The blues live on because the blues give people life, not the other way around. Talk about the blues with Taj Mahal
or Tim Duffy—founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation—and you will
quickly understand how deeply they grasp this. Both men are devoted to
tradition, but not a museum kind of tradition. They’re devoted to living
tradition; tradition that is not only “viable and vital”—as Taj puts it—but tradition that is life-giving and life-sustaining.
When Tim recounts his first experiences hearing Taj play
live in the early 1980s, he describes a performer who rumbled with the
echoes of ancestors and forefathers as he created a sound that was
completely relevant in the present moment. Taj was not a revivalist. He was a medium for the blues’ reviving power.
Tim and Taj first connected in the mid-1990s. Tim, just getting the Music Maker Relief Foundation off the ground, had released A Living Past, a book and CD set featuring artists he was working with. When this collection found its way to Taj,
it stopped him dead in his tracks. For a long time, he had nurtured a
belief that there were musicians out there playing traditional blues
with life and vigor; musicians who didn’t simply remember the music, but
who got life from it. And here they were. Taj describes
hearing their music as “deeply personal,” something that illuminated
things about his own musical roots he had intuited before but now came
to understand more fully. Taj was
also was fascinated by Tim. Unlike so many folklorists of the past, Tim
seemed to understand that preserving tradition did not simply mean
sticking photographs and recordings into an archive. Preserving
tradition was “all about taking loving care of these older artists.”
Taj brought
Tim out to L.A. and introduced him and his new foundation to folks like
B.B. King, The Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton. Tim invited Taj to
his place in rural Pinnacle, North Carolina where the celebrated
musician slept on a palette on the floor and hung out with several Music
Maker artists. He loved how they played and sang, but he especially
loved “getting to know their lives and how they made things work.”
Taj says
he wanted to “give whatever [he] had” to Tim’s foundation, and he
figured maybe his name had “some kind of cachet.” Things fell into
place, including a sponsorship from Winston cigarettes, and in 1998 a
group of Music Maker artists set off on a mammoth 42-city tour with Taj as
the headliner. Talk to anyone who was involved and it’s immediately
clear that this was a special time. Artists who had spent the previous
decades playing in drink houses and juke joints were lighting up
audiences on high-profile stages across the country, rising to ever
higher heights. The bigger the show, the better they played.
Taj was
tearing it up too, of course. But he was also soaking it in. He was
hanging out with artists like Cootie Stark, Neal Pattman, and Beverly
“Guitar” Watkins. He was listening to them and learning from them. And
he was reconnecting to music he had been hearing and playing since he
was a kid. But now he was grasping it in a new way, going “deeper.”
Nothing was drastically different, he says, it just felt like he was
getting “closer to the source.”
Tim—sensing
the incredibly rich musical possibilities in the air—hoped to catch
something on tape. In addition to shepherding a motley assemblage of
senior citizen bluesmen and women through a never-ending series of
unfamiliar cities and settings, Tim was lugging around high-end
recording equipment that he had recently acquired from the legendary
audio wizard Mark Levinson. He set it up in hotel rooms in Chicago,
Cleveland, Dallas—wherever—hoping he could get Taj to do an impromptu session. But it never seemed to work out.
Then one night in Houston, the daughter of Katie Mae was hanging around—the Katie
Mae, the woman immortalized in the Lightin’ Hopkins classic “Katie Mae
Blues.” Hopkins, with his highly-original cut-to-the bone poetry and raw
elegance, is an Olympian figure of the blues, and Taj,
being steeped in the blues’ American mythology, couldn’t miss the
chance to meet this woman face-to-face. So, a few bluesmen and Tim and Taj and Katie Mae’s daughter hung out together in this Houston hotel room. After a while, Taj picked
up an acoustic and started whipping out classic tunes—“Stack-O-Lee,”
“Walking Blues,” “Fishing Blues”—merging his reinvigorated feeling for
tradition with his inimitable personal style. The tape was rolling.
Around the time of the Winston tour, Taj often
visited North Carolina, first coming to Pinnacle and later to Music
Maker’s new headquarters in Hillsborough. Tim had “tapped into a full-on
living scene,” Taj says, and he
was reeling with a sense of incredible good fortune that he was getting
to be a part of it. He regularly sat in on recording sessions (usually
long hang-out-and-barbecue sessions with some recording thrown in). When
the music got going, Taj would
play some piano, bass, harp, banjo, mandolin, whatever was needed. “It
was fun. Really fun to get to use all my chops like that,” Taj says,
“but I never got in just because I could. If I didn’t have something to
say, I shut up.” He overflows with feeling when he talks about playing
with these folks; singular artists like John Dee Holeman, Cool John
Ferguson, Cootie Stark, and Algia Mae Hinton.
Tim loved the sounds that were getting recorded. The players were
letting loose, digging in, coming alive as the music came through them.
This was it, that place where tradition becomes “viable and
vital” in the present. He wanted to put this stuff out—these North
Carolina sessions and the Houston hotel recordings. But the time wasn’t
right. Taj had just released a
string of great studio albums with a throwback R&B flavor, and there
was a new 3-disc retrospective of his work on the market. There really
wasn’t any commercial space for Taj Mahal versions of “Hambone” and “Shortin’ Bread.” So the recordings just sat around.
For about two decades now, Taj and
Tim have nurtured their friendship and partnership. They have
incredibly nice things to say about each other. Both men credit the
other with enriching their respective life, career, and musical journey.
Tim says that, “having Taj Mahal be a champion for Music Maker has been one of the greatest joys of my life.” He goes on, “Without Taj, Music Maker would not be what it is, it would be something else; something different.” Taj’s spirit, it seems, infuses the whole enterprise.
In 2015, Tim’s foundation turned 21 years old, and Taj,
born in 1942, was settling into his eighth decade of life. Both men
were looking back and reflecting. They returned to these recordings made
during that magical time in the late 1990s. In them they heard what
Albert Murray, the great African American cultural critic, claimed to be
the essence of blues style, “a unique blend of warmth, sensitivity,
nonsense, vitality, and elegance.” These tracks needed to be heard. Taj wanted to do a vinyl-only release and Tim thought that “was really groovy.”
So here they are, on a piece of solid wax. Comb through all the dozens of Taj Mahal
albums released in the last few decades and you won’t find a more
intimate portrayal of his stripped-down traditional blues style, nor a
better representation of Taj as a
freewheeling, fun-loving, always in-the-pocket sideman. “When I listen
to this,” Tim says, “it just shows how good the music really is. His
version of ‘Shortin’ Bread’ with Neal Pattman is, you know, it’s just
amazing. It’s as good as anything that was on wax in the 20s and 30s.”
And it is, precisely because you don’t get any sense that Taj was trying to recreate some old record. He just sounds like he’s having fun. The album might be a Labor of Love (and
the labor is there, no doubt), but when the needle hits the grooves,
what really comes across is the love: the love of the budding friendship
between Taj and Tim; the love of
the blues; the loving care that is the essence of real preservation;
and, especially, the love of being in the moment, playing, creating a
sound that gives you life. I asked Taj what
he wanted the record to say to people. “Hrmmh,” he grunted, diverting
attention from my too-serious question, “just enjoy it.”
-Will Boone
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