Does the artist really work in abject loneliness? Does the creative act as executed by painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, et al, truly require confinement and utter solitude? I am lately coming to understand that art is a way of binding our relationships more closely, rather than dividing them. I can say with certainty that the phenomenal experience of knowing that others have been moved by something that I have produced makes me feel connected to them in a unique and significant way. I've also learned that making these connections demands the sort of honesty that can burn you in any number of ways. Besides, an audience can smell a fraud from a mile away.
To my thinking, one of the worst kinds of fraud is the artist who has not done his work. For instance, any musician can play a blues song with only three chords, and one must certainly feel the blues in order to play them, but for the modern blues player today, knowing the great tradition of the blues is essential. I say this mostly as a listener: as a musician, I would not call myself a true bluesman, but I did learn quite a lot of rural blues when I first started playing the guitar, and these days I often have the privilege of performing with a good friend whom I consider a master of the form. As he has done, any aspiring blues artist should listen to the oldest gospel music he or she can find, from both black and white churches across the American South. That music is deep in the roots of the great tree, so to speak. All of the struggle, sorrow, and triumph is in it. We build upon it, grow into it, lean upon it. Then the player must study the giants, the strong-shouldered spiritual heroes - Son House, Robert Johnson, Robert Wilkins, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Skip James, Tampa Red, Pine Top Perikins, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Bessie Smith, Bessie Jones, Ma Rainey, Elizabeth Cotten, Blind Willie McTell, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Gus Cannon, Charley Patton, and dozens more... Then he or she should try and master the styles of at least three of these demigods, though he never truly will, for this is a lifetime's undertaking. In the end, all he can really hope for is that some of the richness and depth that grew from a people's daily lives of bitterness, laughter, loss, and hope will stick to him just a little bit, and that maybe just a a little bit of the heat of a Mississippi cotton field or the whine of a northbound train will come through in the playing and give it a degree of authenticity.
And if he has done all of this and reaches a point at which he can begin to write his own stuff, the blues artist might then be able to find words and tunes and riffs and rhythms that seem real and that seem as if they have always existed. Only then, as in these lines from Son House's "Death Letter"...
I walked up right close, and I said I looked down in her face
I said the good ol' gal, she got to lay here 'til the Judgment Day
Looked like there was 10, 000 people standin' round the buryin' ground
I didn't know I loved her 'til they laid her down
can there be no doubt as to the truth being spoken.
John Lee Hooker | Photo: TeamRock