Well, sort of. Problem is, most of the folk who did play the blues are either dead, so old they can’t play anymore or so rich it doesn’t sound right. Which is where hip hop comes from. Some guy trying to play the blues when he’s got eight houses and a car worth more than Buckingham Palace doesn’t really cut it, in the conviction stakes.
On the other hand, as all of those old guys and gals were so fond of saying, to play the blues isn’t a style and to play the blues isn’t a technique. It’s a feeling. If you want to play the blues you’ve got to have the blues. Which is a kind of joyful mixture of hope and despair.
Right?
Well, again: sort of. You can play the blues without ever having felt a note of despair; and you can play the blues without having spent a day broke or hungry in your life. Difference is, whether, when you play the blues like that, you or anyone else feels it. When you play the blues in a penthouse, even if you play it note for note like Nina Simone or Robert Johnson, does it feel like the blues? When you play the blues for a hobby, does it sound like the blues? And, above all, when you play the blues like that – if you play the blues like that – does it matter?
Of course it doesn’t. Not really. When you play the blues you play the blues. Because you want to play the blues, for whatever reason you have. No, a white man with a decent job in a big city is not going to have the background necessary to play the blues like Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. But then a white man with a decent job in a big city probably doesn’t want to have that background. He just wants to play the blues because he likes it. Because it sounds nice. And what’s wrong with that? After all, a white man trying to play the blues in modern London, say, is no different from a normal classical pianist banging out Beethoven’s “Eroica” in full orchestral company. In order to play the blues like Leadbelly, a middle-aged stockbroker would have to have been born nearly 100 years before he was; he’d have to have had a hideously disadvantaged life on a slave plantation; and he’d have had to have been imprisoned twice for murder, once for killing a guard during an escape attempt. He wasn’t and he didn’t. But he still tries to play the blues. And why not? A classical pianist, if he or she wishes to play like Beethoven, would have to be deaf, incipiently suicidal and at least three-quarters mad. Not to mention dead. If they can play “Eroica”, my friends, then you and I can play the blues.
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