It’s sometimes forgotten that there’s a strong link between the blues, white folk music, and country and western. In the first half of the 20th century, different musical and cultural traditions coexisted uneasily throughout the south and intertwined in complex ways. The black plantation musician of the 1920s led a dual life. He played blues and contemporary dance numbers for black house parties and juke joints, but was also often called upon to perform at white functions. For these he’d modify his repertoire considerably to include pop songs, vaudeville-style novelty numbers, and the folk-based ballads and dance tunes that eventually gave birth to bluegrass and western swing, important precursors to modern country-and-western music.
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But while it’s fashionable these days to acknowledge the bluesy roots of rock, no one has offered a more in-depth understanding of the nature of this musical relationship. The current back-to-the-roots movement in country and western has seen artists like Ricky Skaggs returning to the clear harmonies and acoustic string virtuosity of the old days, but to date there’s been little attempt to include traditional black musicians in this revival.
Multi-instrumentalist Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown would be a prime candidate for inclusion in any multiracial blues/C & W roots band. In Texas, where Brown grew up, the cross-pollination between black and white styles was especially fertile, and he apparently absorbed it all. He began his career, like so many other Texas bluesmen, under the sophisticated blues influence of guitarist T-Bone Walker, but he soon branched out to include in his repertoire every possible influence. In the early 40s, he toured the midwest with a musical revue known as William Benbow’s Brown Skin Models, and his early credits also include stints (often as a drummer) with various Texas-based “territory” bands of the mid-40s–jazz and jazz-related bands that toured regularly–as well as the usual blues and R & B gigs in clubs in San Antonio and Houston.
Once Brown took over, he upped the energy level considerably. He began with a sparse and tasty guitar solo that had his characteristic fluidity and underlying melodic suppleness. The debt to T-Bone Walker was obvious, even though Brown occasionally gave his delivery a harshness that Walker didn’t usually employ. He’s obviously rehearsed the heck out of his sidemen; they riffed behind him with unerring precision, sometimes joining him chord for chord and then settling down into a smooth, vamping groove as he laid his shimmering leads over their accompaniment. His voice, never the strongest in blues, has lost some of its youthful grit, but its slightly muted timbre is appropriate to the sophistication of his music.
By then the blues had been almost entirely forsaken. Although a few people left muttering, not many in the audience appeared to care; Brown seems to attract a crowd that appreciates eclecticism. He charged on with the war-horse “Battle of New Orleans” and a straight-ahead C & W weeper called “Dark End of the Hallway.” His fiddle wails and moans on “Hallway” were imbued with a vintage country pathos, and he sang with appropriately bathetic grit. Finally, Brown and the band broke into a no-nonsense western-swing instrumental, embellished with some Cajun-style fiddle sawing toward the end but a lot closer to the Texas tradition in which Brown came up.
A master showman like Brown could combine entertainment and some much-needed musical education. Instead, he opts to showcase his varied talents in apparently random exhibits, with little apparent continuity between them. The result is like gumbo cooked by committee: savory ingredients, plenty of spice, and lots of heat, but vaguely unsatisfying in the final mix.
