Richard Haslop
1 April 2006
column
Johannesburg — AFRICAN music recently suffered a major loss when Mali's Ali Farka Toure died of cancer. When Westerners first encountered Toure's music, which eventually won two Grammy Awards for collaborative efforts with Ry Cooder and kora player Toumani Diabate respectively, they thought they'd found the fountainhead of the blues.
This, surely, was the artist who proved those theories about the music of West African slaves slowly turning into the Delta blues on the Mississippi plantations.
The resemblance between his hypnotic acoustic guitar accompanied songs and those by John Lee Hooker was uncanny, with the ticking calabash approximating the way Hooker's constantly tapping foot provided his percussive accompaniment.
The introduction to La Drogue, now on the recently reissued Red & Green, seemed to quote directly from the Temptations' pop-soul classic, My Girl. Musicological imaginations ran wild.
Consider, therefore, the academic disappointment when Toure revealed that he had long been a fan of African-American music and that Hooker was a particular favourite. It's also very likely, familiar as he would have been with the Motown hits of the 60s, that the quote from My Girl was deliberate. What Toure did let on was that he was attracted to Hooker in the first place because he sounded like the Malian music Toure had always known.
One of the Hooker recordings that Toure might've heard is Tupelo, the bluesman's moody rumination on the 1927 Mississippi flood mentioned in a previous column.
Featuring nothing but Hooker's menacing growl over a simple, repetitive guitar figure -- and that eerie tapping -- lyrics, sound and the water's implacable approach merge so that the song winds up existing virtually as atmosphere.
Nick Cave is among rock's finest songwriters, capable of communicating a complex range of emotional experiences. When he was younger he rampaged through mid-80s Gothic post-punk, fired by dreams of sin and redemption in the US South and fuelled by a deadly combination of drugs, darkness and the writings of Flannery O'Connor.
His own Tupelo, on his The First Born Is Dead album, is an apocalyptic extension of the Hooker theme where, at the height of the storm, "the king is born in Tupelo". Though the event is couched in the imagery of the birth of Christ, or perhaps the anti-Christ, that king is Elvis Presley, born in Tupelo, Mississippi, with his stillborn twin brother.
Presley's first five singles were all recorded in Memphis for the Sun label and each consisted of a blues side and a country side, fortifying the historically simplistic yet rather compelling definition of rock 'n roll as the bastard child of country music and the blues. The fifth of these, his version of bluesman Junior Parker's Mystery Train, may be the greatest Presley single and is certainly among the most magnificent two-and-a-half minutes in rock 'n roll. For me, the deal is sealed a mere six seconds into the song, when the already unstoppable rhythmic drive established by Scotty Moore and Bill Black is kicked into overdrive by the introduction of Presley's acoustic guitar. It may not sound like much in the context of this fantastic performance, but listen out for it, and see if it doesn't make your heart leap.
A musician who fully understood the power of the acoustic guitar as rock rhythm instrument was Welsh rocker and production ace Dave Edmunds. A fine example from his impressive catalogue is Sweet Little Lisa, a song which also happens to sport not one, but two, of the great rock 'n roll guitar solos, by brilliant English picker Albert Lee, whose bottomless stock of fills, riffs, rolls and lines is revealed in all its finery.
Edmunds's biggest hit was his version of I Hear You Knockin', a resounding dose of guitar propelled raunch, but originally written as classic New Orleans R&B by Crescent City arranger Dave Bartholomew, and most impressively performed against a typically rolling Fats Domino piano accompaniment by blues singer Smiley Lewis. Lewis also sang the original of Presley's One Night, where the chart-sanitised revelation that one night of love was what Presley was praying for turned out to have been one night of sin that Lewis was paying for.
The piano has been central to the music of New Orleans, perhaps since 19th-century composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk wrote classical pieces with a Creole flavour, but certainly since Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented jazz.
The claim is overstated, but not as far-fetched as you might imagine.
However, it was the so-called piano professors who nailed down the strain of rhythm and blues that became associated with the city. Chief among these was the great Professor Longhair, whose 1953 song Tipitina incorporated rumba rhythms with the usual second line beat of the street parade, and eventually gave its name to the most famous club in town, with a statue of the pianist right outside.
The style perfected by Professor Longhair has influenced the sound of New Orleans ever since, with his lineage ending up in the rock album racks when local session man Mac Rebennack assumed the guise of Dr John the Nite Tripper, and brought not only the rhythms of the Big Easy streets, but also the trappings of voodoo to a 70s rock audience. Dr John has continued to refer to his roots for inspiration.
The finest exponent of the style may have been the wildly eccentric James Booker, a gifted player whose pianistic pyrotechnics made him sound like two or three players at once, and whose repertoire included Chopin and Sinatra and most places in between, but who turned everything he touched into pure New Orleans.
Start with his Junco Partner, an old blues song that later became punk in the hands of the Clash, and move outwards, but be warned -- he's as addictive as the drugs in the song.
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