Same As It Ever Was

 

I was reading an article on the Black Keys recently. They have a new album out, one where they've recorded some of their favorite blues tunes. This is not a new phenomena, in fact, it has been around for 60 plus years, most notably during the British Invasion, when young English white dudes presented American Blues right back to us.

The irony was noted then, as it is whenever articles like this come out.

Now before you get tight with me, thinking I'm dissing on the Keys, the more interesting part of the story is the Keys fear that the blues, in particular southern rural blues, will be extinguished from the good earth due to an antipathy to it by the general public, and its apparent preference for good ol' generic pop, pumped out by photogenic youngsters who are typically white, but not always. (Ironically, this dismisses Rap, which is still predominantly black, and perhaps surprising to some, more popular than...pop!)

I'm shocked.

Fortunately, I've been shocked—but not really, as I've been hearing (but mostly reading) this for most, if not all, of my lengthening life. Southern rural blues, like R&B, Americana, which is real country music, Bluegrass, Jazz, have been given last rites only to live on in the communities that love them. Granted, these communities are not large until you put them all together, and then you see that all music outside of that which is considered commercially viable—read the stuff you're going to hear on TV award shows, is substantial. We're just not getting rich off of it.

That includes all of us pining away locally.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the article is how the life of a song changes over the lives of the people who keep the songs going. In some respects it is this that keeps and will keep all the genres of music alive beyond that heard by teenagers, and as we have all been there, let's not harsh them too badly.

In fact, the beauty of being little known is that the songs are allowed to change with time, with different performers in different places and with different instruments and interpretations. The rigidity of well-known songs by specific performers—think of every concert you've gone to by acts from your youth—is, inevitably, once they're past their prime, nothing more than a replay of their greatest hits, over and over again. Fleetwood Mac is not going to completely reinvent their catalog because they've done it the same way for 50 years and are sick of it. (This is why Robert Plant has consistently squashed every hint at a Zeppelin reunion.) Fans would not pony up megabucks to hear the songs played any other way than how they remember them. That's not a problem in the rest of the music world. Mostly... I'm looking at you, Beethoven fans.

And while we all harbor a secret, or not so secret, desire to make it big and be bored that our back catalog is what's keeping us going, we still get together, write, perform, and enjoy because it's in our natures to do so. 

For those of us who just want to play, we play, and often we tweek, or change, or rearrange, and it's all good, and it'll never leave us.

©2021 David William Pearce