Recently, WNYC’s great music show Soundcheck held a contest to see who could do the best version of the 100 year old song “Yellow Dog Blues” by WC Handy.
Marc Weidenbaum had the members of the Disquiet Junto enter the contest en masse. I did my track, put it on SoundCloud, and promptly forgot all about it.
https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/green-dog-disquiet0125-junto360blues
A month later, I was surprised and delighted to learn from Marc’s blog that the contest winner was Junto stalwart Westy Reflector.
Even better, Studio 360 did a segment on the contest, and they gave a shoutout to my entry. One of the judges was Chocolate Genius. I assumed from his name that he’s a rapper, and was wondering why he was judging a blues contest, but no, it turns out that he’s an ace blues singer. I had heard his music under a particularly critical scene on Breaking Bad.
Chocolate Genius said that my entry sounded like “the soundtrack to a really bad video game.” He meant that the game would be bad, not that my track was; still, not quite the vibe I was after. But he did appreciate the James Brown samples.
The various NPR people brought up how an open-source music-making contest like this is well-suited to the open-source nature of the blues generally. There’s an appealing resonance between all those MIDI files floating around the internet and the blues licks floating around the meme pool. If you believe that originality is a virtue in music, the blues will quickly undermine that notion for you. The concept of authorship in blues is almost totally meaningless. Here’s an excerpt of Jonathan Lethem’s indispensable essay The Ecstasy Of Influence:
In 1941, on his front porch, Muddy Waters recorded a song for the folklorist Alan Lomax. After singing the song, which he told Lomax was entitled “Country Blues,” Waters described how he came to write it. “I made it on about the eighth of October ’38,” Waters said. “I was fixin’ a puncture on a car. I had been mistreated by a girl. I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind and it come to me just like that and I started singing.” Then Lomax, who knew of the Robert Johnson recording called “Walkin’ Blues,” asked Waters if there were any other songs that used the same tune. “There’s been some blues played like that,” Waters replied. “This song comes from the cotton field and a boy once put a record out — Robert Johnson. He put it out as named ‘Walkin’ Blues.’ I heard the tune before I heard it on the record. I learned it from Son House.” In nearly one breath, Waters offers five accounts: his own active authorship: he “made it” on a specific date. Then the “passive” explanation: “it come to me just like that.” After Lomax raises the question of influence, Waters, without shame, misgivings, or trepidation, says that he heard a version by Johnson, but that his mentor, Son House, taught it to him. In the middle of that complex genealogy, Waters declares that “this song comes from the cotton field.”
Blues is defined by a corpus of characteristic riffs, rhythms and motifs. It’s difficult to be original in the blues context, and not particularly desirable. You could certainly try to write a blues song that makes no reference to any existing blues song, but then it wouldn’t sound like blues anymore. The point is to take the cliches and put your own interpretive spin on them, not to break away from the cliches.
The thing is, the blues is not actually that different from any other kind of music. Whether you’re talking about baroque classical, death metal, bluegrass or gamelan, there’s always a bounded set of stylistic conventions. All of us who make music are floating in the same memepool. But just because we have finite raw materials to work from, doesn’t mean that we can’t all express ourselves powerfully. The Disquiet Junto proves week after week that you can give people the same narrow instruction set and source material and the results will still be wildly individual and varied. Same goes for the Studio 360 contest. Constraints really do seem to bring out the best in musicians.