Bo Carter, prob. with Lonnie Chatmon on fiddle. The full family band was the Mississippi Sheiks, who recorded the original Sitting On Top of the World. Like many bluesmen, the Chatmon brothers didnt think of themselves as bluesmen in the contemporary sense of the word. The Blues was considered by musicians as a stereotype (not in the negative sense) style, associated with certain artists, certain song structures ( the 12-bar AAB blues had not yet become the defining feature). While blues was from the start considered to be a Negro form, white musicians were already imitating, quoting, referencing, or parodying the Negro blues, the same way they always had, since well before the blackface minstrel craze, taken up key features of New World African song style and married them to Anglophone folk music forms, like reels and jigs. I loved Bo Carter from my first exposure, on the Yazoo re-issue LPs of the 70s. He, along with John Hurt, were anomalies in the ( ca. 1970) popular idea of blues from Mississippi. The Sheiks played--and recorded-- a far broader and more eclectic repertoire than most Race artists were credited with or allowed to record to shellac. The white A&R men knew what sold, and they pushed the blues craze as a hot commodity (as they would with jazz, ragtime, hokum, boogie woogie, and later with soul, funk, R&B, and hiphop.) The musicians who endured were those who could credibly adopt whatever was the latest musical fad, who could accompany the latest dance steps (see the slow drag or the Charleston, the twist or the funky chicken). They called themselves musicianers, or songsters. And played for white and Black live audiences a far broader range of songs and songstyles than they recorded. And were sold short when The Story of the Blues was told ... and sold. Thus endeth todays reading.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 14:12:50 +0000
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