An Encore Presentation-“Searching For The American Songbook” With New Introductions By Allan Jackson-Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind

Allan Jackson Introduction

I have been around the publishing, editing, writing business a long time so I know when the dime drops it can drop for thee. Know first-hand having been the subject of a vote of no confidence by the younger writers at this publication aided and abetted by my long-time hometown high school friend Sam Lowell who cast the deciding vote for my ouster based on his notion that “the torch had to be passed.”  Naturally I was pissed off although maybe in the end Sam was half-right to do what he did. In any case that is politics in this cutthroat business and it comes with the territory. After the purge and my exile Sam sent out an olive branch to me in what he too called my “exile” and got me back here to do a plum job doing the Encore Introductions to the very successful and sweated out The Roots Are the Toots rock and roll series which I fathered and which I claim was the best job of editing, cajoling, whipping, nagging, etc. I ever did in my long career.

That assignment though whetted my appetite to do more encore introductions (although definitely not looking to get back the site manager’s job which fell to Greg Green whom I actually brought in to do the day to day operation which I was heartily sick of and who wound up with the whole ball of wax) and I was fortunate enough to get Sam, now head of the Editorial Board put in place after my exile to ensure that there would not be a return to “one man” rule, to get me an assignment doing the encore intros for the Sam and Ralph Stories about the improbable life-long friendship and political activism of two very different working-class guys who met on the “battlefields” of the struggle against the Vietnam War.

 Then, apparently, I pressed my luck when I asked to do the encore presentations for the Film Noir series which really was my baby despite the fact that Sam Lowell did all the heavy lifting and Zack James most of the best of the writings. I tussled with both Sam and Greg over this to no avail. Sam for obvious reasons wanted to do what he considered his baby and Greg because I don’t think he though it was a good idea for me to be continuing to work here even as a contributing editor. I proved to be wrong and I should have slapped my hand to my head when I thought about it in this damn cutthroat business. Sam pulled rank, pulled his chair of the Ed Board card and Greg fell down and payed homage to his request. As the next best thing in the universe today I got this highly regarded assignment which Si Lannon was supposed to do but begged off of having been ill for a while and passed off to me.

Of course Searching for the American Songbook, the idea behind it anyway was, is very far from the devotion that we of the Generation of ’68, those who came of age in the mid-1950s paid to rock and roll, now called the classic age of rock and roll, the age begat by Elvis. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and a ton of other talent that got us on our dancing feet. Frankly, as Sam mentioned in one of his introductions, we were rebelling, naturally rebelling looking back on the times, against our parents’ slogging through the Great Depression and World War II music from the likes of Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters heard wafting (Sam’s forever-etched in the brain word) through the early 1950s house on the family radio). Having now gone through a couple of generations of changes in musical taste, guess what, those latter generations have up and rebelled against our “old fogie” music. What age and experience has taught though is that the mystical mythical American Songbook is a very big tent, has plenty for everyone. Even that music from our parents’ generation that sounded so “square” has made a big “comeback” even if the emotional roller-coaster for a lot of us who used that musical uprising as a big step toward our own understandings of the world have never quite calmed down, the battle of the generations never quite settled at anything but an “armed truce.” (Truth to tell the passing on of that parental generation has left many of us with things that now can never be resolved.)          

Which brings us to the idea behind the idea. This series for the most part was Bart Webber’s “baby” since he was the first guy to “break-out” of the classic rock and roll music we lived and died for in the 1970s. No, that is not true, not true as many things are not true in dealing with events and personalities of guys from the old neighborhood, the old Acre section of North Adamsville. The driving force toward the big tent look at the American Songbook was done by one Peter Paul Markin, forever known as the Scribe, who was the first guy out of the blocks to make the connection between ancient blues and the roots of rock and roll. Was the first guy who caught the whiff of that “folk minute” from the early 1960s and dragged some of us in his wake. All Bart did was expand of those understandings to visit jazz, Cajun music, Zydeco, be-bop, and a host of other musical genre including those World War II pop hits that used to drive us crazy. Two things you need to know going forward-the sketches will be very eclectic as the big tent idea implies and the reason that Bart Webber was tagged with this assignment originally was the still bitter fact that the Scribe had given up the ghost long ago murdered through his own hubris and delusions down in Mexico on a busted drug deal in the mid-1970s. A big fall from grace, a very big fall which we still mourn today.

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From The Pen Of Bart Webber   

Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight Creep (the capitals no accident since we always reverently used that term once we had heard in one of his songs) in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk.

So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweated (not perspired) profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come. Some nights they were on fire and blew that big note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white note, I swear, blew out to the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at when he was not in his prime.         

The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating the father we never knew Son House for showing up drunk). Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.

Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Robert Johnson-spooked Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.  

They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them sit here not there, walk here but not there, drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their own and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade whiskey (or so he called it).

So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room to the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).

Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, pretty good right.