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

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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