Soul Station Feature 1: Harlem Hamfats

Old and New from Chicago's Bronzeville

Over the years my perspectives on music history and popular culture, as you well know, have changed. My article on Drinking Muddy Water has become, in my mind, an exploration and the many books on the 1920's I’ve been reading (and some readings that encompass the 1930's) have served as a catalyst for an extended, somewhat different view of the 1930's and the relationships of that music and popular culture to that of the 1920's and the 1940's and 1950's.

The more I think about it, it really is the case that the blues freaks have it backwards. The music of 'country blues' that was mostly NOT recorded until the mid 1930's, was certainly anachronistic. If Handy and others are to be believed, the solo guitarist-singer was already popular by the beginning of the 20th century. Why have the contexts and possibilities of this escaped the speculative notice of historians and critics? So by the time Robert Johnson was making records, his performance was not only a little anachronistic, it was REALLY OLD! That ancient aspect is much, much more than the time difference from Papa Spruill (1926) to the mid 1930's!

While some ancient strands continued, especially the lone piano player, what does emerge from blues and southern folk ways, especially transplanted into something like an urban environment, is some version of a band, and here is where the gut hybridity 'occurs'. When Tampa Red and other blues musicians form associations like the Chicago Five, especially employing trumpet/coronet and clarinet/sax, this is at once both 'old' (New Orleans, early jazz) and new (a version of a small group swing-jazz band), grounding performance in blues, the pre-Chicago and early Chicago representations of 'jazz', and a recognition that the market, the consumer and the venue wanted music people could dance to and that could be loud enough to be heard in a dance floor, dance hall, club environment. It is well worth noting that for 60 years this music has been shunned and despised by pre-war blues fanatics. But it really was a major part of urban blues and African American life, and it really is an amalgam, a hybrid, and in many ways, while there are several versions of it, one major part is encapsulated here:

and like the person who posted the notes, it IS important that the members of the Hamfats represent New Orleans, the delta AND Chicago. And as for the recording, it brings a raw, urban, African American sensibility and experience to a dark, intriguing melody that has 'pop' as well as bluesy DNA/RNA; the rhythm guitar imparts a swaying swing while the horn invokes NOLA. Something like this is a locus for the past, the present and the future. Listen to it again.

Originally Posted on January 27, 2015 by DJ PI