One of the greatest guitar players of all time, Elmore James. This music is from the late 1950′s. It’s really just the blues, but it almost feels like rock n roll. You can hear traces of this sound all the way from Chuck Berry to the Rolling Stones to the Stooges to the Pistols all the way to GG Allin. This stuff is the root, the base of rock and roll music.
It is true that rockers owe a debt to Blacks, since Blacks created the blues and especially the rhythm and blues which led directly to rock and roll. Some Afrocentrists wail that Whites “stole” Black music to make rock and roll. But we pay our tributes where they are due. And anyway, culture is free. Everyone borrows from everyone. It’s called…culture. That’s the nature of culture, endless borrowing and piling on layer upon layer to the point where you can hardly tell who or what influenced whom anymore. At some point, nearly everything and everyone is influencing everything and everyone. And then you have? What? Postmodernism?
Anyway, if rock and roll is really Black music, why don’t Blacks play. There have been few great rockers aside from Hendrix. If it’s really the ultimate Black music, why don’t Blacks even listen to it. Black rock fans are not common. Sure, Blacks provided the base for rock and roll, but Whites expanded on that base endlessly and in so doing expanded the form far beyond it’s narrow origins and created a whole new universe called rock and roll that no one could yet see all the way back in the myopic 1950′s.
Anyway, dig Elmore James.
Anyone here like the blues?
