butterfield, pt 2

[Gatorharp@xxxxxxx]

To understand the transformation of blues music in our society,
consider how it has been used to market other products. Go back
forty years to Memphis where Riley King, former Mississippi Delta
sharecropper, was on his way to becoming B.B. King, world-reknowned
blues singer and guitarist, the man widely acknowledged as the
greatest blues musician of our time. Before he was B.B., the Blues
Boy of Beale Street, he was known briefly as "The Pepticon Boy".
This was during the time when King hosted a daily music program on
Memphis radio station WDIA. The sponsor was Pepticon, a health
tonic, competitor to Hadacol, which sponsored a program on KWEM,
broadcasting from West Helena, Arkansas, just across the Mississippi
River. Pepticon had King on 'DIA; Hadacol had Sonny Boy Williamson
on 'WEM. [Sonny Boy was actually Rice Miller, a blues singer and
harmonica player, whose appearance under a name reknowned down
through the Delta and up into Tennessee, and Arkansas, was a
deliberate ruse of the station owners. By the time listeners got
wise his popularity was so well established that he became Sonny Boy
Williamson II.] Here is the point: as a marketing device blues music
was seen as good for nothing more than selling diluted grain
alcohol, laced with herbs and caramel coloring, to blacks too poor
to afford decent housing, if they'd had access to it, yet able to
scrape together the price of a bottle of pep tonic to soothe their
depression or a can of lye to straighten their hair.

In contrast, today, between innings of the World Series, you may see
a Levi's commercial, with all its mass marketing imagery; long lens
shots of sleek young couples crossing big city boulevards or
bounding down beaches beside roiling surf; tight shots of strong,
youthful, male hands -- unsullied by hard physical labor -- with
their thumbs hooked into belt loops, pulling faded blue denims over
powerful thighs. The music heard under the pitchman's smooth voice
is "Mannish Boy" by Muddy Waters, the very same musician whose
identity was virtually a secret in the years when Mick Jagger and
Van Morrison were singing his songs and even imitating the
Mississippi twang in his voice. So here is the latest edition of
what Madison Avenue believes will get the juices flowing in its
market, orchestrated to the unmistakable sound of Muddy wailing "I'm
a man./A nat'chal born man". There's another sound there, too. A
Mississippi saxophone. James Cotton's harmonica. Twenty five years
ago that sound was as alien to the mass audience as the sound of
Balkan bagpipes. But this is Middle America in the 1990's where
blues music can induce millions to believe that buying this
sponsor's product will make them mannish, make them way cool.

The migration of blues, which is the heart and soul of all the music
America claims as its own, from the world of Pepticon to the Land of
Levi's, from the ghetto of Hadacol to the suburbs of Bud Lite, makes
one of the great American stories of our time. I gave a brief
account of the story in The Arrival Of B.B. King . What was missing
from that sketch was a full account of the role played by The Paul
Butterfield Blues Band.

The Butterfield Band was exceptional in many ways but none so much
as the fact that it was the first integrated blues band. The white
members of the band came from middle class families. Had they not
fallen in love with this music they probably would have become
professionals like their fathers. Instead, they gave themselves to
the power of a music that had been hidden away in a part of America
where few whites ever ventured. The black members of the band had
known little else besides a life of ghetto bars and rural
roadhouses, places where you could get shot just for standing in the
wrong spot at the wrong time.

Paul Butterfield grew up in Chicago. In high school he played
classical flute and starred on the track team. Through the influence
of an older brother and with the urging of a chum, Nick Gravenites,
Butterfield set out to find the music he had heard on the black
radio stations in Chicago. This music could be heard live only on
the South and West Sides in bars where the only white faces belonged
to policemen.

Somehow Butterfield and Gravenites made that musical culture their
own. They learned all its varieties, from the hard-edged slide
guitar of Elmore James to the smooth big band sound of Bobby Blue
Bland. One particular blues musician captured Butterfield's
imagination, Marion Walter Jacobs, known as "Little Walter". Little
Walter created a new blues instrument, the amplified harmonica. A
cheap instrument, invented in Germany in the 19th century, the
harmonica was designed, not mainly for playing melody, but, rather,
to play chords. Harmonica was not new to blues music, but its voice
in the hands of Little Walter, blowing it through a cheap microphone
plugged into a guitar amplifier, was brand new. The sound of
vibrating brass reeds, moving a column of air that reached down into
a man's innards, driving a crystal microphone in the confines of a
small, air-tight accoustic space, this sound was a new voice, raw
and primal, and Butterfield took it for his own. More precisely, in
his own words, "the instrument chose me". He sang, too, with a
strong, chesty tone and a delivery full of authority.

Elvin Bishop was the original guitarist in the Butterfield Band.
Bishop came to Chicago from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to study physics at the
Univeristy of Chicago on a Merit Scholarship. This award marked him
as among the two or three hundred most talented high school students
in the country. Bishop's stay at the University was extremely short,
indeed, undoubtedly one of the shortest among his Merit peers. He
left his studies to play the blues with Butterfield.

When they got a steady gig at Big John's club, Bishop and
Butterfield persuaded the rhythm section of Howlin' Wolf's band to
join them. Sam Lay played drums with weight-lifters' arms and a
relentless, staccatto rhythm, coupled with a powerful right foot on
bass drum. He was handsome, with a great processed pompadour and a
deep voice that supplemented Butterfield's on certain tunes like
Muddy Waters' signature song "Got My Mojo Workin'". Though one would
never suspect it to look at him, his health was fragile, perhaps
aggravated by a bullet wound he had suffered some years before.
Illness caused him to leave the band before the sessions for the
second album.

The other half of the rhythm section was Jerome Arnold, younger
brother of a blues singer/harmonica-player of wide repute, Billy Boy
Arnold. Jerome was quiet and unassuming; a conservative dresser
given to double knits and loafers, in contrast to Sam Lay, who liked
outrageous shoes and dazzling colors. As the harmonic half of the
rhythm section he played the bass like a bricklayer lays bricks, in
heavy, solid lines. Together Lay, Arnold and Bishop provided an
unshakable, rhythmic and harmonic foundation for the Butterfield's
brilliant solos.

In 1964 Elektra Records producer Paul Rothchild heard Butterfield
and recognized the potential. He wanted to record the band, but he
wanted Butterfield to add another guitarist, Mike Bloomfield.
Bishop, the regular guitarist, had met Bloomfield before on one of
his outings to neighborhood pawn shops in search of a guitar. Bishop
was strumming a guitar in one pawn shop when a fast-talking kid
standing behind the counter took the guitar from him and ripped of a
dazzling blues arpeggio. It was Bloomfield, tending the store for
his pawn brokeruncle.

Bishop voiced no objection to adding Bloomfield to the band. It was
Bloomfield who had to be convinced he could stand next to
Butterfield on the bandstand without looking diminished. "He was
bad, man," Bloomfield later said about Butterfield in a recorded
interview. "That cat was bad. It took all the persuading to get me
to join."

Michael Bloomfield was heir to a fortune his father made as a
manufacturer of restaurant furniture. At age 21 he became the
beneficiary of a $2 million trust. He was set for life, free to
pursue his passion: blues guitar. As the foil to Butterfield's harp
playing he become the leader of a generation of guitar heros that
included Jimmi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana,
Duane Allan, and Alvin Lee. Bloomfield had the frantic energy of a
10-year old boy, right to the end when he died in his mid-30's. When
the press idolized him he was quick to tell them that he was a mere
imitator of the master, B.B. King.

The seminal event that launched the Butterfield Band on the way to
stardom was the Newport Folk Festival of 1965. Folk music had made
its own journey in the previous decade, from the coffee house to the
pop charts, led by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. No longer was it the
special province of left wing intellectuals. There was still the old
folk mafia and its most famous don, Pete Seeger, but the younger
musicians had taken the genre to primetime air play on the new
medium of FM radio. Now it was music that could make culture heros
and win Grammys. Newport had become a kind of summit for the
practitioners from both generations and now there was a new
excitement that invested this annual rite. That year, 1965, the
festival featured an afternoon session devoted to blues. A
distinguished procession of old blues masters played to a worshipful
crowd, who were thrilled just to see these historic figures of
American music. At the session's end the M.C.introduced the
Butterfield Band, who stood waiting in front of a wall of
amplifiers.

The very sight of all this gear was an offense to many present. Folk
music appealed to the romantic notion of the common man, the
dignified peasant, the itinerant minstrel. Woody Guthrie was the
patron saint of this school. According to his legend Woody was the
voice of the people, defying the powers that be who would take from
the poor all that was rightfully theirs -- the land, their simple
dignity. Blues music was to them the music of sharecroppers
exploited by rich white landowners, fieldhands who picked cotton all
day in the burning sun, and none typified the blues quite so much as
Mississippi John Hurt, the gentle, soft-spoken singer with parchment
skin and sad eyes, who had entertained the crowd earlier in the day.
A close second was Son House, the brooding, scrawny singer whose
delivery made him seem possessed; eyes rolled back in his head,
fingers choking the neck of his guitar. Now here came a
high-wattage, racially mixed band of urbanites headed by a
sullen-looking white man.