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Blues Cruise
On the trail of America's first roots music to see if and how it survives
By Eric Snider
Page 6 of 6
On our last afternoon, in New Orleans, we hooked up with Chris Thomas King, who is consciously trying to move the blues forward by fusing it with hip-hop. Although he says his music comes organically, his latest album is titled Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues.
We met King at his loft office in a boho enclave in uptown New Orleans. He wore baggy Sean John jeans and a white skullcap with a Nike logo, accentuating his heavy-lidded eyes. We spoke for a half-hour before I realized he had played George Clooney's black sidekick Tommy Johnson in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? King runs several companies on his own, including 21st Century Blues Records -- not by choice, but because he could never reach an accord with Sony or Warner Bros.
The multifaceted artist worked in his father's juke joint in Baton Rouge, where he learned the blues basics. He also was surrounded by hip-hop. Throughout our conversation, King evoked an air of quiet defiance. He's run into plenty of resistance trying to be a blues innovator.
"Bands that make it in rock "n' roll -- Nirvana, Metallica, Linkin Park -- they don't sound anything like Jerry Lee Lewis or Buddy Holly to me," he said. "Nobody comes to a Linkin Park show and gets mad that they didn't hear "Peggy Sue.' People come to a Chris Thomas King concert and they start screaming out "Play some Muddy Waters!' It's like, "Who is Muddy Waters and what's he have to do with a Chris Thomas King concert?'"
King says he encounters a lot of problems with promoters when he shows up to perform with a DJ as his only sideman. He's clearly suffering backlash from an infrastructure that's tethered to tradition. And yet, quite expediently, he works within that tradition. Last year, he played Blind Willie Johnson in Wim Wenders' The Soul of a Man, part of Martin Scorcese's series of blues films on PBS. As a companion piece, King recorded and released an album titled The Roots, where he re-enacted songs by Robert Johnson, Son House and Leadbelly dating as far back as the early 20th century.
Sadly, perhaps, The Roots is a far more satisfying listen than Dirty South Hip-Hop Blues, which, though not without its moments, suffers from sluggish production and the artist's marginal rapping skills. Thus far, Chris Thomas King doesn't appear to have the raw goods to be the future of the blues, but at least he's got the right idea.
So what needs to be done to ensure the music survives, and perhaps thrives, down the line? It'll take bold moves. Artists need to free the music from the shackles of purism, graft it to other styles, take risks, fail, not worry about living up to legacies. (Blues history will no doubt be well preserved.)
Maybe the next wave of blues visionaries is already out there, toiling away in bedrooms with PCs and turntables and Stratocasters and who-knows-what.
God willing.
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