It’s tragic that racism continues to thrive in the western world, but it’s also utterly ridiculous, because there’s no one who hasn’t profited from the spirit that animates this music. It’s brought more to our culture than any of us ever could have imagined. The precious secret is simply that part of the human soul which can never be trampled on or taken away. It was and still is a way of maintaining dignity and identity, both individual and collective, through art and as we all know (or should know), it originated as a response to the very worst forms of oppression: slavery, sharecropping, and the racism that’s never left American society. Corey called this a “language of exclusion,” which can be found in the poetry of Langston Hughes just as easily as it can be found in the music of Howlin’ Wolf or Lightnin’ Hopkins. The words don’t contain the emotion, they’re a vehicle for it. The words of “Hellhound on My Trail” may be about a jealous woman sprinkling hot foot powder around her lover’s door, but Robert Johnson is singing something else, something mysterious, powerful, undefinable. Corey made a very important point: Throughout the history of African-American music, right up through the present, there’s a distinction between the emotions of the singer and the words he or she is singing. I was in a studio with Corey Harris and Keb’ Mo’, two extraordinary young musicians, and we were talking about Robert Johnson. What is that secret? Recently, I was shooting a scene for the film I contributed to this series. It’s there in all those echoes and borrowings, all those shared phrasings and guitar figures, all those songs that have passed down from singer to singer, player to player, sometimes changing along the way and becoming whole new songs in the process.
MARTIN SCORSESE PRESENTS THE BLUES SON HOUSE FULL
That grabs your full attention from the first note-you’re hearing something very precious being passed down. When you listen to Skip James singing “Devil Got My Woman” or Son House singing “Death Letter Blues” or John Lee Hooker laying down one of his snaking guitar figures, when you really listen-and believe me, it’s not hard, because this is music It’s endlessly old and endlessly new at the same time, because there are always young artists hearing and seeing work that’s come before them, getting inspired and making something of their own out of what they’ve absorbed. It has to be a human exchange, passed down hand to hand, or else it’s not art. The beauty of art and the power of art is that it can never be standardized or mechanized. The greater truth is that everything-every painting, every movie, every play, every song-comes out of something that precedes it. We all like to imagine that art can come from out of nowhere and shock us like nothing we’ve ever seen or read or heard before. All roads led to the source, which was the blues.
But then we uncovered another, deeper level, the history behind rock and R&B, the music behind our music. It became our music, a very important way of defining ourselves and separating from our parents. Rock & roll seemed to just come to us, on the radio and in the record stores. Many people I know had the same shock of recognition. And I could feel that the spirit behind the music, behind that voice and that guitar, came from somewhere much, much farther back in time. All of a sudden, in an instant, I could hear where it had all come from. Like most people of my generation, I grew up listening to rock & roll. I’ll never forget the first time I heard Lead Belly singing “See See Rider.” I was entranced.