The Blues In High Cotton

Cigarette change for the likes of Michael Jackson, these sales figures are significant given that most of the artists are long dead--and given who's doing the buying. just as they did for country, "the baby-boom generation came back into the market" for the blues, according to Andy McKaie, vice president for catalog development at MCA Records, whose market research that shows the average blues buyer is a 40-year-old man. That's precisely the sort of listener most easily "alienated by pop and rap," says Yves Beauvais, senior director of A&R special projects at Atlantic Records. "Blues is closer to what they grew up with in the '60s. It has that grittiness, that accessibility, that sense of fun."

For the boomers who want to get beyond Clapton or the Stones, the logical route is back to what inspired those white rockers-namely, the blues. And perhaps it's easier to listen to Howlin' Wolf at 40 than at 20 because, while the Wolf possessed the passion of a rocker, his music has the gravity and eloquence of a man who'd seen a lot of life. Blues at its best is a homemade affair that depends on the lyricism of everyday images ("I believe I'll dust my broom," "I hate to see that evening sun go down"). As a musical form it is simple but elastic, capable of embracing tenderness, humor and sometimes surreally frightening emotion ("I'm gonna shoot my woman just to see her jump and fall"). "Musical fashions come and go, but the blues never goes out of style," says Stanley Booth, author of "Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South." "It's highly charged epic poetry about adult stuff."

Bobby Robinson, one of the first black record-company owners, agrees. Now 76, be spent the '50s and '60s recording everyone from Elmore James to Gladys Knight on his Fire and Fury labels, which are selling briskly again as one of Capricorn's reissues. A man of eclectic tastes, Robinson also recorded some early rap, including Grandmaster Flash, but he has little use for modern pop and finds it logical that adults should turn to the meatier stuff of the blues. "The blues came out of slavery when blacks were inhumanly treated. Whenever they got together, they would sing. Their song was a combination of hope and despair and longing and suffering. That's where it came from, and it will never really go away."

Musicologist Lomax, who along with his father, John, probably did more than anyone to educate people about the blues, takes it a step further. In his new memoir he writes, "Although this has been called the age of anxiety, it might better be termed the century of the blues...A hundred years ago only blacks in the Deep South were seized by the blues. Now the whole world begins to know them."

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