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John Lee Hooker’s chugging guitar emerges from a swamp of static. An unidentified pianist interjects simple flourishes barely audible above the din of scratches and scrapes on the acetate. But then Hooker’s voice enters, emphatic and sturdy, weary yet randy as he begs a woman to relieve his sorrows. Her name is illegible (Essie Mae? Ethel May?), but the desire borders on desperation: "I want you to drive my blues away." "Rocks" is not one of Hooker’s best tunes, but it does project a certain charisma that would later come into greater focus. It’s notable for being one of the first recordings Hooker made after leaving Memphis and arriving in Detroit in the late 1940s, a tenure that would produce some of his most famous hits—including 1948's massive "Boogie Chillen". As such, "Rocks" is the anchor of a new 4xCD set from the UK label JSP Records, a fanfare that set Detroit blues rolling and tumbling for more than a decade.
Hooker was the focal point for the scene, and he gets more than a full disc of tracks—35 in all, a number that reflects both his early arrival in Detroit and his heavy studio schedule. Neil Slaven, the producer and historian who penned the liners for Garden City Blues, sounds almost apologetic about some of his cuts: "There’s none of the personality in his guitar playing that we came to expect. He’s not helped by a pedestrian pianist even more limited than he was at the time." Especially compared to Hooker’s most popular hits (many of which were recorded in Detroit yet have been omitted from this compilation), these tracks may sound rudimentary, but together they add up to more than just a prologue to his career. Each one indulges some new whim or tries out some new trick: "Boogie Woogie" moves with such an exaggerated strut that even the poor quality of the recording can’t diminish its cocky exuberance, and "Christmas Time Blues" slows a jingle-bell melody down to a crawl before disrupting the lament with loud, percussive strums.
Hooker comes across as a musician of formidable ability and charisma, so it’s little wonder that he played with most of the other artists on Garden City Blues. Eddie Kirkland was his touring partner, Eddie Burns backed him on harmonica. Obviously they all borrowed from him, just as he no doubt learned a few things from them, but they developed their own styles. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this box set is its range: Detroit obviously encouraged a great deal of variation and innovation, such that the rhythms, the structures, and even the lineups vary from one track to the next and certainly from one artist to the next. Some of these artists provide their own accompaniment, picking on a guitar while stomping on the floor, while others bring in one or two other players. Big Jack Reynolds brings in a full band for his sole track, "Going Down Slow", recorded sometime in the early 1960s, and his unidentified drummer takes off in the first measure and turns the song into a pounding proto-garage rocker.
That loose parameters of the Detroit scene also permits some entertaining oddities, especially the Richard Brothers’ "Stolen Property". Recorded in 1959, it starts as a fairly run-of-the-mill blues number, with the siblings lamenting an unfaithful woman and laying down a jumpy blues riff. Soon, however, they veer into a bit of comic playacting, with one brother playing a pistol-wielding husband and the other a movie-house usher trying to minimize the violence. "Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please, there’s a man in the inside of the theater with another man’s wife, and HE’S OUTSIDE WITH A .45!" The whole place empties out in just a few seconds, leaving the brothers to deliver the inevitable punchline. It’s an odd bit of humor—part radio play, part vaudeville routine—but nearly 60 years after its creation, it works as a winking parody of the violence so often described in blues lyrics.
Despite its subtitle, Garden City Blues doesn’t really chronicle a scene so much as it documents a transitional period in blues history. The early and mid-20th century saw millions of African-Americans leaving mostly agrarian jobs in the South for the promise of work at factories in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, and other areas thriving in the new industrial era. The Great Migration coincided with great leaps in recording technology, and blues musicians began to gravitate toward electric guitars. This was industrial music before it became a rock subgenre—before rock itself was even a genre—and the new sounds allowed players to do things in urban venues that had been unimaginable in the farmland juke joints many of them had left behind.
The shift from acoustic to electric wasn’t instantaneous, but gradual. It took years for ideas to develop and conventions to gel, and the music collected on Garden City Blues documents that period of transition, when old styles and methods mingled with new. As such, the set may not be the best point of entry for anyone unfamiliar with what led to this music and what followed it. (For primers, either of Smithsonian Folkways’ Classic Blues comps is recommended, as is the 1992 box set Chess Blues.) But there is still a great deal to discover and appreciate here: spirited performances depicting a lively city that prized jumpy grooves, idiosyncratic swagger, and dogged innovation above all else.
Fri May 27 00:00:00 GMT 2016