[Harp-L] The Importance of Butterfield

[robert mcgraw <harpbob@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> What's important to me about Paul Butterfield's playing is I couldn't 
> have gotten from there to here without it.

--- I view Butterfield as the link between the Post-War Chicago players and the modern diatonic players...a transitional figure of great importance. I think his playing foreshadows Jason Ricci, Madcat, Magic Dick, even Howard Levy and the various overblowers who "follow" Levy [ Chris "Buddah" etc]. I don't mean that they copy him, though some do; I mean that Butterfield was the first, or one of the first, great players who pushed the diatonic out of the realm of the blues into other musics: rock, jazz, even what we might now call "World Music" [thinking of East-West here]...Butterfield had a different sound than the other Chicago guys, even on the first record he made. [and, i would argue, in having his own approach to the blues was truer to the blues tradition of speaking in your own voic, not someone elses, than many of the players who emerged later and tried to recreate the Chicago sound]

   All of Butterfield's experiments didn't work, at least to my ears. I don't much care for his version of Nat Adderly's "Work Song," for example...but that is often the case with an innovator, whcih Butterfield most assuredly was...others later will work out the implications of what they did.

   Silly to rank players, but i like doing it anyway. I place Butterfield in the pantheon of great harmonica players, right there with Little Walter, Toots, Stevie, Larry Adler, Levy and the a few others. Unquestionably a harmonica player of the very highest caliber.

WVa Bob

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