I’m currently listening to a wonderful, great sounding two record set of Blind Lemon Jefferson recordings on the Milestone label. The liner notes by Pete Welding bring up elements of blues authenticity arguments that intrigue me. For example Welding writes that the myth of the “footloose, hard-drinking, hard-living, tender-tough man of rough genius” has been recently been recently exploded by “serious, dispassionate study.” And yet, he still maintains, “The more carefully one applies the merciless gaze of detached inquiry the more clearly he emerges an uncommonly original, highly individualistic artist sui generis. If anything, the aura of romance glows even more brightly.”
I can dig that mostly. Listening to Blind Lemon sing “Jack ‘o Diamonds” blues you can’t help but visualize a lonely, tormented genius, even if in reality his life wasn’t completely like that. On the other hand, you can hear a cheerfulness, sexiness and a vaudeville pop sensibility in the thirty two songs on this record. His guitar playing is zippy, danceable, sociable. You can imagine the guy playing with a band, not just alone and lonely.
In his book Escaping the Delta, Elijah Wald brings up an interesting question to think about: was Blind Lemon Jefferson a natural bluesman or was he a gifted musician who just happened to come of age when the blues was in its ascendancy as a popular music? A bit of both maybe?
Such questions take some of the fan boy romance away from the blues, but if that helps to take away some of the moldy fig snobbery and breathes life into my dusty old records, I’m all for that.
