'THE BLUES' BACKWARD AND FORWARD FROM SOUTHERN FIELDS AND JUKE JOINTS, THROUGH CHICAGO, LONDON AND EVEN HIP-HOP, PBS SERIES SHOWS MANY SIDES OF A MUSICAL GENRE.Byline: Sandra Barrera Music Writer Chris Thomas King For other persons named Chris King, see Chris King (disambiguation). For other persons named Thomas King, see Thomas King (disambiguation). Chris Thomas King (born October 14, 1964 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is an New Orleans Louisiana based blues musician and actor. is in the vanguard of today's blues - arguably the great-grandfather of American popular music American popular music had a profound effect on music across the world. The country has seen the rise of popular styles that have had a significant influence on global culture, including ragtime, blues, jazz, rock, R&B, doo wop, gospel, soul, funk, heavy metal, punk, disco, house, . But he doesn't just sing and play guitar. He raps over turntable scratches and slide guitar, tortured strings, pulled and hammered. And the way blues purists saw it a decade ago, that was part of his problem and the reason why he was often excluded from playing blues festivals. The sagging Fubu jeans, the turntables and other stamps of hip-hop marked him in the eyes of the often white gatekeepers at music companies and among festival promoters as a Judas, as faithless to the romantic blues ideal as Dylan was to folk music folk music: see folk song. folk music Music held to be typical of a nation or ethnic group, known to all segments of its society, and preserved usually by oral tradition. Knowledge of the history and development of folk music is largely conjectural. when he plugged in. ``That's not the image of a bluesman,'' King, 38, says. ``We have to put on that suit and put on that hat and sing that song about the shack falling down.'' Ironically, King has played such characters as an actor, beginning with Tommy Johnson
Tommy Johnson (1896 – November 1 1956) was an influential American delta blues musician who recorded in the late 1920s. (a Robert Johnson-type figure) in the Coen brothers film ``O Brother, Where Art Thou.'' His latest role is as Blind Willie Johnson
"Blind" Willie Johnson (1897-1945) was an African-American singer and guitarist whose music straddled the border between blues and spirituals. in Wim Wenders' ``The Soul of a Man.'' The film is one in a seven-part series executive produced by Martin Scorsese Noun 1. Martin Scorsese - United States filmmaker (born in 1942) Scorsese about the legacy of the blues that begins airing tonight on PBS PBS in full Public Broadcasting Service Private, nonprofit U.S. corporation of public television stations. PBS provides its member stations, which are supported by public funds and private contributions rather than by commercials, with educational, cultural, . ``Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey'' could help put the music in its proper light and dispel misconceptions still floating around. It could even spur people to want to further investigate the music during this Year of the Blues centennial. The congressional proclamation that went into effect Feb. 1 commemorates the moment when W.C. Handy, a black bandleader of a minstrel orchestra, was waiting on a train platform in Mississippi and saw a local musician playing slide guitar with a knife and singing to pass the time. Handy would later describe it in his autobiography, ``Father of the Blues,'' as ``the weirdest music I had ever heard.'' Of course, Handy isn't really the father of the blues, although he did become the first person to copyright and publish blues compositions, starting with ``Memphis Blues'' in 1912. ``Blues has been around forever, it seems,'' says Shemekia Copeland Shemekia Copeland (b Harlem, New York City, 10 April 1979) is an American blues singer. The daughter of blues guitarist and singer Johnny Copeland, she began to pursue a singing career in earnest at age 16, when her father's health began to decline; he took Shemekia on tour , the 24-year-old blues-singing powerhouse and daughter of the late, great blues guitarist Johnny ``Clyde'' Copeland. ``And it's not going anywhere. This particular genre of music has survived every other genre of music, and it's still here.'' Originating in traditional West African West Africa A region of western Africa between the Sahara Desert and the Gulf of Guinea. It was largely controlled by colonial powers until the 20th century. West African adj. & n. songs, transmogrified in the furnace of slavery to the hollers of field hands and eventually laid against a blanket of chords played on twisted, tortured strings, the blues morphed out of the sweltering swel·ter·ing adj. 1. Oppressively hot and humid; sultry. 2. Suffering from oppressive heat. swel Southern heat. As it grew, it produced mythic figures like Robert Johnson Robert Johnson may refer to:
``There's no one that's held in higher esteem or surrounded by more myth than Robert Johnson, and we like that,'' says Peter Guralnick Peter Guralnick (born December 15, 1943, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American music critic, writer on music, and historian of US American popular music, who is also active as an author and screenwriter. , a musicologist mu·si·col·o·gy n. The historical and scientific study of music. mu  si·co·log who specializes in the blues and was a contributing editor A contributing editor is a magazine job title that varies in responsibilities. Most often, a contributing editor is a freelancer who has proven ability and readership draw. on a companion book to the PBS series. ``It's the same reason why we're forever fascinated with Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio Noun 1. Joe DiMaggio - United States professional baseball player noted for his batting ability (1914-1999)DiMaggio, Joseph Paul DiMaggio in baseball. I mean, there are some great players today, maybe even greater for all I know, but there's a mythology that surrounds them that Americans enjoy.'' Like baseball, the blues is in no short supply of colorful, charismatic characters like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf Howlin' Wolf, 1910–76, African-American blues singer and composer, b. White Station, Miss., as Chester Arthur Burnett. Exposed to blues performers from childhood, he sang locally and organized his first band in West Memphis, Tenn., in 1948. , both of whom were especially attractive to white audiences. Their stories are the essence of the series executive produced by Scorsese and directed by A-list Hollywood filmmakers with documentary experience and a passion for music. In what is perhaps unintended irony, only one of the seven directors, Charles Burnett, is black. But just as the blues itself benefits - perhaps even depends - heavily now, as it did during the blues revival of the '60s, on the patronage of whites, the series is a loving paean Paean (pē`ən), Paean was an epithet for Apollo, the healer. The paean, a hymn of praise to Apollo and often to other gods, was sung as a prayer for safety or deliverance at battles and other important occasions. to an art form that is as strict in its basic structure as haiku haiku (hī`k  ), an unrhymed Japanese poem recording the essence of a moment keenly perceived, in which nature is linked to human nature. but is ever evolving. ``No one should feel like in order to listen to the blues they have to go back 50 or 60 years,'' Guralnick says. ``Great blues music is being made today as well.'' Which brings us back to King, who says he draws a line between playing a mythic blues figure on the big screen and being a blues musician in real life. ``If people expect African-American artists to perform the blues the way Leadbelly performed the blues, or perform the blues the way Blind Willie Johnson performed the blues, to me, that's like putting on blackface,'' he says. ``There's a certain setting where I love that period and that music, but I'm not going to pretend to be something I'm not, because that's really outdated.'' The whole point of Scorsese's project is to portray the blues through film as it was and continues to be. He also wants to debunk de·bunk tr.v. de·bunked, de·bunk·ing, de·bunks To expose or ridicule the falseness, sham, or exaggerated claims of: debunk a supposed miracle drug. the notion that you have to be a scholar of Americana to appreciate the blues. ``Of course, I came to the blues through rock 'n' roll rock 'n' roll: see rock music. , not through jazz or anything much more sophisticated,'' Scorsese says at the July PBS press tour from location in Montreal, where he was directing ``The Aviator,'' starring Leonardo DiCaprio Leonardo Wilhelm DiCaprio (born November 11 1974[1]) is a three-time Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe Award-winning American actor who garnered world wide fame for his role as Jack Dawson in Titanic. and Cate Blanchett Catherine Élise Blanchett (born May 14, 1969), better known as Cate Blanchett, is an Academy Award- and Golden Globe Award-winning Australian actress. She has also won various awards, most notably including two SAGs and two BAFTAs, making her one of a few actors who won all . From as early as 1950, Scorsese was drawn to the music. But it was the British invasion British Invasion Musical movement. In the mid 1960s the popularity of a number of British rock-and-roll (“beat”) groups spread rapidly to the U.S., beginning with the triumphant arrival of Liverpool's Beatles in New York in 1964 and continuing with the Rolling bands of the early '60s, Woodstock and meeting Robbie Robertson from the Band that would eventually lead Scorsese to the route that he now travels from the Mississippi juke joints back to the banks of the Niger River Niger River or Joliba or Kworra Principal river of western Africa. The third longest on the continent, it rises in Guinea near the Sierra Leone border and flows into Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea. in the documentary ``Feel Like Going Home.'' Scorsese's film and its companion pieces don't amount to the definitive history of the blues. ``It's not the tablets coming down from the mountain,'' says Alex Gibney, the series producer, in an attempt to avert comparisons to Ken Burns' ``Jazz'' series. ``The Blues'' is roughly chronological and geographical. Each filmmaker was given artistic license to tell the story the way he chose to tell it. Clint Eastwood chose the piano blues This article may contain original research or unverified claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the for details. This article has been tagged since June 2007. , and Charles Burnett explored the controversy within his own family between gospel and the blues. At the same time, the series isn't about 20th-century artifacts artifacts see specimen artifacts. , as director Marc Levin's ``Godfathers and Sons'' shows by uniting veteran Chicago blues musicians
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Mike Figgis, meanwhile, explores the merging between blues and rock on a scale far greater that what is happening with blues and hip-hop today. In his film ``Red, White & Blues,'' he follows the blues to Great Britain and back again in a documentary about the British rock invasion defined by the Rolling Stones from 1963 on. By the mid-'60s, British blues-rock had boomed thanks to bands like Cream, the Yardbirds and, later on, Led Zeppelin. Across the generations Like every generation before it, contemporary artists have been bringing the blues into the present to meet the needs of younger listeners. Today's examples include garage rock revivalist band the White Stripes, Beck and hip-hop star Common. But not all modern-day flag-bearers of the blues are hybrids. Take director Richard Pearce's ``The Road to Memphis,'' a film that documents modern-day bluesmen B.B. King, Rosco Gordon (who died shortly after the filming) and Bobby Rush. ``He could make his connection to that wider audience today with this movie,'' Pearce says of Rush. ``It's powerful - I mean, there's something about him that will never age as long as he believes. And he's out there believing, I tell you.'' Through Rush, Pearce blurs the present with the past - the way it was 50 years ago with artists like B.B. King. Filmmaker Wenders conceptualized a similar documentary when he set out to make ``The Soul of a Man'' about his all-time favorite bluesmen Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and J.B. Lenoir. But making this film wasn't going to be easy - certainly not as easy as it was shooting ``Buena Vista Social Club The Buena Vista Social Club was a members club in Havana, Cuba that held dances and musical activities, becoming a popular location for musicians to meet and play during the 1940s. ,'' one of his last documentaries. ``I had very old men who were in their 70s and 80s, but very much alive, I mean, intoxicatingly alive,'' Wenders says. ``And in 'Soul of a Man,' all my heroes were dead for 40 or 60 years already, so that was a very, very difficult and very different task.'' In fact, Wenders ended up shooting two films. The first was a standard documentary that attempted to show the connection between the Mississippi Delta and Chicago through interviews and footage of juke joints. But Wenders was dissatisfied with that one, and so he started again from scratch. This time he incorporated into the project early-20th-century hand- cranked camera technology. In essence, he had achieved making a partial silent movie using actors, with the part of Blind Willie Johnson played by Chris Thomas King. ``It's films like these that are the vital heart of 'The Blues' project, but it's important to note that the project was designed holistically,'' Gibney says. ``The idea was, you get people excited with the films and then you provide a lot of other material for them to seek out.'' It's here where the companion book, CDs, DVDs and 13-hour public radio series that KCRW-FM (89.9) is planning to air in the future come in. ``My hope would be that it really raises the profile of the blues,'' adds Gibney. ``Not only the blues as it was, but the blues as it is and continues to be.'' As King puts it, ``People still have the blues. You don't have to go back 50 years ago or 200 years ago to find inspiration,'' he says. ``We're living proof of it.'' Sandra Barrera, (818) 713-3728 sandra.barrera(at)dailynews.com Rundown of 'The Blues' in seven parts 'The Blues,'' executive produced by Martin Scorsese, premieres at 9 tonight on KCET KCET Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (Japan) KCET Kamaraj College of Engineering and Technology . The seven-part PBS series will air at that same time nightly through Oct. 4, with each two-hour film followed by a special encore performance at 12:30 a.m. KKJZ-FM (88.1) will simulcast the 9 p.m. broadcasts. FEEL LIKE GOING HOME: Martin Scorsese, left, directs the first in the seven-part PBS series by following contemporary bluesman Corey Harris on a guided tour that traces the music's origins from the Niger River to the South's cotton fields to the Mississippi Delta. Running time: 80 minutes. THE SOUL OF A MAN: Director Wim Wenders, right, explores the music and the lives of the late, great blues pioneers Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson and J.B. Lenoir in this film that revives 1920s crankshaft technology for the sake of keeping it real - even when it's not. Running time: 104 minutes. THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS: Director Richard Pearce, left, points his camera at Beale Street in this tribute to the city and its contemporary bluesmen, including B.B. King, Rosco Gordon and Bobby Rush. Running time: 88 minutes. WARMING BY THE DEVIL'S FIRE: In this personal journey back to 1950s Mississippi, director Charles Burnett, right, recalls the intergenerational in·ter·gen·er·a·tion·al adj. Being or occurring between generations: "These social-insurance programs are intergenerational and all tensions within his own family over the blues and gospel. Running time: 89 minutes. GODFATHERS AND SONS: Director Marc Levin, left, documents hip-hop pioneer Chuck D of Public Enemy as he explores Chicago blues lore with Marshall Chess, heir to the Chess Records legacy, and teams up with Muddy Waters' Electric Mud veterans for a star-studded jam that includes rappers Common and the Roots. Running time: 98 minutes. RED, WHITE & BLUES: Director Mike Figgis, right, engages Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Tom Jones in this look back at the early-'60s British rock invasion that reintroduced the blues to America. Running time: 95 minutes. PIANO BLUES: For his film, director Clint Eastwood, pictured with Jay McShann, explores his lifelong love of piano blues through rare historical footage combined with interviews and special performances by living legends Pinetop Perkins and Jay McShann, as well as Dave Brubeck and Marcia Ball. Running time: 120 minutes. More 'Blues' Here are some items related to the PBS series: MARTIN SCORSESE PRESENTS THE BLUES: A MUSICAL JOURNEY A collectors' set featuring all seven films in ``The Blues'' series. Includes special footage about the making of the films, artist and director interviews, commentaries and performances not seen in the PBS series. Individual films will be available in 2004. But the collectors' set arrives in stores Monday and is priced to sell at $139.98 for DVD DVD: see digital versatile disc. DVD in full digital video disc or digital versatile disc Type of optical disc. The DVD represents the second generation of compact-disc (CD) technology. and $119.98 for VHS (Video Home System) A half-inch, analog videocassette recorder (VCR) format introduced by JVC in 1976 to compete with Sony's Betamax, introduced a year earlier. . MARTIN SCORSESE PRESENTS THE BLUES: A MUSICAL JOURNEY This anthology of collected essays, reminiscences and archival material is the PBS series' official companion book. (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins; $27.95.) Now available in book stores. MARTIN SCORSESE PRESENTS THE BEST OF THE BLUES (Columbia/Legacy) This 21-track set's featured recordings span the last 65-plus years of the blues with performances by Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker and Janis Joplin. The collection also includes four new tracks recorded specifically for Scorsese's film series by Los Lobos, Cassandra Wilson, Bonnie Raitt and Robert Cray with Shemekia Copeland. Now available. MARTIN SCORSESE PRESENTS THE BLUES: A MUSICAL JOURNEY (Columbia/Legacy) This chronologically sequenced five-CD set begins in the 1920s with Bessie Smith singing her groundbreaking ``Crazy Blues'' and ends with a recent recording of Robert Johnson's classic ``Sweet Home Chicago'' as covered by Keb' Mo' and Corey Harris. Represented is a who's who of blues artists from throughout the last century. In stores Oct. 7. THE BLUES Seven individual soundtracks (Columbia/Legacy) to each of the ``The Blues'' films - Feel Like Going Home, The Soul of a Man, The Road to Memphis, Warming by the Devil's Fire, Godfathers and Sons, Red, White and Blues and Piano Blues - feature a mixed bag of vintage recordings, newly minted classic and live performances. With liner notes from each CD's corresponding director. Now available. THE BLUES Twelve single-artist releases (Columbia/Legacy) from Stevie Ray Vaughan Stephen "Stevie" Ray Vaughan (October 3, 1954 – August 27, 1990), born in Dallas, Texas, was an American blues guitarist. His broad appeal, combination of unbelievable speed, precision, energy, passion and emotion and constant expansion of his Blues style into Funk, Jazz, , Keb' Mo', J.B. Lenoir, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Son House, Taj Mahal, Bessie Smith, Eric Clapton, the Allman Brothers and Jimi Hendrix. In each case, the collections represent definitive career retrospectives of the artists from all eras of their careers. Now available. THE BLUES A 13-part radio series from Public Radio International that chronicles the music from its West African roots to the present day. Includes recent and archival interviews with blues legends, contemporary recording artists and historians combined with both new and historic recordings. Hosted by Keb' Mo'. Will air on KCRW-FM (89.9) at a future date. - Sandra Barrera CAPTION(S): 12 photos, 2 boxes Photo: (1 -- 2 -- cover; 2 -- color) John Lee Hoooker, above; Chuck D. left (3) Martin Scorsese directs a jam session with Keb' Mo, center and Corey Harris in ``Feel Like Going Home.'' (4) Chris Thomas King (5) Martin Scorsese (6) Wim Wenders (7) Richard Pearce (8) Charles Burnett (9) Marc Levin (10) Mike Figgis (11) Clint Eastwood, pictured with Jay McShann (12) A young B.B. King began his career singing ad jingles and working the DJ booth at WDIA WDIA Washington Dulles International Airport (airport code IAD) in Memphis, Tenn. Box: (1) Rundown of `The Blues' in seven parts (see text) (2) More `Blues' (see text) |
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