Re: [Harp-L] The Blues In Any Color

[David Payne <dmatthew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All in the eyes of the beholder and the subjection in the ear of the listener. Whenever I see this kind of thread, which pops up time and again, I think of Jimmie Rodgers everytime. I think of Blue Yodel No. 12 and what would have been 13, Jimmie pouring everything he had into the song, propped up with pillows and coughing up blood and pieces of T.B.-shredded lung between songs.. who can say Jimmie Rodgers did not have the blues?
On blues harmonica, why do so few people know who Gwen Foster was? Why doesn't anybody study Frank Hutchison? 

We tend to think of the world of our American past as entirely segregated. Maybe that's true someplace, but in West Virginia, it was different, musically there was a great deal of exchange between black and white in the coalfields. But there are so many documented stories of these exchanges, white people picked up the blues same as anybody else, they were dirt poor people starving to death, they heard it and it moved them. Bill Monroe had not only those economic issues as a boy, but he was blind as well. Or Hank Williams as a baby, crying alone in a cabin all day while his mother picked strawberries. Who's to say that either of those men when they sang the blues (Monroe did way more 12 bar and 8 bar than Williams) had no right to sing it? 

Back to Gwen Foster, when was the last time you saw Foster tabbed in a blues harp book? Joe Filisko is only guy I know of that has really studied Foster. And Foster was doing his stuff while playing with a neck rack and on this vid, he's playing it on an F harp....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgBZHlgAaBc

The ear is, and should always be, colorblind.

Dave
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