban blues is full of references to sharecropping life, hoodoo, and the joys and miseries of life in the delta. It seems utterly absurd for a middle class northern white kid to sing about mojos and john the conqueror roots. It's also true that the great innovators of blues, R&B, and jazz by and large never got the coin or the credit due them, while their often tamer white imitators walked away with millions. To continue that heritage of expropriation seems a bit suspect

On the other hand, blues is not so much the music of black people as it is the music of black individuals. It's not as if everyone with dark skin south of the Mason-Dixon line can do what Muddy Waters did. Not only that, but all the really great blues artists sound completely different from each other. This is made abundantly clear to me pretty much every time I walk into a blues club. White or black, bad blues artists sound like unconvincing imitations of someone else. Good ones sound like themselves, with maybe some echoes of others, but an essence that stands alone.

Moving over to my third hand, it's not as if there are a whole lot black Americans whose experiences give them insights into life in the court of Frederick the Great or in 19th Century Milan. Yet you rarely hear it said that a black person can't play "white" music, or that Kathleen Battle is stealing Verdi's birthright.

All of these arguments melt away for me in the face of the music itself though. There are a handful of blues artists who have touched me and made me want to play the music. At first it was about technique -- the precision of Clapton, the pyrotechnics of Hendrix, the intricacies of the great finger pickers. Eventually, raw emotion, personality, and individuality are what kept me hooked. It was no longer "how does he do that?" Instead it was "how do I translate what I'm feeling into a sound the way he does?" In light of that question, I can name a few white guys who deserve to be listened to on their own terms as much as any of their contemporaries. I wouldn't say this is because they sound authentic or "black." It's because they sound like themselves, and they communicate who they are. Here's a few. Some are obvious, some a little obscure, but all worth a spin:

Mike Bloomfield (anything from his Takoma Records days will knock your socks off)
Paul Butterfield
Bob Margolin
Bonnie Raitt
The Blues Project
A fella named Eric (but you gotta go way back)
Delbert McClinton
Larry Carlton (go see him live; forget his studio work)
Jimmy Vaughan (always like him more than his little brother)
Pheobe Snow (live, the greatest female R&B singer since Aretha, IMHO.)
Ari Eisenger
Duane A. (especially with EC)
Peter-Green-Era Fleetwood Mac
Carlos Montoya
Manitas De Plata

Now if I can only finally figure out the rest of Malaguena ...