The Louisiana bluesman Buddy Guy is releasing a new album this week. It is called Ain’t Done With The Blues – a statement which one might argue seems redundant considering Guy, who is 89, has been releasing albums with the word ‘blues’ in the title since 1967’s Left My Blues In San Francisco.
Since then, we’ve had A Man And The Blues (1968), The Blues Giant (1979), DJ Play My Blues (1982), Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues (1991), Rhythm & Blues (2013), The Blues Is Alive And Well (2018) and The Blues Don’t Lie (2022). This is a man who isn’t ever going to give David Bowie a run for his money in the shapeshifter stakes; Guy’s listeners can have their music any colour they want, as long as it’s blue, blue, electric blue.
This is how it has to be. Blues artists are wholly invested in signalling in advance that they are indeed going to be singing the blues. Between 1957 and 1968, the great B.B. King released Singin’ the Blues, The Blues, King Of The Blues, My Kind Of Blues, Blues For Me, Blues In My Heart, Easy Listening Blues, Mr. Blues, Confessin’ The Blues and, in case any lingering doubts remained vis à vis his affiliations, Blues On Top Of Blues. By comparison, AC/DC’s dedication to the word ‘rock’ is so much skittish dilettantism.
The point is, you know where you are with the blues. From the bluesmen and women telling everyone that, yes, they were born with them, still have them and always will, to the satisfyingly disciplined 12-bar structure (traditionally deploying only three simple chords), to the foreshadowed lyrical tropes, memorably lampooned by Richard Stilgoe in ‘Poppa’s Blues’ – ‘Well, the first line of a blues/ Is always sung a second time’ – a major part of its enduring appeal is that the direction of travel is never in doubt.
I say this as someone who has always struggled somewhat to appreciate the journey. I understand that the timeless chug of the blues is in some sense the atavistic heartbeat of all modern music, and that its simple rudiments allow its greatest practitioners maximum freedom of expression. I am drawn towards the Delta blues of Son House, Charley Patton and particularly John Lee Hooker’s spectral Mississippi moan, where time slips and something truly primeval seeps out. I love Jimi Hendrix’s phantasmagorical ‘Red House’. John Fahey. Bonnie Raitt. Even the White Stripes supercharged blues-rock felt exciting in the beginning.
Unlike country or folk, too much of the blues leans on the clichéd, the rote
Yet I find that, unlike country or folk, too much of the blues leans on the clichéd, the rote. The Armani blues of Eric Clapton, once regarded as the greatest guitarist who ever lived, though you hear such hyperbole less frequently these days, leaves me entirely cold, and not just because he endorsed Enoch Powell in a horribly racist on-stage rant in 1976.
Within the electrified Chicago blues of which Buddy Guy is one of the leading lights, I hear plenty to admire but little to love. That said, Ain’t Done With The Blues is tough and sinewy and sporadically entertaining. It adheres to the template of the glossy multi-artist major-label releases of the 1980s and 1990s, perhaps the last time the blues felt like a mainstream concern rather than a niche interest thanks to albums such as B.B. King’s Blues Summit and Riding With The King, and Guy’s own Damn Right, I Got The Blues.
Like those records, Ain’t Done With The Blues features several guest artists – among them Peter Frampton, Joe Bonamassa and Joe Walsh – and is rarely more than a squealing solo away from a title which reassures the blues aficionado that they have come to the right place: ‘Blues Chase The Blues Away’, ‘Blues On Top’, ‘How Blues Is That?’ The last mimics the stuttering stop-time rhythm of Muddy Waters’ ‘Mannish Boy’ while parlaying the kind of hardscrabble paid-my-dues lyrics for which the blues is renowned and often parodied, and which can’t help but evoke Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen sketch. ‘I’m from the backwoods, way down south,’ Guy growls. ‘Grew up living hand to mouth/ One-door shack was all I had/ The heat went out and the cold got bad/ How blues is that?’
To which the only reasonable response is to nod and say, ‘Very blues indeed.’ At least with Guy this well-worn stuff rings true. You listen and believe not only that he ain’t done with the blues, but that the blues ain’t done with him, either.
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