Re: [Harp-L] re:was blues scale now illiterate



Jim Alciere wrote:
People assume blues musicians were musically illiterate.

This is just to add to Jim's excellent post.


One of a bunch of wonderful revelations in the Howlin' Wolf biography was that he went back to school in his 50's and studied music theory.

That book also made it pretty clear that long before he went back to school he was the guy who put his bands together. His bands were revolutionary and, from the recorded evidence, astonishingly powerful. They didn't come together and - suddenly out of nowhere - one of the most revolutionary sounds of the 20th century occured. He may not have written out charts, but the musical sensibility that shaped that sound was certainly proactive and possessed of musical genius. The people who worked with him all tell that story.

The Writer's Guild runs these great magazine ads where you see an image like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, with the caption "Play it again Sam!" And below that, in emphatic lettering: "Somebody wrote that."

While it's been my experience that members of the WGA are generally literate people, the Bulgarian people did not have a written language until the late 19th century. And yet their poetic literature was vast. Researchers in the 1870's found that there were epic poets who had written poems much longer than the Iliad and could recite them for audiences precisely, time after time, without ever having written them down. Some of these poets had written many epics and could recite any of them on demand. It's how they made their living.

I don't want to argue for illiteracy, but musical literacy is just one of many tools available to talented musicians, and is not unomittable.

K





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