Southeast, Southwest, Delta, acoustic or electric, the blues is alive and well
Photos by Tanner Spendley
Story by Aaron Brand
Texarkana Gazette
Blues Talkin'
LINDEN, Texas—Born of searing pain and simple joy, the blues is a truly unique and American musical gift to the world.
With roots in work songs and spirituals from black America, and influences that stretch back to West Africa, the blues has become one of the most popular genres in the past century with a wide impact on rock and roll, jazz and other music forms.
And people who love the blues do so with passion and knowledge.
The T-Bone Walker Music Festival held last weekend celebrated Linden native Walker, who pioneered the use of the electric guitar in blues. The diverse roster of musicians for the three-day festival showed where local and regional blues artists are taking the form.
So, just where is the blues going?
In Your Blood, In Your Soul
Kelley Taylor of Big Red and the Soul Benders hails from Mountain Home, Ark., and from a young age she was mesmerized hearing the blues. Now Taylor, the Big Red part of the equation, can belt out the blues with wit, heart and grit.
If she could, she'd do it all the time. But she'd like to see more opportunities for live blues.
"What I'd like to see is the live music period be alive and going. Karaoke and DJs have pretty much put the live business, you know, to the bottom. I'd really like to see it up and going, and as far as blues I'd like to play blues every day, every day," said Taylor while catching some shade before singing on Music City Texas Theater's outdoor stage.
The blues, she said, is felt down deep.
"It gets in your blood, it gets in your soul and it just moves you. No matter if it's a swing, no matter if it's a slow blues, acoustic, electric, there's a feeling and it gets to you," said Taylor, who's recorded two albums.
She thinks the blues encompasses the good and the bad in life. For Taylor's take on the blues, she likes a walk on the wilder side.
"You can write happy blues songs, you can write sassy blues songs. I like things a little sassy, just hitting right on the mmmmmmm, nasty," she said.
As it is for many blues artists, everyday life is the rich, deep vein from which to draw inspiration.
"Life, just basically life. There's been times in everybody's life where you're down. I've written some really dark songs, and there's times when you love something so much you write a song about it because you love it," Taylor said.
She was a teenager when she fell in love with live blues. For her, it was a secret mission to get out and enjoy it.
"I would say that the first blues I can remember ever hearing when I was just a kid was B.B. King. My mother used to listen to blues, and then I used to steal my mother's driver's license when I was 15 and go to downtown St. Louis to the bars and go listen to blues," said Taylor.
Her blues joint destination? The Missouri Bar and Grill.
At another blues club in Centerville, Ill., she said, she was the only white person there. The music brought everyone together.
"I loved it, and I just got in there and enjoyed," she recalled.
Now she and her Soul Benders are part of the Arkansas blues scene.
"There are a lot of good musicians in Arkansas, and there are a lot of blues musicians in Arkansas—Southern Arkansas more than Northern where we're at. But in Southern Arkansas the blues is striving. I think it's closer to where the heart of the blues was," Taylor said.
The older generation aren't the only ones who dig Taylor's music.
"The college kids I see sometimes coming in, and they don't know what's going on. But, by gosh, by the end of the night they're grooving. They hang around and groove. I don't think they exactly know how to dance to the blues yet but they're figuring it out. They're used to the bop, bop, bop stuff," she said. "I think it's just a matter of keeping it out there and presenting it to the kids. And I think that's all it takes."
Blues Reborn
Saxophonist Rick Sims walked into the T-Bone Walker Blues Festival crowd to play last Saturday, strutting with style amid a grooving, receptive audience.
He played with Northeast Texasbased Diddley Squat, which won the Texarkana Blues Society's sponsorship to the International Blues Challenge in Memphis earlier this year.
"We're trying to get the blues reborn and bring that back to the newer generation because it's almost a lost art form, and all these old blues musicians are getting older or passing away. And without us to rejuvenate the spirit of the blues, it will die out," said Sims.
He said it's amazing how many young bands and musicians are picking up the blues. Sims remembers when Wes Jeans, one of the musicians who played on the "Texas Young Guns" night at the festival, first got his guitar and learned blues licks from him and Jeans' uncle.
Sims and his fellow Diddley Squats go back to the roots of the blues.
"We've gone back to Robert Johnson and T-Bone for our inspiration ... we're heavily influenced by the older blues artists," he said, suggesting if you want to learn the blues, go back before Stevie Ray Vaughan and check out stuff like Albert King.
"Go back to the roots. I mean Rolling Stones didn't have any problem doing it, and Led Zeppelin, and they all went back to the roots of the blues to pull it out," said Sims.
He'd like to see a longer lineup of live blues venues in the area. He said Arkansas and Louisiana are strong, as well as the Midwest and Mississippi, places where they've been booked for shows.
He said the blues is a whole-body feeling.
"You go back to the roots and then you start developing your own style, your own personal style, and you're playing something that's inside of you. Everybody has their own interpretation of what blues is. It comes from a person's gut."
Porch Music
Arkansan Trey Johnson is half of the duo Almond and Johnson. He and Dave Almond bring an acoustic, twoperson approach to conjuring deep blues magic and sharing it in a live, intimate setting.
They, too, look to the past for inspiration.
"Everybody right now, especially in this part of the country, is a fan of electric blues. And I love it, don't take that wrong, but at the same time I want to reach further to where it actually started. With the acoustic stuff, it's just porch music," said Johnson.
As a songwriter he looks to some of the same themes discussed by such blues greats as Robert Johnson.
Themes prevalent in the blues can cross generations.
"I try the same themes but I try to modernize a little bit if I can and turn it into whatever I'm thinking of at the time usually: women, women and drinking and hard times and good times," said Johnson (no relation to the blues legend).
He tries to focus on the positive, and said they take much of their inspiration from the 1930s and '40s, when music was stripped down to a voice and guitar.
Johnson said if you go far enough back, you can see how Robert Johnson, for example, was very modern for the times, while other blues artists were very rootsy and woodsy. He said this is how the strains in the blues developed.
Johnson thinks younger people can identify with the directness of blues music .
He credits satellite radio with introducing a wider and younger generation to the blues.
"To be honest with you, from what we would call our generation, it's almost like you've heard it all and you can only dress it up so much and then people start to strip things down. They just want something true, something real, and it doesn't matter if it's something they've dealt with themselves. As long as it's real and they can feel like they can grasp it, then that's what they're after," Johnson said.
He sees the older generation passing along a love of the blues to younger folks. It's something he spots at live shows.
"The older generation will turn their sons and their daughters on to it, and then they'll bring 20 kids. They're all incredible," Johnson said.
"You don't have to travel very far if you live in this area to hear really good music," said Johnson.
As for Almond & Johnson, he doesn't see them adding more instrumentation. He liked the fact that at the T-Bone festival they were the only act with simply two guitars.
"I just want the songwriting to get better—I mean just as the time goes write the songs that people identify with. As long as they're walking up trying to buy the CDs, trying to talk to us, it means they're grasping onto something. That's pretty much all I'm after," said Johnson.
And now is a natural time to relish the blues.
"It's getting harder. Gas is $4 a gallon," he said with a laugh.
Since 1943
Dorothy Ellis (better known as "Miss Blues") has years and experience on her fellow blues artists. She's worked the microphone since 1943, giving her six-and-a-half decades as a blues singer.
Also the washboard player in her band, Ellis was born in Direct, Texas, and raised nearby in Paris.
"I'm traditional blues, and no rock and roll," said Ellis, an inductee into the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame. "I can sing other things, though."
In the 1940s, seeing her mother record a song inspired her to take up singing herself.
"So that was my first introduction to some of the stuff she was doing. But she wasn't a professional singer, no. She was in the kitchen," said Ellis with a deep chuckle.
From there on, Miss Blues carved out her own style of throaty, full-bodied and downhome blues that's rough, direct and honest. From her first notes at the T-Bone Walker Blues Festival, it was clear her voice carries the weight and wonder of real life lived heartily for decades.
What keeps her going?
Gesturing to her bandmates, Miss Blues laughed and said, "They help the old lady. That's what keeps me going."
And it helps that she has stored up some wisdom about the blues.
"What appeals to me about the traditional blues is because if we're going to talk blues, you've got to go back to the basics. And I believe within my heart, since I've been at it so long, there's only three blues," said Ellis. They're Southeast, Southwest and Delta.
"Those are the three. That was when I was a kid. That's what they're going to be now. When I die and go in kickin', I'm going to still be hollering about those three," she said, noting she fits somewhere in the Southwest blues.
As a songwriter she favors the "moaning and groaning" songs about hard times and being trapped in bad situations. But it's not all sad.
"Well, I think the blues is coming into its own again. You know it's always tough with the moan and the groan, but somehow you make it through. And it ain't all moaning and groaning. We do have some happy blues," said Ellis. "It ain't moaning and groaning all. It's really not."
And the blues, she said, is OK where it's at now and where it's headed.
"I think it's flourishing, I really do. I think that it's coming into its own right and it's still the backbone," said Ellis.
T-Bone's Legacy
Bernita Walker's father left his mark on the blues by pioneering the electric guitar sound, ultimately affecting musicians like B.B. King and Eric Clapton.
In between sets played by The Blues Specialists and Dee Dee Williams last weekend at Music City Texas, Walker said she could see her dad's influence in today's blues artists.
"I do see some of his strokes, some of his notes, his chords—I see a number of them really trying to pick up the course that he set in place and to get that sound. It's not an easy sound to get. He is a very special individual," said Walker.
Her father was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987—12 years after he died—and he was noted for his early influence on rock music. At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Website, Walker songs like "Stormy Monday" and "TBone Blues" are called blues classics, "demonstrating his jazz-based blues style."
But the style, said his daughter, is tough to copy.
"It's a hard sound to pick up. It's a T-Bone style. It's like Bo Diddley had his style," said Walker.
She points out there were some lean years for the blues in general and for her father specifically. But the blues has been resurgent.
"So it has its place. With the economy going the way it is, people are going to be singing the blues a lot more, you know, so maybe that's what's going to pick it back up. But this is an American tradition. It's just like jazz, so it's not going anywhere," said Walker.
She prefers a traditional approach to the blues, as opposed to a rock sound. And she said younger folks are beginning to show interest in the blues.
"They're starting to," Walker said, referencing the musicians like Mojo Tedder, Kayla Reeves and The Kesler Brothers who performed at the festival as some of the Texas Young Guns .
"It's individuals like them who are going to keep it alive. And if we get the music stations, that's the key, to play more traditional music."
Coda
If there's one thing that's clear from talking to blues musicians, it's that the blues—like the people who cherish it and play it now and those whose work songs were shared in the cotton fields—is surely a survivor.
