Blues rolls on for Bishop
22nd Annual Bull Durham Blues Festival
By Cliff Bellamy
cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-6744
DURHAM -- In his more than 40-year career as a musician, guitarist Elvin Bishop has seen a lot of popular music come and go. Through all those changes, the blues has remained constant, as it has for the Tulsa, Okla.-born Bishop.
Bishop phrased it this way on his Grammy-nominated 2008 release "The Blues Rolls On": On the song "Oklahoma," he sings, "But the change it seems, didn't really change me / Still eatin' cornbread and black-eyed peas / I come all the way from Oklahoma."
Beginning today, the blues also rolls on when the 22nd Annual Bull Durham Blues Festival gets under way at St. Joseph's Performance Hall at Hayti Heritage Center. Guitarist Eric Bibb will be the headliner for tonight's concert. Bishop will be the headliner Saturday, when the festival performances start at 1 p.m. and continue until midnight at Durham Athletic Park.
Last year, the festival was held at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park to make way for renovations on the historic DAP. By popular demand, this year's festival returns to the renovated DAP.
Bishop said he will perform at the festival with a six-piece band that includes another guitarist and Ed Early, former music director for guitarist Albert King, on trombone. "It's all swinging and it's all fun, and they're great musicians," Bishop said in a phone interview from his home in Marin County, Calif. "Not household names, but all great musicians."
On "The Blues Rolls On," Bishop was joined by several guest artists -- among them B.B. King, George Thorogood, James Cotton, and Warren Haynes. The Homemade Jamz Blues Band, who also will be at this year's festival, also performed on the record. On the album, Bishop said he wanted to pay tribute to some of the musicians who helped him during his early days learning the blues in Chicago. "I decided to go back to some of their tunes," Bishop said. "I just thought of guys to whom the tunes would mean something ... I made up my mind early on not to get people just because they had a name."
Every guest artist had a connection to the song they perform on the record, he said. King, for example, performs on "Keep a Dollar in Your Pocket," a song associated with Roy Milton, and on the record Bishop briefly interviews King about his association with Milton. Bishop said King also told stories about how he and Milton would open games for the Negro Baseball League teams, and how they would watch Satchel Paige pitch.
Haynes, who performs on Bishop's tune "Struttin' My Stuff," told him he used to play Bishop's song in bar bands when he was coming up, which Bishop said shows how the blues gets passed on from generation to generation.
He said he does not have a theory about why the blues remains constant. "Albert Collins told me every 10 years a different generation finds out about the blues," Bishop said. "It's one of the basic building blocks of American music, along with country and gospel."
Born in Tulsa in 1942, Bishop first heard the sounds of Jimmy Reed, Howlin' Wolf , Muddy Waters and other blues artists on the radio. When it was time for him to go to college, he picked the University of Chicago because of its closeness to that city's Southside blues scene. Bishop began working on guitar, and met harmonica player Paul Butterfield, who also was attending the university. Soon they began sitting in and playing along with some of their heroes.
Going to Chicago was a watershed for Bishop both musically and culturally. "Guys were really nice to me and helped me out," Bishop said of his musical mentors who helped him learn guitar. "It was great when I got to Chicago, 'cause I could see what they were talking about in all these songs." In the time he was growing up, Tulsa was segregated, and "getting to know black culture was a big step."
Bishop and Butterfield were in the first lineup of The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which also included former Howlin' Wolf rhythm section players Sam Lay on drums and Jerome Arnold on bass, making it one of the early integrated bands of its time. Rolling Stone's "Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll" credits the band for helping to spur the revival of the blues in the 1960s. The band recorded its first album in 1965, and Bishop remained for three recordings before branching out on his solo career.
Many listeners know Bishop for his 1976 radio hit "Fooled Around and Fell in Love," but throughout his career he has remained faithful to the blues he learned in Tulsa and Chicago.
He is well into the process of recording another release. "There are no high-powered guests on this one, but some pretty interesting and unique material is on there. There's a whole lot of slide [guitar]," he said. And, if past is prologue, plenty of Oklahoma and Chicago roots.
No comments:
Post a Comment