JOHNNY NEVER AND JOHN COLGAN-DAVIS
PERFORMING BLUES HISTORY
An oral exploration of the roots of American Music
The history of American popular music and by extension popular music the world over, cannot be told without acknowledging the blues and its foundational influence. It is impossible to overstate the miraculous journey of the blues - from its late 19th century roots in African American work and spiritual song in the racist, rural southern United States, up the Mississippi and to points north, and from there around the entire globe.
Music history is peppered with great and well trained musicians who set out to create music that would have a lasting impact on the history of music and culture. Many did. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach…. to name a few whose names became household words the world over.
It's worth pondering.
The music that changed the world culture even more, did so however, with no such intention. The original field-grown blues artists did not study at Julliard and were lucky if they had any education at all. As individuals they likely knew nothing of music theory and little of the world beyond the cotton fields. They most were instead trained by hard times and oral traditions. Miraculously the music they birthed inseminated an entire culture. In short, they did not set out to set the world on fire, but American music never burned the same once the blues was recorded and disseminated to populations first here, then around the globe.
During the early part of the 20th century the story goes, WC Handy, a well-educated, New York, African American musician, writer and performer, took his band on tour in the south and at a show in Memphis was approached by the venue owner who asked a favor: there were some local boys who would like to perform when WC's band was on break. Mr. Handy agreed. In his telling in his memoir, the band who came up played "primitive" music and they were showered with more money thrown onto the stage in half an hour's time, than Handy's band made that entire night. That "primitive music" was the blues. Handy, who for a while was called the "father of the blues" penned the first written sheet music of blues called The St. Louis Blues in 1914. But it was not the first blues. The blues, as an oral tradition, had likely been practiced, performed and passed on from musician to musician for decades before Handy saw it first hand and “wrote” it down.
Ironically, the blues music that was first recorded and distributed as "Race Records" has no bias. The blues does not care the color of your skin, the texture of your hair, the heritage of your ancestors or the spiritual or geographic location of your soul. The blues speaks equally and eloquently in the simple language of humanity.