Blues Myths And The Beatles

Elijah Wald's excellent book Escaping The Delta debunks many assumptions about the 'authentic' blues being a music form primarily produced by men in rural settings, especially in Mississippi. Such myths of authenticity deprive women such as Bessie Smith of their rightful place in the narrative, but also fail to recognize how urban blues artists continued to innovate and explore their art. In addition, Wald notes that conventional accounts omit the degree to which African-American blues audiences were familiar with popular trends and expected performers to know the hits of the day, which meant their work was always contemporary.

Such myths became toxic when white audiences and rock performers began to dominate how blues was perceived. Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, for example, had to perform in Europe to be treated as artists (as had happened to many jazz greats) and often faced pressure to shape their repertoires around the expectation that the music would reflect the rural black America of 1900-1940 rather than the urban black experience of 1955-1965. They were, in effect, obliged to play the role of living museum exhibits. These processes were partly because the blues had been "rediscovered" in the Fifties as a kind of rural black folk music rather than what it had really become: urban electrified blues. In 1966, for example, a Muddy Waters collection was entitled Real Folk Blues despite the fact its tracks were recorded for Chess several years after Waters had moved to Chicago and included such electrified numbers as "Mannish Boy" and "Walking Through The Park." 

In the same year, Waters told students at Stanford, "I had to come to you behind The Rolling Stones and The Beatles." Bo Diddley was quoted in Billboard, "We all owe a debt to The Beatles. They started playing r&b with country rhythms and changes. It had to come over from there for American kids to listen" (both quoted by Arnold Shaw, "The Rhythm and Blues Revival: No White Gloved, Black Hits", Billboard, 690816, p.S-3, 'The World Of Soul' supplement). These British groups, unlike their American folk contemporaries, did value the electric guitar in blues, but their appreciation was still tied to a stereotype of black expressiveness that opposed it to traditions of European art music. This then led to the myth that Sgt. Pepper and other concept albums were a departure from black music rather than artistically parallel to the artistic explorations of modal jazz which combined influences from non-western musical forms (most notably India, which also influenced The Beatles) with a deep blues feeling (for example, see 'India' by John Coltrane, as discussed here). 

The White Album was underappreciated for many years (relative to Revolver and Pepper) partly because its rock tracks, with heavy blues parts, were perceived wrongly as a retrograde step from the psychedelic art music of the previous year. Such misconceptions need to be discarded before the Beatles' relationship with the blues is properly appreciated in a way that does justice both to the Beatles themselves and the blues artists who influenced them.