There's Blues In The News

No, as Lee Atwater fans no doubt remember, the blues can just as easily be a Republican National Committee chairman jamming away at a George Bush Inaugural celebration. The most striking thing about the new wave of blues fans is that they are, by and large, white. Partly out of nostalgia for college days spent listening to Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, middle-aged whites are flocking to events like the three-day Chicago Blues Festival, which this year drew 650,000 people. A mostly young group of whites is listening to blues programs on college radio stations out of a hunger for something more substantial than today's overproduced rock. When a small Stamford, Conn., record company called Mosaic put a T-Bone Walker collection on sale last month, at $90 a pop, it sold more than 1,000 sets in three weeks. "There's nothing really stimulating now in pop music," says concert promoter George Wein. "The audience wants something more profound, and blues has that. " Singer Deitra Farr says she was shocked last year when she was booked to perform her "lowdown dirty blues" before a group of pro-life activists in suburban Palatine, Ill. As soon as she started wailing, the "totally white" crowd, she says, "just hit the floor."

It's exactly those tales of old-fashioned jumping and jiving that set some black people's teeth on edge. In an interview in Ebony magazine last year, Bill Cosby, whose tastes run toward jazz, said that it was time "to call a moratorium on the blues." His intentions were honorable, but the statement set off an entire festival's worth of moaning and hollering. And now that we have Johnson's Complete Recordings a ban on blues seems even more appalling. "The stuff I got'll bust your brains out, baby, hoo hoo, it'll make you lose your mind," sings Johnson. And as usual the man is telling the absolute truth, squared.

PATRICIA KING IN CHICAGO VERN E. SMITH IN ATLANTA AND ANDREW MURR IN LOS ANGELES

© 1990