butterfield...pt 1

[Gatorharp@xxxxxxx]

the below is something a friend sent.  it's self explanatory, so i won't say 
much.  it's verrrrrry long, so i've divided it into three sections, each 
labeled.
steven j gatorman

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I had a huge response from listmembers to the Joel Selvin piece I sent
out yesterday putting forth an argument for the induction of the Butterfield
Blues Band in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  It seems that Selvin's article
struck a nerve with our eclectic audience, and many of you agree about the
influence of this band.  One particularly passionate response came from the
respected music biographer Charles Sawyer, who sent me the following writing: 
an
essay on the significance of the Paul Butterfield Blues band that also serves 
as
a proposal for a still unwritten bio on Paul Butterfield.  I know that there 
are those on our list who have some influence on the RockHall selections.  I 
honestly believe such an induction is alongshot, but it would be certainly well 
deserved and long overdue.  If the following text becomes truncated in the 
email, you can find it in its entirety by going to the following link.
- -bsarles
<A HREF="http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Esawyer/bwf.html";>BluesWith A 
Feeling</A>
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Esawyer/bwf.html
- -------------------------------------------------------
Never Be The Same Again

By Charles Sawyer

Ask a serious music lover what started him/her on a life filled with
the particular sounds that move, soothe, excite, incite him/her, and
you are likely to hear about an exact moment in life when a new kind
of music reached his/her ears for the first time. It might be the
sound of a cello playing Bach's Suites For Cello; it might be the
mellow sound of a saxophone played by Lester Young or Johnny Hodges,
or the keening sound of a sitar, the wail of Bulgarian Baba, or the
gentle sighing of a Dobro guitar. Whatever the particular sound the
experience is always one of hearing a voice so distinctive and
compelling it seems to be meant exclusively for the listener. You
feel that this voice is speaking just to you in a language of the
soul. Once you hear that voice speaking to you, you are never the
same again.

I remember such a moment with stark clarity. It was a Sunday evening
in the winter of 1965/1966. I was driving on the Connecticut
Turnpike, returning to Yale University where I was in graduate
school. A song with a sound unlike any I had ever heard came on my
car radio and put me in a kind of trance. The song was "Born In
Chicago," and the sound was an amplified harmonica. The next day I
went to the record store and bought the album, The Paul Butterfield
Blues Band. For months it never left my turntable and as the needle
wore out the grooves on the record, it etched a copy in my brain.
Driving to a party in southern New Hampshire during spring vacation
I heard an announcement on the radio that Butterfield was appearing
at the Unicorn Coffee House on Boylston Street in Boston. I turned
the car around and headed south. Within an hour I was sitting in the
Unicorn hearing that sound live.

The effect on me is hard to express, but one detail may give the
flavor. So strong was the sound that I could feel the vibrations
coming up through the table into my elbows. I pressed my elbows down
tight and turned my palms up, roughly in the Islamic attitude of
prayer, not an incongruous gesture, considering my state of mind. My
God, I thought, I can feel the music in the bones of my hands.
During the break I went to the edge of the stage and looked at the
harmonicas sitting on an amplifier. They were the ordinary,
dime-store variety. Ten little holes, no buttons, no wires. Whatever
it takes, I thought to myself, I've got to learn to make that sound
myself.

I believe this experience was typical of a kind of revelation that
brought blues music into the lives of white, middle class Americans.
Many white blues musicians of my generation have told me variations
of this story, how once they heard the Butterfield Band, things were
never the same inside their heads.

Given my experience and my views it was inevitable that I should
want to write a book about the Butterfield Band. But after a
successful, ten-year struggle to find a publisher for my biography
of B.B. King I decided I would not write another book without first
signing a publishing contract. What follows here is a book proposal
I wrote in the hope I could find a publisher to underwrite the
project. I had a very savvy agent to shop it, one who had sold a
musical biography written by a friend of mine for a sum closer to
seven figures than to six. The responses he got from publishers
convinced me I will not write this book. Alas, a book about a
forgotten band that rewrites the cultural history of our time was,
at best, a very long shot, commercially speaking.

Still there is hope such a book will yet appear. A series of
articles in Blues Access by Tom Ellis III is telling the story of
Paul Butterfield and his bands in considerable detail. [No. 23,
Fall, 1995; No. 25, Spring, 1996; No. 27, Fall, 1996; No. 29,
Spring, 1997.] The last installment will appear soon. A book is in
the works. I wish him well. Very well! Carpe diem, Tom. 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blues With A Feeling
Proposal for A Biography of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band
By Charles Sawyer
Winter 1994

For two decades now I have watched the steady rise of urban blues in
popular culture, always aware that this turn of events was set in
motion in the years 1965 to 1968, largely through the success of one
musician, Paul Butterfield, and his band. At the height of his
popularity Butterfield and his musicians ignited an interest in a
musical genre that had been buried in a racial enclave of American
culture. He bears a significance much like that of Paul Whiteman,
Benny Goodman, Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. They are
all cultural pivot points whose work arrested public attention and
forever changed our musical sensibilities; all, except possibly
Dylan, used the styles of African American musicians as a foundation
for their own music and, in the bargain, introduced the world to
some of America's greatest artists, who had remained invisible
because they were black.

Yet Butterfield, the musical pioneer, has been all but completely
forgotten. History can be worse than unfair, but my own feeling of
debt to Butterfield, whom I knew only slightly in a personal sense,
made this piece of history a personal matter. In the spring and
summer of 1993 my convictions about this lost piece of cultural
history forged themselves into a plan for a book. I realized with a
kind of shining clarity that the story of how this music moved from
the chit'lin' circuit to the mainstream is one of the great stories
of our time, and that I am in a unique position to tell it. I have
felt this author's conviction once before and the result was the
critically acclaimed biography of B. B. King, The Arrival Of B. B.
King (Doubleday, 1978 hbk; Da Capo, 1980 pbk).

The key event that triggered the plan for a book was a visit to the
toney new blues club in Harvard Square, The House of Blues, the one
sponsored by "Blues Brother" Dan Ackroyd and Isaac Tigrett, founder
of the Hard Rock Cafe chain. The very existence of this place
signifies the new cachet of blues music. I gazed at the ceiling
where looking down on the patrons was a pantheon of blues greats in
plaster relief. Each larger than life portrait is plain white
plaster. Only the gentle shadows cast by the side lighting give the
figures their shape. They're all there: Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf,
Lightnin' Hopkins, Albert King, Son House, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy,
Junior Wells. More than one hundred portraits, each easily
recognizable. It is a kind of Sistine Chapel of pop culture.

But wait. Where is Butterfield? Where is the man who illuminated the
shadows where these players had lingered, the man whose success gave
them access to the stages of Jordan and Carnegie Halls. Where is he?
Were it not for him this house might not be here. Twenty-five years
ago the crowds lined up along Palmer Street at the entrance to Club
47, out onto Brattle Street, around the bend into Harvard Square, a
bare two blocks from this "temple", to learn from Butterfield what
"urban blues" really meant. This temple is his temple, yet he is
missing.