What Does My Music Library Say About Me?

A Rebuttal to the Personality Link

William Sundwick

Ever since I can remember, I’ve liked listening to music. My childhood was spent with a father who was a failed violinist in his youth. (He became an engineer.) But, while he never played for me, he was totally dedicated to the classical, mostly 19^th century, orchestral catalogue. He took off from Paganini and didn’t stop until Heifetz. Listening to music was very serious business to him. It was clearly emotional. I inherited the emotional content, if not the literature.

For me, dramatic always trumped soothing. Heavy was generally better than light. I adored Beethoven -- a love shared with my dad. Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms all get honorable mention. I liked the Russians, too – along with my mother – father not so much (no violinists).

Something happened to me culturally, however, when I got to high school, and obtained a driver’s license. With a little help from my friends, I discovered top 40 radio in the car. It became a social thing. My previous group of friends, intellectually precocious New York Jews, with holocaust survivor parents, had aided and abetted my classical predilections up to that point -- although none of us ever played an instrument. Driving around listening to radio in the car became a liberating experience. Independence at last!

Social acceptance changed tone in college. There, the driving force seemed to be “what’s new.” And, then, what would come next. Thus, the avant-garde invaded my mind, with musical, artistic, and theatrical dimensions. Grafted onto that avant-garde sensibility was social awareness of a different world – an underclass world of black people. Blues and avant-garde jazz were, in my mind as a college student, part of the same “movement.” I had already gained an appreciation for the left from my New York Jewish friends in high school – college gave me the chance to integrate all that into an aesthetic that would become my own.

I still listened to classical music in college but replaced the 19^th century romantics with baroque and more 20th century artists. I liked Shostakovich and Prokofiev symphonies.

After college, it became clear that the future lay with rock music. It was symbolic of the age, and drew from a fabulous, beautiful history of the great migration from the South to the industrial Midwest. Urban blues became my music. As it transmogrified into Chicago Blues or British Blues, it seemed to be part of an evolving tradition. A working-class artform.

I, too, became a worker. I may have been an intellectual worker, but a worker, nonetheless. Adding to that, I was slow to develop intimate relationships – adolescent “sturm und drang” didn’t disappear from my psyche until my late marriage at 35. By that time, I was dedicated to Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. The revolution was still coming – in the future.

If there is anything at all to the psychological studies which claim to correlate musical tastes with personality, I might confess being a “systemizer” more than an “empathizer” – like my engineer father. This does tend to support the basic genres of music I like best. I prefer complex melodies and rhythms, and intense music.

One parameter for musical taste which is clearly bogus in my case is age. I’m still discovering new musical genres at age 71. I have only recently become a fan of heavy metal and punk/post-punk. It says something to me which is as valid now as it was when I was 20 or 25. I’ve never rejected my roots. Sadly, I never participated in creating music. But I still appreciate it.

Today the only time I listen intently to music is at the gym. This means I associate my music library with biofeedback (cardio) and may even use it for “productivity enhancement” (makes me pedal harder). This is a departure from my youthful serious listening, although that listening mode is still imprinted in my emotional affect. I still like sad songs (blues), especially when linked to social alienation and emancipation. I continue associating avant-garde with class struggle, opposing the mainstream.

When music stays “underground,” it is better than when it is commercially successful. I’ve never liked “soothing” or “easy listening” music of the pop world. I reject overly sentimental music, as it cheapens my own emotions. And, I steadfastly reject music with a conservative social message. Commercial Nashville usually epitomizes that -- although I still enjoy some Rolling Stones anthems like “Ruby Tuesday” or “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (both examples of Keith Richards lapsing into extolling market capitalism’s virtue).

Blues is good. The purity and depth of its sentiment is real. It’s mostly about struggle, as I see it. The world of rock, whether blues-based or more experimental (like heavy metal), strikes me as great when it features virtuoso musicians – vocalists, guitar players, drummers, especially. Harmonica and tenor sax can often give an extra treat to the ear, as well. They contribute a plaintive tone to a song.

But the beat must remain predominant. Even in experimental electronic forms, there must be an underlying regular, repetitive beat. Sometimes the beat gets lost but is heroically rediscovered in the denouement. Zeppelin were masters of this, especially “In My Time of Dying” and “Dazed and Confused”. “Noise rock,”  like Sonic Youth, has tried the same approach – the beat must be at the heart of the song, even if lost in the middle.

Rock anthems continue to have an appeal to me. They seem to be hymns, crying “we shall overcome someday.”  Often, they take the form of a personal story, but sometimes they preach. The underlying emotion is hopefulness, with a dash of triumphalism – arrived at mostly through resistance to malevolent forces. Two of my favorite anthems are from the Rolling Stones: “Gimme Shelter” and “Midnight Rambler.” The former is the preaching style, the latter more bluesy.

The singer-songwriter folk tradition also contributes much to my music library. But always a folk-rock beat and instrumental backup is added. Mumford and Sons made a big impression on me when they entered the scene about ten years ago. Banjo replaces lead guitar on their first two albums, but it’s unmistakably folk rock.

The main reason I can’t buy the link between personality and musical tastes is that my tastes are way too varied to be pigeonholed. Why would I want to define who I am, anyway? Different studies have come up with different dimensions of personality and music – there is an “extroversion” scale where the most outgoing folks like the music I like, but the introverted folks also like some of the music I like. The “neuroticism” dimension in different studies concludes that people who rank high in neuroticism like totally opposite kinds of music. Go figure.

I think it’s not about musical genres, but more the socio-cultural tradition you live in that determines your musical taste. Mine has been developing for 71 years. There’s quite a history behind it. If I share it with nobody else, I don’t care.

Van Slyke Assembly, 1967

Music for the Shop Rat

William Sundwick

It was a lark. Something to do during college term break. I had just returned from a “career-service” internship experience in Washington, D.C. And, frankly, I was curious about what an auto assembly line was like. It was the defining social construct of my hometown -- Flint, Michigan -- but I had never seen one in action.

So, I signed up for a tour of the plant located directly across the street from the new townhouse my parents had just bought. It was their last address before leaving Flint forever, for Florida retirement. Odd, you may think, that this new townhouse development was built across the street from one of Flint’s premier General Motors manufacturing facilities, but there was a tall board-on-board fence separating it from the traffic noise of Van Slyke Road, blocking the view of the acres of factory occupying the equivalent of 20 adjacent city blocks.

In 1967 Flint was reaching peak “civilization,” still proud of its GM connections (indeed, General Motors was founded there in 1908). To see the lifeblood of my city close-up seemed an obligation, since I had already been talking up Flint with college friends in Kalamazoo.

I found myself overwhelmed by what I saw – and heard – inside, during the two-hour tour. It was a choreographed musical!

I had not been brought up with popular music. All music heard in my parents’ house was classical, especially violin and string orchestra. That was my father’s requirement. He was a failed violinist in his youth. Now he was an engineer, the head of process engineering at another GM plant in town.

It was perhaps that violinist’s artistic sensibility, combined with the process engineer’s dedication to efficient production methods, that led me to my profound aesthetic awakening after visiting that mammoth industrial facility.

I attribute my lifelong love of hard blues/rock music to the experience. Truly, this is the only style of music that fits the gritty, monotonous, obsessive life of the shop rat. I do not mean to imply that all assembly line workers loved that music – but, to me, the genre perfectly captures the spirit of the line. And, when done well, provides the seeds of an uplifting release from the grim drudgery of any job.

Those brightly colored Chevrolet Impalas marched down the assembly line in precisely timed formation, randomly distributed body styles and trims, based on an unseen production manifest. The shop rats’ responsibility was to put those cars together, unceasingly over an eight-hour shift, five days a week, each having a strictly defined small piece of the job.

And with the crashing noise of the stamping presses precisely timed, there was an unmistakable rhythm to the spectacle. Watching hundreds of workers below us, from an observation deck, all doing their repetitive ballet – it was real artistry. And, incredibly taxing, physically and mentally. When their shift was over, the urge to escape would be overpowering. At home, or at a local bar, as Ben Hamper relates in his seminal memoir of life on the assembly line, Rivethead. (Hamper worked in the same Van Slyke assembly plant in the ‘70s and ‘80s, then part of GM’s Truck and Bus Division). To a shop rat, music was likely an important part of that escape. As it was for me – but, the release I sought was from a different sort of stress.

Hamper had a dysfunctional psychological sense of destiny – he was a third generation Flint (and GM) shop rat, literally following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. I was first generation Flint and would never rely on an hourly rate factory job for income. I think I knew this, rationally, even in 1967. Yet, that tour of the Van Slyke plant showed me a world that I must have felt inside me. At each job station along the line, the task was to rivet, weld, or lift, one part of the overall vehicle, and only that one part. I feared It was the same as most jobs in life.

I had resolved at this point in my college career to be a history major, with English minor. Teaching was my chosen field – but I was uncertain whether I could advance directly to grad school. Draft deferments did not extend to graduate work. It was 1967.

Would I ever be able to do more? How much responsibility could I really handle?

So, I felt a great deal of stress about my future. It was something I could not control. But I had music. Not the classical music of my childhood, but angry, revolutionary music. The music of marginalized people who had no control over their futures. People like Ben Hamper, the “Rivethead.”

I had already collected some LPs since I had been at Kalamazoo College. Mostly Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and the like. My favorite album at the time was Aftermath by the Stones. It seemed dark to me. Paint It Black was perhaps my favorite song. But, on the album, not featured as a single, no air play, was another: Going Home. This song may have captured the beat of the assembly line better than any I knew then.

The cars are no longer made in Flint. Music was never made there. Detroit, on the other hand, did produce music! As far back as the 1940s, long before Motown, John Lee Hooker landed in that city during the Great Migration from Mississippi. He personified “Detroit Blues,” invented while he worked in a Ford plant. Music never left Detroit. Iggy Pop came from nearby Ann Arbor in the 1960s, same era as MC5.  Even as late as the 1990s, Detroit was still producing artists like Jack White. I didn’t know these musicians in 1967, but there were the Stones (and other early “British Blues”), seemingly representing a similar industrial culture.

Throughout my life, I’ve been compelled to return to the anxiety, and bitterness, of the 19-year-old on that plant tour. It was important. More music, along the same lines as the styles I liked then, has come into my life since, but with modifications and improvements, much like cars have changed and improved over a similar time span.

Those Chevy Impalas, and the trucks that Ben Hamper assembled, were for the people. The music was as well. Workers were drawn to the assembly line because of good pay and benefits. Rock musicians were drawn to their calling because of its demand pricing. Fewer opportunities were available to either than to the privileged who could get an education and move away from places like Flint. Here there were majestic and powerful machines, like those rock drum riffs. The leitmotiv of amplified lead guitar was like the “dumpster hockey” Hamper and his colleagues wasted time playing when the line slowed or stopped. The angry lyrics of the front man were the profanity-laced banter of the shop rats.

The psychic need to escape, without the means. Hamper ultimately departed the shop only due to disability – he went directly from the rivet line at Van Slyke to a mental outpatient facility, permanently laid off, found shooting hoops in a cameo in Michael Moore’s film, “Roger and Me.”

I never experienced that sort of release with music, but in some ways, when listening to my iTunes playlists while working out at my gym, I feel like the Rivethead at that mental health clinic. Perhaps there never was an escape from Flint?

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?

Boogie Til You Drop

John Lee Hooker and Roots Music

William Sundwick

Nobody knows for sure when or where he was born. We know it was somewhere near Clarksdale, Mississippi, probably in 1917, but it could have been 1912, or even 1920. Poor, illiterate, black sharecropper births often didn’t get recorded with birth certificates. But, we do know when and where John Lee Hooker died: peacefully in his sleep, in his 80s, on June 21, 2001 in Los Altos, California. By then, he had spent nearly sixty years performing and recording countless original blues songs based on a primitive, minimalist boogie beat, varying only in tempo and minor rearrangement of chords and lyrics. He also impressed audiences with traditional 12-bar blues renditions, featuring simple, skillful guitar riffs and a deep, rugged Mississippi hill country voice.

He apparently learned guitar from his stepfather, Will Moore, a Mississippi blues performer in the twenties. And, perhaps more significantly, he learned from his sister’s boyfriend, also a blues musician, who gave him his first guitar. All this occurred in childhood – he left his rural Mississippi home at 14.

He journeyed first to Memphis, working as an usher at the Daisy Theater on Beale Street. It’s likely that here he got the idea performing blues might just be a living. He hadn’t launched his career yet, however, when he migrated to Cincinnati, then Detroit, in the 1930s. In Detroit, he began working at Ford, doing janitorial service during WWII.

By now in his mid-twenties, he had not recorded a single song. But he did perform in local Detroit clubs as an amateur. He was “discovered” in Detroit by a record store owner who introduced him to music producer Bernard Besman, who recorded him, then leased the recordings to an LA-based record label, Modern Records. His first song, “Boogie Chillen,” was released on the Modern label in 1948. It was not a complicated song, and featured the same primitive, repetitive beat that would become Hooker’s trademark. It was perhaps the first commercial success for something calling itself “boogie” played on a guitar – previous “boogie woogie” music was always associated with piano.

The audience for his kind of music was still limited in the late ‘40s. Very little radio promotion was available. Few stations (primarily in cities with large African American populations) ever played it. Hooker used a device in this first song, and many that followed, known as “talking blues.” The form had been in existence since the 1920s in folk, or “roots,” music from the South. It may not have been black, originally, but was certainly country. The vocals would be spoken, not sung, with attention given to the beat and the sound of the lyrics, not the notes. A mixture of spoken word and singing characterized much of “the Hook’s” work. Always, he relied on the force of the repetitive beat, his choice of words, and inflection as he spoke, sang, or chanted them. Overall, they create a feeling of dynamic, primitive energy.

Two hits in the 1950s began to establish Hooker’s reputation nationally, at least in the Rhythm and Blues community. They were “I’m in the Mood” (1951) and “Dimples” (1956). There was still a wall between R&B music (primarily a black audience) and emerging Rock-and-Roll. Hooker was clearly on the R&B side of the wall. Yet, these two songs have contributed single lines to many rock, especially “roots rock” lyrics – from I’m in the Mood, we’ve gotten “the night time is the right time” and from Dimples has come “I’ve got my eyes on you”  -- e.g., Robert Plant’s 1990 “Hurting Kind (I’ve Got My Eyes on You).”

In the early sixties, Hooker travelled to Great Britain, where he seems to have influenced  some rising British blues artists, soon to emerge as worldwide sensations – like Keith Richards. This seemed to build confidence in the now middle-aged Hooker, as he saw his appeal spread to a much wider audience. More hits were forthcoming, “Boom Boom” in 1962 and “One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer” in 1966. With the star power of the British invasion on his side (not just the Rolling Stones, but the Animals and Yardbirds), many “roots rock” bands were suddenly eager to claim inspiration from Hooker. George Thorogood made considerable alterations to One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer in the ‘70s, mashing it up with another Hooker song, “House Rent Blues” – while still giving John Lee Hooker full credit, because that sold records for Thorogood and his band, The Destroyers.

When the big budget Hollywood film The Blues Brothers was released in 1980, Hooker played himself, performing “Boom Boom.” Indeed, he was just reaching the peak of his career – which lasted throughout his seventies! And, he was now immersed in California, and Hollywood culture. 

Bonnie Raitt recorded a duet with him in 1989’s version of “I’m in the Mood” on his The Healer album, winning a Grammy for them both.  He “changed the way I thought” about men in their 70s and 80s, she said. By the mid-1990s, Hooker announced he was scaling back his live performances, yet on the last Saturday night before he died, he performed at a sold-out concert in the Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa, CA.

While that simple, minimalist boogie style of blues is “The Hook’s” trademark, and is easily identifiable in all his hits, he did write many softer, sadder blues tunes during his career. Two of my favorites are 1960’s “I Hate the Day I Was Born” and “Feel So Bad” from 1969. These two songs are traditional delta blues, and leave an impression of a man not only down on his luck, but clearly morose. They both feature an almost funereal cadence. “I Hate the Day I Was Born” seems to have a biblical source (Jeremiah 20:14), and alludes to a classic blues symbol of being “born under a bad sign” (see: song of same name recorded for Albert King in 1967, then redone by Cream in 1968). “Feel So Bad” explores childhood trauma, possibly autobiographical -- John Lee, the youngest of 11 children, was reputed never to have seen his mother after leaving home at age 14. These songs express real emotional depth, it seems to me.

Another favorite of mine is “Shake It Baby” (1962).  Though it falls into the standard John Lee Hooker boogie genre, it still displays an unusually energetic libido! It reminds me of my own youth, and songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Going Home” (1966) -- or, as recently as 2010, Jack White and Dead Weather doing “Blue Blood Blues.”

Jack White has recently become interested in roots music, and participated in the American Epic documentary series on PBS. He and filmmakers, determined to recapture delta blues and hillbilly music, fabricated their own wax-grinding lathe to record without electricity, the same methods used in the rural South in the 1920s and 1930s. John Lee Hooker, on the other hand, became an icon of roots music a generation ago at the cost of leaving his own roots and adopting “Hollywood” as home. Fortunately, he kept his music genuine by forcing his producers to work on his terms, and inspiring an audience, both via recordings and live performance, who were hungry for those lost roots.

It seems to have been a strategy that paid off. Even contemporary pop rock bands like Queens of the Stone Age have recently released clearly identifiable boogie beats in their hit songs – check out the bass line in QOTSA’s “The Way You Used to Do” (2017).