Various Artists: Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey

A few weeks ago, I penned a review for this site on an album called, Exile on Blues St., an attempt to rework tracks from the epochal Rolling Stones album in a blues context. Disgusted not only with the thinly veiled crassness of the project but also with the abysmal music, I panned with all my might. The blues, I opined as I have many times before, appear to have no artistic validity today, the form having been long since bankrupted by bumbling thieves like the Stones, Cream, and Janis Joplin. The genre sits beside reggae and jazz as one that I think would be abandoned all at once if earnest white people were freed of their perceived responsibility to like any and all outpourings of African-American anguish. And since most anguished African-Americans have long since moved on to other outlets for expressing their grief and white people singing about plowing cotton is dumb, I thought that John Q. Public should finally admit what has been obvious all along — that he doesn’t actually like blues. Not now. Not ever.

It was with this taste in my mouth that I received the box set for Martin Scorsese’s The Blues: A Musical Journey, five discs of music from his seven-part series on PBS designed to outdo Ken Burns’s Jazz as the definitive documentary on a historical idiom. The episodes were a mixed bag, each coming from a different director and each taking a personal approach rather than attempting to fit into a master plan for the series. As such, there were good episodes (Clint Eastwood’s) and bad episodes (Wim Wenders’s), but more troubling than the spottiness was the creeping piety that ran throughout. The cachet attached to blues-lovers is far too powerful not to look skeptically at such loud claims of stewardship over Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf. But being a reviewer requires more than merely eyedropping the jaundice, so I took out the box set and nosed around, playing Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman”, Lead Belly’s “C.C. Rider”, Big Joe Williams’s “Baby Please Don’t Go”, Wynonie Harris’ “Good Rockin’ Tonight”, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Match Box Blues”, Furry Lewis’ “Billy Lyons & Stack-O-Lee”, Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues”, Charley Patton’s “Pony Blues”, and Son House’s “Preachin’ the Blues”. As the CD spun to a stop, I stared out the window, entirely paralyzed by what I had just heard.

I can’t think of any instances from my career as surprising, as rich, or as instantly moving as what I felt listening to that handful of tracks. In fact, I can think of very few experiences from a lifetime of listening to music that quite compare to it. What struck me the most was what came across in that first song I played, “Devil Got My Woman”. After decades of music getting progressively louder in its quest to grab attention and the dollars that go with it, James sounds not old-timey but radical, like Erik Satie after the years of accumulated grandiosity that preceded him. Next to this work, bands like Kiss, Marilyn Manson, or even the Flaming Lips seem downright embarrassing, filled to the breaking point with distractions that evaporate in the face of music as unadorned and sinewy as this. It allows its empty spaces to remain empty, sticking question marks in the brain instead of exclamation points. It sounds like the remnants of a lost society, and as the juxtaposition of today’s ersatz blues will attest, it very much is lost, and irretrievably so. What we have left are artifacts, wriggling with life perhaps, but walled off from the present with all hopes to breach that wall inevitably dashed.

The many voices in The Blues (and there are many — across the five discs, very few artists get more than a track) are ghosts. We don’t connect with them because they are like us; we are instead fascinated because they are so different. Preservationists including Scorsese himself like to say that they live on in the artists they’ve inspired like Keb’ Mo, Corey Harris, and Robert Cray, but even a casual listen to their output reveals the lie in that sentiment. The blues was a product of its particular times and places, most notably the Mississippi Delta and the South Side of Chicago. We can be thankful that the conditions there have been forever changed, but they seem to have taken with them the quintessence of their celebrated music. Muddy Waters said it best when he noted that you can’t really sing the blues unless you’ve been through some hard times, and as the box set shifts its focus from the originators to their increasingly distant descendants, it makes that verité ring with ever greater resonance. After starting off with some of the oldest and most traditional exponents of the form, The Blues and the blues seem to lose their way when the former starts including the Allman Brothers Band, Derek & the Dominoes, and Bob Dylan. Scorsese makes a defensible case by including these figures, but it risks degrading everything that has come before as mere prologue to rock rather than a viable art form in itself. That impression is buttressed by the selection of a bounty of songs made famous through rock cover versions, but in the end, it’s still inarguable that this collects an impressive hunk of some of the best American music ever recorded. Martin Scorsese is no Harry Smith either in innovation or ideological purity, but The Blues is nonetheless fabulous and makes a superb path into a past far richer than the future, one too beautiful in its mystery to let fade away.