By Clyde Edgerton | Dec 09/Jan 10 | 

Behind the Music

Two new books delve deep into the roots of blues and jazz

Listen to a cut from the CD included with Give My Poor Heart Ease

In the early 1960s, William Ferris decided to film and audiotape African American blues and gospel musicians living throughout Mississippi. He gained the confidence of black singers and preachers—including the more widely known musicians B. B. King and Willie Dixon—and was welcomed into neighborhoods, homes, churches, juke joints, and eating establishments. For two decades he captured music from instruments and traditions that helped define the blues: one-strand instruments, fifes and drums, banjos, fiddles, guitars, hymns, spirituals, and prison work chants.

Ferris, as a young white man, was somehow not made deaf and blind to African American music and traditions—not curtailed by the racism that was part of America’s social fabric, especially in the South. In his profound and moving book Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues (University of North Carolina Press), the classic struggle between Saturday night revelry and Sunday morning appropriateness, the pain and joy in blues and gospel music, sermons, and stories, are presented in print, and—lucky for us—on a CD and a DVD, compilations from Ferris’s faithful work. The package is raw, unadorned, very funny, haunting, daring, and spellbinding.

When I was a teenager in 1960, blues music first came to me on the radio through the guitar, voice, and harmonica playing of recording artist Jimmy Reed, from Mississippi. I started playing blues on the piano. The slant and pull of blue notes (flatted thirds, fifths, and sevenths, among others) moved me away from the square music of my conventional piano lessons. Those same blue notes had already been pulling American music away from—as well as augmenting—European music for over a century. And then in the 1980s, while watching the film documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day, I happened upon a song, “Blue Monk,” which wouldn’t turn me loose. That instrumental has been one of my favorite songs to play for twenty years, and I’ve just read a new biography of its composer.