I started writing about music as soon as anyone would listen. Long before the existence of Crawdaddy! or Rolling Stone I wanted to do a history of Sun Records; I had mapped out a biography of Skip James. I had this intimation that what I was interested in could be of importance to other people, too.
When I did start writing serious uncritical pieces about my heroes in blues and rock 'n' roll, my intentions, I thought, were of the purest. I sought to publicize the artists; I wanted to call the attention of others to what seemed to me worthwhile; I tried to repay a little the enormous debt I owed to these musicians for opening up my universe.
Nothing ever turns out to be that simple. Writing, of course, is its own reward; in publication lie the pitfalls. It's flattering, after all, to see your own name in print. You become aware of the small degree of power that you exert. And although I have never written any piece out of anything less than personal enthusiasm, it is impossible to avoid becoming manipulative at least to a certain extent. At some point you even begin to get paid.
This book sprang originally out of a suggestion made many editors and over two years ago. A large publisher, riding the crest of the new youth market, wanted "the definitive history of the blues". I wasn't interested in that, Even ignoring my own lack of qualifications for the job, I tried to explain the breadth of the subject, also that it had been covered, probably as well as it could be, in Paul Oliver's Story of the Blues. My objections were waved aside. Develop your own treatment, I was told. Well, ultimately, this book is the result.
It is a book of profiles intended to show a kind of historical progression. This progression I hope will be obvious from the profiles themselves and from the very abbreviated history in Chapter II which traces the development of the blues from traditional country roots up through Memphis and Chicago and into the first heady days of rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll, of course, I took to be and extension of the blues tradition, and I am sorry circumstances prevented me from including Little Richard or Chuck Berry as an example of the black artist's adaptation of his own cultural experience for white popular consumption. The stories are interrelated in any case, and undoubtedly the reader will make his own connections as well.
Much more important than any specific progression, however, are the musicians themselves. Every one of them is an artist I've known and admired, if only from afar, for years. Every one of them is, I think, A significant artist; every one of them deserves your attention. What I wanted to do was to present them in a way in which they had not been seen before, within the context of their own time and world. I wanted to explore in some ways how that world shaped them and how they in turn shaped it.
Obviously there are limitations to this kind of approach. Their experience is, in almost every case, foreign to my own, and I have had to make certain imaginative leaps even to begin to comprehend it for myself. It's an experience, on the other hand, in which I have steeped myself for the last twelve years, and I thought it important for this reason to give the reader a little bit of a clue to my own background and bias, the viewpoint by which the frame work is necessarily limited. Chapter I, "Rock 'n' Roll Music", is and attempt to do just that and, I hope, in the process to suggest a kind of portrait of an era. Because it is that era, after all, which not only killed off the blues as a popular music but has now resurrected it, fifteen years later, out of guilt perhaps and out of necessity.
In the end, though, it's the music that counts. If this book moves you to listen, if it causes you to pay at least that minimal tribute to each artist's work, then it will have served some real purpose. Otherwise it's just empty rhetoric, and everyone knows we don't need more of that.
