killdeer43 said:What Pascal said, plus....griehund said:Kind of begs the question: is the blues just music after all?
It's a musical form, of course, but so much more.
You can play and sing the blues, or you can just have the blues. However you see it, the blues ain't nothin' but a good man feelin' bad. 8)
Bonnie Raitt has always been a great interpreter of the blues, but I don't know if she suffered beforehand.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXVoOgwiYc8
Joe
I agree that everybody has the right to play whatever dang music they want to. I also realize that just about every genre has roots in some sort of expression. When I think about Polka music I imagine a Polish band with some reeds and brass heavy on the bass drum. If a Japanese group decided to play Polka music and mastered the genre then more power to them. Watching them perform would produce for me a cognitive dissonance that would be my own problem to deal with. A Polish polka band might scoff at their Japanese counterparts.
When it comes to blues (like any genre) if the original expression can be replicated then I guess we have to say the artist is successful. I consider blues to be story telling like folk, country, blue grass, et al. I guess I wouldn't expect Buddy Guy to stand in and play blue grass anymore than I would expect Joan Baez to stand in and play blues. Although, Dillon went electric and the BeeGees went disco.
If blues is played in perfect syncopation and form without expressing a heartfelt story then for me it fails no matter who is performing. I think it was BB King who said the blues is easy to learn and hard to master. Listening to Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" and Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Crossfire" is like listening to two different genres.
The question for me is this: if you take a blues song and tear it down and put it back together in perfect structure, rythm, and sync does it lose it's original identity? There's got to be a thousand versions of Cross Roads out there. Pascal goes a long way to preserve the original in his version.
The music that was formative in my life goes all the way from LeadBelly to Wilson Picket with some calypso and reggae thrown in so my views are pretty screwed up.
There's always more questions than answers. :?: