It sometimes seems that in the never-ending battle between blues traditionalists and modernists, only the music loses. In a corrupt variation on the feminist notion that “the personal is political,” aficionados too often argue that what moves the soul, what inspires the feet to dance, signifies more than individual taste–that it labels one not just as a connoisseur or a tin-eared philistine but as a representative of social forces that would preserve or destroy an entire musical canon. Such arguments place a terrible burden on the artists. They’re music lovers themselves, of course, trying to satisfy both economic necessity and aesthetic integrity, and they often get caught in the cross fire.
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We’ve heard it all before, of course; in the 40s and 50s, a similar fight raged between lovers of traditional jazz and those who were attuned to the small-group experiments evolving into bebop. It’s revealing that many of the former revolutionaries who championed the cause of Diz, Monk, Bud, and Bird now sound like their old antagonists as they decry fusion, world beat, and other contemporary genres.
That’s the problem with these ideological turf wars; in retrospect, they often seem to be more about the passage of time than about art. In the 60s, many blues purists refused to give most soul music a listen; today musicians like Wilson Pickett and James Brown are regularly suggested as headliners for major blues festivals. Somehow black music seems to get more “authentic” among the intelligentsia when it’s at least 20 years old.
McCray’s blues roots are most evident in his singing. His voice is throaty and full, tender on ballads and balls-out ecstatic on the up-tempo rockers he favors. It’s the tension between that voice, the tormented exuberance of his leads, and the smooth ease with which his sidemen complement him that makes his music arresting. “I Don’t Mind,” for instance, was played as meat-and-potatoes rock/R&B fusion at Buddy Guy’s, punctuated by a break that in its playful pop buoyancy sounded almost like Sgt. Pepper’s. But McCray sang it with rugged conviction, and his solo cut in over the top, rising with sputtering jets of steam and heat, pulling everything else up along with it.
So is this, then, the “future” of the blues? Well, no–the blues won’t have one future, just as it doesn’t have one past. Artists as diverse as Charlie Patton, Bessie Smith, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, and Guitar Slim are part of a varied, multifaceted heritage; both McCray and young Delta traditionalist Lonnie Pitchford are among the rising stars of contemporary blues. We can expect a similar eclecticism as the form evolves.
