Listening to Prestige 413: Memphis Slim

Prestige Bluesville released two Memphis Slim albums in 1961, each of them culled partly from an earlier session (April 26, 1960) and partly from this one. Although Slim had, throughout most of the 1940s and 1950s, fronted a rhythm and blues ensemble with a couple of saxophones, and one might have thought that side of him would have appealed to Bob Weinstock's jazz-oriented sensibilities, Prestige--like Folkways, which recorded him at about the same time--decided to emphasize his folk blues persona. The April session put him together with Lafayette Thomas, a rhythm and blues guitarist from the West Coast who was taking a folk blues sabbatical in New York, and jazz bassist Wendell Marshall. For this November session, Marshall is dropped, and Thomas is replaced by Buster Brown, here called Buster "Harpie" Brown, on harmonica.

Both sessions, though, belong to Memphis Slim's inventive boogie-woogie and blues piano playing, and his distinctive vocals.

One of the interesting things about different blues singers, as they expanded their audience from their neighbors in the delta to white folks from the north, is their different levels of intelligibility. Sometimes you didn't even have to be from the north. Early blues scholars and musicologists puzzled over some of Charley Patton's lyrics. Some they had to guess at, some they couldn't get at all. When Patton's friend and blues partner Son House was rediscovered in Rochester, New York, the scholars beat a path to his door, played some of the old records, and asked, "What's Charley saying here? And here? And here?"

House just laughed. "Nobody could ever understand what Charley was saying. You could be standing on the bandstand right next to him and you wouldn't understand."

Muddy Waters is supposed to have told Mick Jagger that too much attention to diction took away from the emotional power of the song, and it's an interesting idea, although Mick--and Elvis before him--were smart enough to know that you can't imitate the unintelligibility of a Delta blues singer, although Elvis himself was from pretty close to the Delta.

And Muddy may have something. People who don't speak a word of Italian can still be moved to tears by grand opera. On the other extreme from Charley Patton, whose music is emotionally searing, you have Josh White, whose diction is supper-club perfect, as opposed to coffee-house casual, and doesn't deliver that much of an emotional punch. Of course, diction is only part of that story. You can understand all the words to both Josh White's and Billie Holiday's version of "Strange Fruit," but only one of them will tear your guts out.

Robert Pete Williams is closer to the Patton end of the spectrum, and if you really wanted to get every word he was saying, you'd have to listen awfully closely, which of course is why you don't. You can get the drift of "Parole Renied Again," and feel the lonesome desperation a prisoner's hopes dashed, without understanding every word.

Muddy Waters' first recordings for the Library of Congress, when he was still in the Delta. By the time he started recording for Chess, even though it was still "race records," he'd spent some time in the North and while he wasn't thinking in terms of communicating with white audiences, his Delta accent has still thinned out some. Chuck Berry came to Chess a few years later. He was from St. Louis, and had grown up listening to Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway, and to the very different accents of the white country and western singers he heard and admired on the radio. The brilliance and wit of his lyrics, the incisiveness of his character development and social commentary, demanded that the words be understood.

Memphis Slim was originally from Memphis, but he made Chicago his home for many years, and, as with Muddy Waters, the North had its effect on his diction, although it's still very much his own, and he's certainly not sacrificing anything on the altar of making sure he's understood, although when the lyric is clever, as in "Beer Drinking Woman." the words come across clearly.  By the time he was reinventing himself as a purveyor of folk blues for Bluesville and Folkways, he knew his audience would be the white leftists for whom Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy and Brownie McGhee had reinvented themselves, creating a new audience and a new blues style. More power to them. They played their music, and got paid for it. And Memphis Slim was one of the greats.

How much he's adapted himself to a new audience can be heard in his Dragnet intro to an original blues he's been singing for a long time, "Beer Drinking Woman" (it's also on one of his Folkways albums with Willie Dixon).

His version of "My Baby Left Me" is very different from Arthur Crudup's (the one covered by Elvis)., but they have an opening verse in common. There are variations, but the basic structure is the same -- his baby has left him without saying a word, so he doesn't know if it was something he did or something that she heard.

"When Your Dough Roller Is Gone" sounds as though it's going to be another clever one, "dough roller" working as both allusion to sexual and breadwinning prowess, but it turns out to be a pretty straightforward blues about a lost lover. So is "Darling, I Miss You So," for all that the title sounds more like something Perry Como would sing. There's a comedy routine about what blues lyrics can and can't be about. It includes names that would never fit into a blues, like Sierra, Sequioa, Auburn or Rainbow. "Darling" comes close to making that list, but frankly, Memphis Slim could sing a blues about a woman named Sequoia, or even Muffy, and make it work.

And as good as his singing is, his piano playing seals the deal. If there are limitations on the possibilities of blues or boogie-woogie piano styles, you couldn't prove it by Slim. He includes some instrumental numbers in this session,  and each of them is a treat.

Slim is the engine that drives this whole session, and Buster Brown doesn't have that much to so. But when he is featured, as in "IC Blues" or "Motherless Child," he more than holds up his end.

These tracks were meshed with the earlier session and put out on two Bluesville albums, Just Blues and No Strain, both released on Bluesville during 1961.




Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.

The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
– Terry Gibbs