Vol. 01 No. 01

Roots, Rock ‘n Blues News

Volume 1, Number 1

Welcome to the premier issue of Roots, Rock ‘n Blues News, the newsletter for fans and players of blues and derivative music. We will be publishing this newsletter approximately weekly and bringing you our views on musical subjects that we deem appropriate or at least important enough to write about. We’ll have reviews of CDs new and old, popular and obscure, and bring you news about the musicians playing our favorite music. There will be resources for those of you who play and those who want to play and those who are happy just to listen. So, again, welcome, enjoy, and let’s hear from you!

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…but is it The Blues?
Human beings love to label things and put them into categories. Even the most disorganized among us spend a good deal of our energy categorizing things so that our personal universe makes sense. Music is a great example. We meet a musician and immediately want to put them into a genre, hopefully one we actually like.”So, you’re a musician. What kind of music do you play?”

Implying, of course, that an answer we’re not ready for means it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll dig your stuff. If we happen to like blues and you say “I play fusion”, we’re going to grin weakly and say, “Uh…cool. So, what instrument do you play?” hoping against hope that it’s some axe we have a clue about, like guitar or bass or drums or even keyboards.

Assuming we know what fusion is, we might be able to carry on a semi-intelligent conversation, but if fusion doesn’t happen to be on our list of approved genres, the conversation probably isn’t going anywhere. If we happen to be open-minded and are interested in learning more about fusion things are a bit more hopeful. In any case, if this scenario sounds familiar to you, you may be narrowing your horizons. The point is that we have all these labels that have been invented to categorize different kinds of music and we want to put music and musicians into those categories in order to save time actually listening to the music and appreciating it for its own sake.

It really freaks people out when musicians refuse to follow all the rules that define a particular genre. When that happens, we start inventing new labels, like folk-rock, or blues-rock, or rockin’ blues, or smooth jazz. As opposed to what: rough jazz? Anyway, we end up with dozens of different subcategories of virtually any musical genre because those crazy musicians just refuse to stick to the rules.

In the case of blues we get: country blues, delta blues, pre-war blues, Chicago blues, West Coast blues, and on and on. What’s interesting is that most people pick one of those categories and promote it to the status of “The Blues.” In their universe, it might be Chicago blues from the Chess era. So, anything that sounds like Little Walter or Muddy Waters is “The Blues”. Everything else is designated with a sub-category to indicate that it’s not really “The Blues”, but some lesser form thereof.

I suppose all this labeling and classifying helps when you’re trying to tell somebody else what type of music you’re listening to that you want them to check out. The problem with that is that it creates expectations in the mind of the person you’re talking to. Rather than approaching with an open mind the new artist you’ve discovered, your friend now expects the music to fall into some set of guidelines that they’ve assigned to whatever category you specified. Everybody has their own definition of “The Blues”, or “Real Hard Rock” or whatever. No two people have exactly the same perception of any genre even when they’re using the same label. There has to be a certain commonality of “rules” so that if we tell somebody there’s a new blues artist they need to hear, they at least have a clue what the music will be like, but they’ll immediately place their own qualifiers on it based on their definition of the applied label and further qualify it once they’ve heard it.

Okay, we know there are lots of labels and everybody has their own unique interpretation of what the labels mean. So what? Well, I think we do ourselves a disservice by being too attached to the labels and trying to shoehorn music into rigid categories. It amazes me how people dismiss music that doesn’t fit into the rules they’ve defined for themselves. I know people who will not listen to entire categories of music because it’s not “their” music. Still others blow it off as “Hey, it’s good stuff, but it’s not The Blues”, or whatever their particular favorite is.

Now, I’ll be the first to agree that there are genres where it would be so painful to sift through the crap to find the few gems that exist within them that it’s not worth my effort. That’s my personal opinion, but it’s based on listening to at least some of it to determine that it’s not for me. I realize there’s a lot of music out there and nobody has the time to listen to it all, so we have to use some kind of classification system just to make it all manageable. We all have preferences, and that’s cool, too. Preferences are what make the world go around and there’s room for everybody’s preferences.

Maybe I’m whacked, but I’ll get on a jag with a particular artist or genre of music and listen to as much of it as I can find for a while. I have my favorites, of course, but there are always new favorites out there to be found. If I hear something I like in a genre I’m not very familiar with, I’ll start collecting CDs in that genre until it all starts to sound the same. When that happens, I’ll go back to something else for a while, or if I hear something new that I like, I’ll get into that for a while. It’s all about discovering the diamonds that are out there among the zircons, knowing that I’ll never get to listen to it all, but that’s okay. There’s more good music out there than anyone can hear in a lifetime and the more I’m open to it, the more I find. It may not be “The Blues”, but it’s worth listening to on its own merits.

Web Site of the Week
http://www.carolmoog.com

Harmonica player Carol Moog makes her home in the Philadelphia, PA area and keeps an active gig schedule. This versatile harper performs in acoustic duos, amplified and unamplified trios and with a full band, depending on the venue. Check her out if you’re in the area, and stay tuned to her schedule for the occasional road trip.

See you next time!