Can PBS Boost the Blues? (Boston Globe)
Christopher Burger
Can a PBS series on the struggling genre bring it back to life?
By Steve Morse, Boston Globe, 9/28/03
www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2003/09/28/the_great_blues_hope/
Congress may have loftily designated 2003 the "Year of the Blues," but out
in the real world, the blues scene is struggling.
You rarely hear a blues song on the radio, and it's hard even to find the
CDs in stores. Sales of blues records this year dwindled to only 1 percent
of the US market, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures.
Locally, the House of Blues in Cambridge just closed after an 11-year run,
further reducing opportunity for blues acts. Johnny D's and Harpers Ferry
are two other clubs booking less blues than before. (Copping out, methinks-
CB.)
Yet fans and industry insiders are hoping against hope that a change is
coming. Can you say "blues revival" one more time?
You can if you believe that a seven-part PBS series, "The Blues," debuting
tonight, will lure a new generation of listeners whose current idea of
roots music is old-school hip-hop and funk.
The series is executive-produced by filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who directs
tonight's opening segment, "Feel Like Going Home," and enlisted such fellow
movie directors as Wim Wenders, Clint Eastwood, and Charles Burnett to
direct other episodes in an attempt to create a personal, and hopefully
fresh, vision of the blues, past and present.
Hopes are high that the new series will have the same cultural and
commercial impact as Ken Burns's "Jazz" series on PBS two years ago, which
revitalized the legacies of such artists as Louis Armstrong and Duke
Ellington, whose album sales rose 200-400 percent, according to retailers.
"People are definitely looking for this series to give blues a shot in the
arm," says Scott Billington, a staff producer with Rounder Records, which
just issued a four-CD boxed set of its blues artists. "There will be a huge
onslaught of blues releases coming from every label's catalog. But we'll
see how that fares. It may be too much for people to assimilate."
As with "Jazz," the new series was planned with many tie-ins. "There was
always the notion that a lot of blues CD releases will come out of this,"
says series producer Margaret Bodde.
The Sony Legacy label just released a five-CD box, "Martin Scorsese
Presents the Blues: A Musical Journey." The box incorporates music from
within and without the films. That's in addition to a "Best Of" blues
album, a Muddy Waters live record, and DVDs of all seven films, which Sony
releases on Oct. 14. Then there's the seven individual soundtrack CDs (four
on Sony, three on Universal Records), six more individual artist CDs on
Sony (Robert Johnson, Son House, Taj Mahal, Keb' Mo', Bessie Smith, Stevie
Ray Vaughan), and a bunch more on Universal (Eric Clapton, the Allman
Brothers, B. B. King, Jimi Hendrix, J. B. Lenoir). "It's a similar model to
what we did on the Ken Burns series," says Jeff Jones, a vice president of
the Legacy label, who notes that it's already paying off: Seven of the top
15 albums on this week's Billboard's blues chart are spinoffs from the
series. We're not talking million-sellers, however. Most blues albums sell
well under 40,000, often somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 copies apiece.
The biggest seller in recent years was the King/
Clapton CD "Riding With the King," which sold 2 million. And recent charts
have been topped by Susan Tedeschi's "Wait for Me," which has sold 211,000
copies. "Even if these films take blues from a 1 percent share to 2 or 3
percent, they'll have had a huge impact," points out Jones. "And to have
millions of people watching a Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf or Willie Dixon
or B. B. King on TV can't be a bad thing."
Viewers, however, should not assume they're watching a similar format to
Burns's "Jazz" programs.
Burns addressed the music chronologically and had a more academic tone,
utilizing talking-head interviews that Corey Harris, a host of tonight's
first blues episode, says were "too ivory tower."
"The blues series connects the past and the present," he adds. "Burns
stopped right after Bird [Charlie Parker] died, and he only briefly
mentioned John Coltrane. That was it. We missed out on a lot of what
happened in the '60s and '70s."
The blues series does not follow a rigid chronology and gives more latitude
to each director. "Ken Burns set the mold. There is always a comparison
between our series and his," says Burnett, who filmed the "Warming by the
Devil's Fire" segment. "He did a terrific job, but ours is different. It's
not one particular vision but seven particular visions."
The new series also hopes to reach more young African-Americans who prefer
hip-hop to the blues, which they see as belonging to their parents'
generation. "One thing I hope happens is that we stop ghettoizing the blues
and bring it to a wider audience," says Harris, who opens tonight's segment
in the Mississippi Delta and ends it in Africa. "The Rolling Stones and
Bonnie Raitt gave the blues a second life with white audiences. And maybe
this series will help black audiences accept it more."
Harris, a cutting-edge performer who has merged blues and hip-hop in his
music, adds: "The reason why young black people don't listen to the blues
is that when we remake something, we do it for the moment. We don't dwell
on nostalgia. In the white culture, there is a lot of nostalgia."
He says, however, that young black performers such as David Banner,
Mystikal, and Master P, along with Outkast and Goodie Mob, are "definitely
into the blues. They might not turn on B. B. King, but they're into the
blues."
In addition to young blacks' alienation from the genre, there are two
stereotypes that the blues must combat: 1) that it's an old, depressing
music that nobody wants to hear anymore, and 2) that it's just bar-band
music now.
"People have to be more open-minded about the blues," says Richard
Rosenblatt, owner of Tone-Cool Records, the Boston-area label for which
Tedeschi records. "I think this series will be important because it shows
many different sides to the story," he says, referring to the range of
acoustic and electric blues that span country and urban sources.
Boston author Peter Guralnick, who scripted tonight's episode and consulted
on others, agrees. "You watch the films and you pick up on Otha Turner and
see Johnny Shines and follow Skip James and J. B. Lenoir. You're seeing a
variety of music that suggests a depth and dimension that no one definition
of the blues can give you. The commercial element of this will fall where
it falls, but the best part about it is that it will open a genuine debate.
No viewer is going to like all segments, but they'll learn there is a broad
spectrum of the blues."
"It's good to have more mainstream attention focused on the blues, but I
hope people don't think the blues is just something they see on their
widescreen, high-definition televisions. It's a live music, and people
should go out to see it in person," says Greg Sarni of the Blues Trust,
which puts on today's free Boston Blues Festival at the Hatch Shell,
starring Mighty Sam McClain, Darrell Nulisch, and others.
A litmus test of how well the series does for individual artists may come
in the person of Bobby Rush, who is featured in "The Road to Memphis"
episode. Rush is a dynamic, largely undiscovered bluesman who has played
the "chitlin circuit" for 50 years but whose soulful, somewhat risque style
has been cited as a series highlight.
"I'm so excited and so blessed to be in the right place at the right time,"
Rush says in a phone interview from Oklahoma. "I'm so overdue. I'm an old
man, but I'm a young man, too," adds Rush, who describes his age as "over
66 and a little under 70."
"I think this series is going to have a real kick behind it," he
says. "Every once in a while you need people to come in and do that to the
blues."
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c. n.
and production values) as the first installment, I'd say that PBS in
conjunction with this series of films, has as good a chance as doing just
that, as anything I've noticed on the horizon. chuck
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Christopher Burger
J.B. Lenoir and also the Chuck D/ Electric Mud thing ) are pretty welcome,
no matter various misgivings I've been seeing. (Pity the rest of the print-
version of the Globe's article with reviews of each flick was not on-line.)
Last night's episode was well done, if a bit earnest in its attempts to
play up links to Africa. The great John Lee Hooker and Othar Turner aside,
there's so many other types of blues that are harder to peg as easily. -CB