Revolutions happen from the bottom up. Maybe before you can truly hope to mobilise the masses and change a regime, you first have to hit rock bottom. Certainly, blues guitarist Stephen Dale Petit, who is at the forefront of the “New Blues Revolution”, has known some pretty lean times since leaving California, equipped only with a guitar and a love of British music.
“After hitting the holy grail, being offered the big deal, recording an album and touring, I hit a dead end, musically and personally.” For this guitar player, it might all have ended in a drink and drugs despond, were it not for his old friend the blues.
“I knew that BB King, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson had all played on street corners for tips, so when London Underground offered licensed busking sites, I seduced myself with the romance and took one. Within two weeks, I was as happy as a pig in shit.”
With the money he earned Dale Petit, with the help of “the blues community” he had discovered in London, recorded “Guitararama”, a “new blues” classic. In order to create something “new”, Dale Petit and others like him first had to go back to the beginning, to rediscover what drove the great British blues train of the 1960s. “Then acoustic blues was real, electric blues was fake. It was essential to record and preserve the music of dirt-poor black bluesmen, and white Americans playing Appalachian music – because the moment these musicians hit the city, the music became corrupted. Early blues music was uncorrupted. It sprang out of the earth.”
Dale Petit concedes that the new blues really represents a third or even fourth coming. But then, as now, there remains a line that blues music mustn’t cross. Listening to the current crop of new blues, it’s clear that the music takes into account every musical development. It makes no sense to pretend that punk never happened, or that rap never happened. “This is 2011, and blues can and should take acknowledge modern recording methods.”
For Dale Petit, this meant he was able to include a recently discovered drum track recorded by his late brother on new CD The Crave. “Hendrix used a fuzz-box yet no one would say he wasn’t an authentic blues musician. Blues is like a well that you can return to at any point.”
In order to create authenticity, Dale Petit says you first have to detoxify yourself – break free of the dense over-production we’re used to hearing.
Rolling Stones’ producer Chris Kimsey agrees. “Blues musicians respect what’s gone before. It’s not so much revolution as evolution. Every generation refers back to the history of the blues and puts their own spin on it. I believe blues music has always had the power to evolve and adapt with the times. What we’re seeing now is people falling in love with the music all over again.”
That’s certainly born out by the success of new-blues band Saint Jude, currently on a sold-out tour of Europe. Kimsey, along with many other high-profile musicians was so impressed with the elemental sound of Saint Jude, fronted by English singer Lynne Jackaman, that he flew the band to Kentucky to record debut album Diary of a Soul Fiend.
With so much great new blues originating in London, Dale Petit is excited by the idea of cross-pollenisation – of working with other blues musicians based in Britain. “I think further collaboration is just around the corner. We can create a talking shop, exchange ideas’ and he is not averse to the idea of a shared tour, perhaps promoted along similar lines to the legendary Stiff records tour of the 1980s where the label showcased its entire stable of performers on the road.
For this not to explode in egos “you would need a revolving headline – a different act headlining on subsequent nights. Obviously I want to do well personally, but I also want to see blues music become part of the discourse of mainstream pop culture in Britain. When I began, I was literally and figuratively underground. There is definitely a greater openness to blues music now than there was five years ago. To market a venue as blues orientated is now seen as cool.”
Dale Petit talks of start-up labels run by aficionados, not bean counters with a tin ear, and cites Sun Records, Atlantic and Motown as examples of what can happen when music is created organically, from the bottom up, with talent as a starting point, and is dismissive of Simon Cowell’s “finishing school where people are marched from obscurity to success at the drop of the hat without any concern for substance”.
He believes the time is again ripe for small independent labels to make hay. He also believes passionately that musicians be rewarded fairly for their talent and pays union rates for all his musicians. Another passion was saving London’s legendary 100 Club, the bricks-and-mortar embodiment of British blues, from closure.
He organised a benefit gig featuring many of the top blues musicians in the country, including octogenarian Chris Barber, former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor and current Stone Ronnie Wood, who coincidentally last appeared at the 100 Club jamming with Saint Jude – an experience new-blues pin-up Jackaman describes as “exciting and surreal. And then you remember that with Ronnie it’s always 100 per cent about the music.”
Chris Barber was responsible for bringing Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe to Britain for the first time, and listening to a new generation of blues folk talk, you understand that this is really what the blues is all about: bringing fresh riffs and an age-old story to a wider audience. It is also about awarding workers “their equal share in a culture of exploitation”.
Politics and blues have been bedfellows since Jim Crow. That’s not to say that blues wasn’t also good-time Juke-joint music. In fact watching Lynne Jackaman perform on stage today you can feel a connection that stretches back to early American blues singers like Hattie Hart, who sang about sex, love and voodoo, and Lucille Bogan, who performed her highly sexualised blues in some of the rowdiest Juke joints of the 1920s, when sharecroppers were encouraged by plantation owners to take advantage of unrealistic credit, thus ensuring they would remain in debt until next years harvest.
“To some extent, we are all still slaves on a plantation”, said Dale Petit. Certain lyrical themes that exist in blues music are as pertinent today as ever. So too is the almost physical relationship that has always existed between blues musicians and their audience. “Bluesmen know better than anyone that a live band is nothing without the audience”, says Jackaman.
That’s something that MP Mike Weatherley experienced while in the crowd at a recent Saint Jude gig, and perhaps on this occasion the last word really should go to a politician. “It felt as though the venue was at one. There was no separation between Lynne, her band and her audience, and that’s why we still have – and still need – the blues.”
