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Willie McTell, Redux · Aug 15, 05:49 PM
Ray Davis, who writes the always edgy Pseudopodium, emailed this last weekend with a link to his own thoughts on McTell. I had linked to Dylan’s homage to McTell in my original post. In sending along the link, Ray wrote:
Just putting the link in a comment seems close to rudeness, & I’m no Dylan fan, but there’s a chance you might get some amusement from my own brand of admiration—more “pop” & “poetic” than “blues” & “riff”, oddly enough.
Though coming round here & saying you’re not a Dylan fan is a little like going to Texas & saying you don’t like barbecue or to Saigon & saying you don’t like pho, I’ll let that pass, since what Ray has to say about McTell represents much of the new thinking about the blues. I don’t disagree that McTell was more of a pop singer & entertainer than a raw folk poet. All you have to do is listen to his diction to understand McTell’s social position. He was town, not country. All you have to do is listen to the way he refers to himself as “Mr. McTell” to understand where he is coming from. “Atlanta Strut” & other tunes prefigure the wit of the great pop musician Ray Charles.
I’d just say that those of us in search of existential authenticity need to be prepared to discover it in popular culture as well as folk culture. Postmodernism—come on, don’t quibble, you know what I mean—tends to undercut the notion of authenticity, but I continue to cling to my modernist—sans post-—views. So while I don’t disagree with the scholarship that has recently repositioned the blues, that scholarship is motivated by the postmodernist impulse to elevate popular culture & camp irony over both “high” & “folk” culture, I think. Not that McTell wasn’t soaked to the skin in irony. He was.
Also: It is true that McTell sang a lot of songs with the word “blues” in the title, but several of them were in fact blues. “Statesboro Blues” is the prime example, but “Loving Talking Blues,” “Broke Down Engine” & “Three Women Blues” also establish Blind Willie McTell as an authentic bluesman.
Also: McTell is more interested than any of his contemporaries in the social divisions within African-American culture: there are many references to “brown,” “blacks,” & “high yellows” in his songs, betraying, perhaps, his own social anxiety. Deeply, deeply ironic for a person blind from birth.
Also: Dylan may get McTell completely wrong, but his homage is still a great poem. It is the job of poets to get things wrong, beautifully, thus making them right.
* * *
Then, when you’re done with that, catch a Buddy Guy show. He’s touring. He recently turned 79 and unlike BB King his health is good.
This is the closest we can come to “The Blues” without time travel.
— Sam 08/15/2005 09:35 PM #