Fantastic video, just discovered -- George Thorogood with John Lee Hooker, Elvin Bishop, Willie Dixon, John Hammond -- live at Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ in 1984 -- play it, then read my post from February, "Boogie Til You Drop"

Where Did It Come From?

How Delta Blues Morphed into All the Music I Like

William Sundwick

What is the music I like? I call it “blues-something” or “something-blues” – roots music critics and historians have many names for many variations of blues. But, since the Music I Like is artistic expression, I’m wary of any taxonomy of styles or “schools.” Artists are entitled to mix and match different styles as they see fit.

Most historians agree on the definition of blues as a style of folk music that was common in the Mississippi Delta in the early 20^th century. It emphasized rhythm and simple lyrics revolving around economic and romantic difficulties, sometimes with magical (mystical, voodoo) intimations. Its primary vehicles were homemade percussion instruments, harmonica, and slide guitar – and an emotive vocalist.

The first recordings of this music date from the 1920s. But, there’s no reason to think that its origins don’t go back much further.  Alan and John Lomax, ethnomusicologists at the Library of Congress in the 1930s, embarked on field trips to record much of the music of the Delta Blues tradition.  They used primitive magnetic recording techniques with a hand lathe to press wax cylinders or discs. No electricity required, because there wasn’t any in rural Mississippi then. The music was thus preserved -- and distributed both in the U.S. and Britain -- even if not commercially recorded. 

Also, the music, at this time, was always performed by non-white artists. They were poor black sharecroppers, usually illiterate, and their songs weren’t written down. They learned guitar chords by demonstration and practice. Without the Lomax efforts, few songs would have been recorded.

My own fascination with the genre began in high school, when I decided to let my musical taste make my stand in the civil rights era. I abandoned the classical repertory imposed by my parents – since I clearly was not going to be a musician myself (my father, a failed violinist turned engineer, insisted that I, too, could never make it). The primitive alternative called. These artists had nothing, nobody recognized their talent, they were shunned by white society. And, the social milieu of Flint, Michigan made me pathologically averse to white country music. Those “hillbillys” were the real dregs in 1960s Flint, it seemed. Whatever musical tastes I carried away to college would certainly NOT be theirs! The cultural disconnect was just too great.

In college, I soon discovered that there was a fascinating blues tradition that had bubbled up from the South, making its way during the “Great Migration” into my part of the country.  It was analogous to my own family’s migration, in the opposite direction, from the mining and logging country of the Keweenaw Peninsula to the industrial heartland further south in Michigan. But, they were first generation immigrants from Swedish-speaking Finland, not descendants of slaves.

The Great Migration from the rural South to Chicago and Detroit was driven both by economic and cultural hardship – the black sharecropper was a refugee, not too different from the escaped slave of a few generations earlier. It continued into the 1940s, and WWII. Blacks began to make up a significant portion of the home-front industrial and service workforce in these cities.

They brought their music with them, intact. They performed it in clubs. But, few artists found recording contracts, despite high demand for live performances in both cities. The business side of “Rhythm and Blues” was not very well developed, though. Radio air play (and “payola”) was still in the future – and would find white rock-and-roll or “doo-wop” artists first, when it did arrive.

Friendly record labels and radio stations did exist, however, in selected markets. There was Billboard’s “R&B hits” list, just like there was the “Hot 100” (distilled to “Top 40”).  Two of the larger early labels were Chess Records and Okeh Records. They had already taken chances on some delta blues artists in Memphis, and had a presence in Chicago, as well.

It’s fair to say that there are three distinct generations in the lineage of this music. The first was R&B transplanted from rural Mississippi to Chicago and Detroit (mostly Chicago – only John Lee Hooker is recognizable from Detroit blues in this period). It showed little influence from any other musical styles outside that folk foundation.

The second generation did show some eclectic influences, depending on where it was performed. Most notable was British Blues, this generation’s archetype. It borrowed from delta blues, but there was also something vitally different emerging on the other side of the Pond in the early ‘60s. It was an urban, industrial, white blues -- without that peculiar American country flavor. A second generation also reached California, epitomized by a fusion of rock-and-roll with more back-to-the-roots folk blues. The second generation put blues rock into the mainstream.

As rock became more sophisticated, there arose a countervailing desire to simplify and “get back to the basics.” Blues was waiting. The beat, the emotional power of the lyrics, and those guitar riffs got our juices flowing. We wanted more of that, less of the fancy stuff. The third generation took off. It was a revival of traditional blues. In this more diverse time, however, blues had to compete with roots music in the country/folk vein. Lineage is genealogy, after all. As the gene pool has more inputs, the original markings often are obscured.

My iTunes library includes examples from each of the three generations of blues (or “bluesy” rock): 

•     From the first generation there is John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, and Willie Dixon. Hooker and King had the longest performing and recording careers of any first-generation blues musician. They were both known as guitar players. The slide guitar was their weapon of choice well. Little Walter and Howlin’ Wolf made the harmonica their centerpiece, although Howlin’ Wolf also impressed audiences with his imposing physical presence and voice. He literally howled like a wolf in some of his most famous pieces, covered by many blues rock bands over the years. Little Walter is the only artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame specifically as a harmonica player. Willie Dixon was a bass player, but had an impressive body of songs, covered by multiple blues and blues rock artists. All but Hooker and King were associated primarily with Chicago.       
•     Second generation blues came from both Britain and California. Good examples are early Rolling Stones, Yardbirds, and Cream. On our own Left Coast, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and maybe Creedence Clearwater Revival, carried on the tradition. Although CCR’s background makes them seem more like third generation revival – arriving early. Bob Dylan must be mentioned here, as well. He uniquely in cracked the New York folk scene in Greenwich Village with roots blues music. It was difficult on the East Coast, because of competition from other established pop forms. His audience was ready when he discovered blues, then rock.
•     George Thorogood and Jack White are examples of third generation blues. They both consGciously brought delta blues and boogie into the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Thorogood with his band, The Destroyers, combines traditional blues/boogie with original songs done in that style. Early in his career he was based in Washington, D.C., often performing in Georgetown opposite the Nighthawks, at places like The Cellar Door. Jack White, a native Detroiter, discovered blues in elementary school. He started an upholstering business before beginning his music career with his wife Meg, forming The White Stripes. They divorced before White Stripes reached its peak popularity in the early aughts -- calling themselves siblings for PR purposes. White now lives in Nashville. He sits on the board of the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Foundation, where he is a fervent proponent of following the Lomaxes in the 1930s. His work with the PBS series, American Epic, speaks to his interest in roots music, especially recording apparatuses. 

A fourth generation of blues artists can be imagined, begat by the children of millennials waxing nostalgic for their childhood exposure to the heavy metal and alternative rock of their parents. Those styles aren’t entirely devoid of blues roots. And, there might even be a folk revival, reflecting synergy of African-American and white country roots. One candidate is the British group Mumford and Sons. They feature an interesting mix of R&B, folk, and Gospel in many of their numbers.

Our affinity for the Music We Like seems to be driven mostly by nostalgia for our respective youths. Hence, age becomes the main predictor of one’s musical tastes. But, cultural affiliation also plays an important secondary role, some would say equal role.

If we remember first generation blues, it might be because of performers of great longevity, like John Lee Hooker, or B.B. King. If we are either slightly younger or were just focused on Top 40 songs in the sixties, we’re likely drawn to second generation blues. Gen-Xers may have fond memories of the third-generation blues revival associated with their youth.

My millennial offspring only know the blues form from me (youngest had never heard of John Lee Hooker until I told him about this post). I’ve succeeded in exposing them to early Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream. I’m not sure it has supplanted their own youthful experiences with hip hop and techno/electronic music, though. My oldest knows Jack White but thinks he’s “over-rated.”

Hmmm. Perhaps they’re missing the proper cultural affiliation?

Who Do You Love? Bo Diddley’s Masterpiece

William Sundwick

On Chicago’s South Side, in the 1940s, a rich culture of recently arrived African-Americans from the rural South made for an enduring musical legacy. While not the sole birthplace of what we came to know as “Rock-and-Roll,” the neighborhood contributed a disproportionately large share of the artists who would ultimately spawn that new musical form. One of them was Ellas McDaniel. He was only six years old when his family moved from Mississippi to the South Side, and his early musical talent was fostered by playing in his school orchestra (violin and trombone). 

Sometime in his teens, he heard a performance by great bluesman John Lee Hooker. He was impressed and inspired. So, he formed a band of his own with school friends. After playing on street corners, they soon found gigs in neighborhood venues, before Ellas was even out of high school. He had taught himself guitar, and was heavily influenced by the rhythmic cadence of music heard in his Pentecostal church. 

His band kept playing. By 1955, at age 26, Chess Records finally discovered him. In one account, Leonard Chess decided that, since McDaniel’s first recording for them was a song entitled “Bo Diddley,” he would give the unknown artist the same name. Other accounts of the origins of the stage name credit it to McDaniel, his fellow band members, or unknown origin, but referencing the crude handmade single-string instrument from Mississippi called the “Diddly Bow.”

Chess was taking a risk releasing recordings from such non-entities, but some of them achieved great success. Bo Diddley would, too, but it was slow coming, by record industry standards. In 1956, when he first recorded “Who Do You Love?”, Chess was already skeptical. This may have partly been because McDaniel was banned from the Ed Sullivan show the previous year, after misunderstanding his cue card, reading “Bo Diddley,” to mean he should play his song by that name – rather than “Sixteen Tons,” as the script had directed! 

In the late fifties, McDaniel (by then well known in Rhythm and Blues circles as Bo Diddley), moved to Washington, D.C. He was prosperous enough to have his own basement recording studio on Rhode Island Avenue, N.E. Here he recorded his album “Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger” and discovered some local artists -- including Marvin Gaye, his valet, who sang in a Doo Wop group called The Marquees.

Part of the early Chess Records promotional campaign for McDaniel was to christen his unique syncopated R & B style the “Bo Diddley Beat.” This can be loosely described as a certain five accent clave. That first single, “Bo Diddley,” is a good example. But, in fact, McDaniel did not invent it – it was a previously recorded Afro-Cuban rhythm heard, among other places, in the Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca Cola” (1944). Leonard Chess did encourage McDaniel to claim credit, however, as part of the general promotion of his name. 

Since the original version of “Who Do You Love” did not even feature that “Bo Diddley Beat” (it was closer in style to Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline”), there must be something else about the song that caused it to become the best-known of all Bo Diddley works –  based on the number of covers it’s received by different musicians.

Could it be the bizarre lyrics that make it such a masterpiece?  They were, according to the songwriter himself, based on children’s schoolyard bragging in Kansas City, animated by a rhythmic body language. We don’t know why McDaniel had been in K.C., or that schoolyard! But, the lyrics clearly have some strong Voodoo overtones (or, “hoodoo,” the Mississippi/Louisiana variant) – rather dark and threatening, describing a harrowing journey through barbed wire, wearing a cobra snake for a necktie, living in a house made of rattlesnake hide with a chimney “made out of a human skull.” Fearless, he is “just 22 and I don’t mind dying” – harsh to his girlfriend, Arlene, “don’t give me no lip”” – and the scene filled with cognitive dissonance: “the night was dark, but the sky was blue” and “you should have heard just what I seen.”

The original song also is easily adaptable, not only to the classic “Bo Diddley Beat,” but also to many different styles of rock music that developed through the sixties and seventies. It was a particularly popular cover for some of the California “psychedelic” bands. Perhaps this is attributable to the vaguely Southwestern imagery of rattlesnakes and barbed wire in the lyrics.

 The California connection for Who Do You Love was contemporaneous with another by a New England coffee house folk singer, Tom Rush. Rush recorded an early cover in 1966. His Who Do You Love had some of his smoother folk attributes. But, when recorded by Elektra Records, Rush’s version was transformed into a Rock-and-Roll staple, with that “Bo Diddley Beat.” This was the first version of the song I ever heard, played on WHFS-FM radio. Rush adopted a low-pitched growl for his vocal rendition, which captured both the blues culture and the dark Voodoo lyrics perfectly. It ultimately led to my wanting to learn more about the song, and about Bo Diddley.

At about the same time, Bo Diddley was becoming a cult on the Left Coast. One of the prime examples of the San Francisco psychedelic scene in the sixties was Quicksilver Messenger Service. Their second album, “Happy Trails,” features the entire first side dedicated to an extended jam on Who Do You Love, in six parts. Most of it is inspired more by Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead than by Bo Diddley, but if you listen carefully, through the haze, you can just barely make out the Bo Diddley Beat in parts, and the lyrics are faithfully reproduced – in between the extended guitar riffs. The great flexibility of the song to differing interpretations is on display in Quicksilver’s performance at Fillmore East in 1968.

My two favorite Who Do You Love covers are both by iconic figures from California. The Doors picked it up for a series of live performances in 1970. By this time in their career, Jim Morrison was drunk at many concerts, and the backup band – especially John Densmore (drums) and Robby Krieger (lead guitar) – often had to rescue him. Who Do You Love made that role easy. Morrison’s slurred speech fit the surreal lyrics well, with Densmore and Krieger were masterful in multiple recordings of the band doing the song on tour. The Bo Diddley Beat is unmistakable. As is the inherent raw power of the song.

By the late seventies, the blues revival was nearing its end – Led Zeppelin was on the verge of breaking up – but one California artist was having some success keeping it going. That was George Thorogood, with his band, The Destroyers. His second album, “Move It On Over,” contained many great blues numbers, often mashups of different Chicago blues classics, with altered lyrics, and transition chords created by Thorogood. “Who Do You Love,” one of his most enduring numbers was also here – Thorogood’s version adds a line to the lyrics: “good time music with a Bo Diddley Beat,” and a couple other minor changes – they fit perfectly, and the beat itself is adapted seamlessly. Thorogood’s “Who Do You Love” is a masterpiece all by itself. He may have been the best of the California R & B revival artists – maybe the last authentic “Who Do You Love” cover?

So, where are they today? Yes, we’ve seen blues guitarists more recently – notably Jack White – but, I’m not aware of any recent R & B or rock covers of Bo Diddley. The Proto-Punk, Punk, and Metal trends in rock seem to have passed him by. Who Do You Love would be eminently adaptable to any of these later styles, I could have seen Motorhead doing a cover of it, for example. 

But, alas, though such attempts may have been made, they were never released. Is it time for another revival? Surely, George Thorogood can’t be the last in a line … maybe another musical style would work better? How about jettisoning the “Bo Diddley Beat” altogether, like Elise LeGrow is doing? Not rock-and-roll, but …