Phew... Friday

It's been a nice week. First the good news that the legs didn't desert me, and all that base training and few hard group rides left my VO2 capacity in good condition. Then the first cross practice of the year was upon me, and I upon it. And today - how about that. I set a personal best for 2 minute power cruising up a hill, not all out but hard yet still within myself.

It feels good to be bouncing back from a serious injury and to start to perform at or above pre-injury levels. It's not dancing-in-the-streets good, it's just a warm fuzzy good that makes a person feel happy and that all has not been for nothing.

The other thing that always makes me feel happier is the blues. We're going to look at some Chicago blues today. That's basically Mississippi Delta blues, except electronic, maybe with some horns thrown in, or maybe driven by a harmonica rather than a guitar.

Elmore James was one of the seminal Chicago blues musicians, and this song was one of his trademark songs.



Everybody who is somebody in blues music, just about, has done a version of that song. Maybe he stole it from another blues musician and this was just a cover; but even if he stole it, he made it his own.

Willie Dixon was another giant of Chicago blues. He was pretty damn good - smooth as silk. He played slow blues for the most part. Slow blues is a bit tough technically, like improv jazz. If you listen to it played well, it's minimalist with not a lot of notes, and the notes there are, are played slow. But if a note is missed just a little bit, everybody in the room knows it. Willie Dixon didn't hit many bad notes. Check this out.



You know who thought that was a great song and made an innovative cover of it? These guys:



Nice, huh? Much of Led Zeppelin's repertoire was recast Delta and Chicago blues. Chicago blues wasn't always good time music about bad time men & women. Sometimes it was really socially significant. Syl Jones' "Is It Because I'm Black" asks a painful question that has to plague people of color when they hit tough times.



You know what modern group was moved by this song, and sampled it in their own work? The Wu Tang Clan.



Maybe not your cup of tea, but but I see what they're doing here, and it's a decent effort.

Charlie Musselwhite is a Chicago bluesman you've probably never heard of, but whom you've definitely heard. He's mainly known for being a great blues harmonica player, but he plays a pretty mean guitar too. Here he is playing, quite frankly, one of the best examples of Chicago blues I've ever heard. It's got John Lee Hooker-esque electric guitar chord progressions. It's driven by a harmonica, and has a beat you'd recognize from a number of brassier Chicago blues songs.



Here's a little more Charlie for you.



Of course you can't talk Chicago blues without John Lee Hooker. Here's one of his classics.



You've maybe heard another version of this, by George Thorogood.



One of the hallmarks of Chicago blues is that it's easily translated into rock or sometimes jazz. Delta blues is often acoustic, and also driven by deeply accented southern voices. It often isn't easily translated into other less primal forms of music - though God bless 'em, Led Zeppelin tried from time to time, with mixed success.

Of course the best Chicago blues isn't diluted to make it more palatable to the masses, nor is it remade into some other form of musics. It's straight up, like a boilermaker - a little raw maybe, a little strong, maybe not easily understood. But potent, and tasty if you've got the taste for that sort of thing.



"Boom boom boom boom... gonna shoot you right down." Damn. That's Donald "Duck" Dunn on the bass, and I'm thinking it's Steve Cropper on guitar - you'd know them from "The Band" in the Blues Brothers. Though the blues originated in the Black community, it's not a uniquely black form of music any longer. Rock, R&B, hip-hop, country, and jazz all carry the blues DNA in their bloodline. *Our* music owes its existence to the blues. It's the grandaddy of a lot of different types of American music, and the uncle of other types. I never get tired of the blues; there are so many variations and it takes on the big themes in life in an honest way. The blues are what you come home to after you've tried different kinds of music. It's a meat & three for your soul because it doesn't talk about something irrelevant to you - big pimpin' or teenagey angst - but it talks about stuff that you're familiar with in a grown up way. And sometimes, you don't eve need the lyrics to hear what it's saying. Cropper & Dunn let their axes do the talking with Booker T and the MG's Fried Green Onions.



Have a good weekend y'all. Good luck at Deep Blue or the aptly named SM 100.