| 9th September 2006 07:22 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Fest's first night simmers with Delta Blues
BY DAN E. WAY : The Herald-Sun
[email protected]
Sep 8, 2006 : 10:21 pm ET
DURHAM -- Blues dynamo Hubert Sumlin laid down some gritty guitar licks on a swaying, clapping, crowd at the 19th annual Bull Durham Blues Festival Friday night.
A protégé of blues pioneer Howlin' Woof, Sumlin teamed with fellow headliner Pinetop Perkins, an icon in his own right, to liven up a sometimes soggy night.
Before the show, an animated Sumlin shared a life story that was more wonderment than a blues-laden trail of tears.
"I always enjoy a show. When I was a little kid I knew what I was going to be," he said. "I have one lung. I had a heart attack. I ain't through yet. I got some things I got to do and that's music."
"A blues musician," he mused when asked how he thought of himself. "They live this stuff and they die this stuff."
As rain drenched the audience leading up to the main event, Mary Hargrove of Durham huddled under a raincap and umbrella, doing her best to keep her fish dinner dry and in the cardboard container balanced on her beat-bouncing knees.
"We've been muddy before," she said in defiance of the liquid darts bounding off the rainbow sea of umbrellas and plastic sheets cropping up all around her.
"It's a cultural experience to taste the food, see the vendors, come out and have two days of fun," said Donna Spinks of High Point, a 16-year veteran of the festival.
"It's a mini-vacation," she said -- for her and her son and daughter.
The on-stage pairing of Sumlin and Perkins was as natural as blues lyrics are universal. The Mississippi natives were born in small, neighboring cotton towns -- Sumlin in 1931 in Greenwood and Perkins in 1913 in Belzoni.
In their formative years, they were bathed in the Delta Blues, and each attained legendary stature despite playing second banana to some of the seminal masters of the genre. Sumlin's guitar is the trademark sound on the Howlin' Wolf band's recordings, and Perkins' piano was the musical motor for Muddy Waters' band.
Their innovative styles brought them acclaim and have been credited for helping to forge the offshoot of rock 'n' roll music.
Sumlin's guitar range and rifts earned him a place in Rolling Stone magazine's list of 100 greatest guitarists of all time.
Aside from Howlin' Wolf, he has played with the likes of Albert King, James Cotton, Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones, and Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Clapton, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page are among those who say Sumlin's pioneering guitar sound influenced their styles. Cream, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and The Grateful Dead are among the groups that have recorded songs Sumlin drafted.
Perkins first rose to recognition by playing with the legendary Sonny Boy Williamson on the King Biscuit Time radio program in the 1930s, but gained greater notice with his wild piano play and solos for Muddy Waters. That sound, music historians say, set the stage for boogie-woogie and rock 'n' roll.
Dippin' into the blues is not just a dose of down-home therapy for toe-tappers and booty-shakers. It's also an economic development tool.
"The Blues Festival is one of our signature festivals, meaning it has achieved national recognition," said Reyn Bowman, president of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau.
And that means tourist bucks flooding the city.
"About 50 to 60 percent of the people who come to our festivals are nonresidents," Bowman said. "About 40 to 50 percent of the people who come would not come except for the festival that day."
There's a simple explanation for that draw.
"It's unique and indigenous to Durham" and helps to shape the community's personality for visitor promotion, Bowman said. "The Piedmont Blues were pioneered in Durham as a form of music . . . Because it's pioneered here it's essentially Durham, like country music is to Nashville."
"Piedmont Blues played the way it originally occurred is a kind of upbeat, acoustic blues," he said, "more like Chicago Blues, which is very electronic.
"The blues musicians who come have a great appreciation for what that style of music has added to the genre," he said.
Being an anomaly is a good thing, and Bowman sees the blues scene as a tap root for the city.
"I don't think we've done enough yet to make that part of the community's personality year-round, and that is what we would intend to do, to encourage clubs to pick up this music," he said.
And the blues has another form of enrichment that doesn't come in cash.
"The people who organize the festival and go there are ready to embrace a biracial vision of the future based on their common love of great music," said Harry Watson, director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC. "I think it shows, first of all, that Durham is aware of its own past because the Piedmont Blues is an important part of Durham's history. Durham was the center of it."
Blues music transcends age, race and ethnic origins, he said.
Watson, a blues lover himself, cannot help but point to the irony in that unifying salve of sound.
"The blues is a music that originated in American tragedy, poverty, discrimination, suffering," he said. "But it also embodies hope and dignity and incredible vitality. And often that vitality is expressed in enormously lively sexuality."
While that saucy side of the genre has earned the blues the title of the devil's music, Watson believes it's also an extremely important part of its universal appeal.
"And so the blues, having originated in some of the worst injustice that America has produced, has blossomed into an affirmation of what can bring us together as Americans, as Southerners. It is very ironic, but it's the truth," Watson said. |
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