| Tracks
1. Eyesight to the Blind – 4:15
(Sonny Boy Williamson)
2. Men's Room – 0:56
3. Frankie and Johnny – 4:42 Traditional
4. I'm with You Always – 3:41Traditional
5. Jockey Blues/ Old Folks Boogie – 3:52 Traditional
6. Some of These Days – 4:59 Traditional
7. Don't You Lie to Me – 3:34 Traditional
8. Hymn Time – 3:35 Traditional
9. Darktown Strutter's Ball – 4:05 Traditional
10. Stagger Lee – Traditional
11. I'm Glad I'm Jewish – 3:17 (Mike Bloomfield)
12. A-Flat Boogaloo (Mike Bloomfield)
Liner Notes
Many of the
performers who rose to prominence as part of the electric blues
movement of the mid-to-late-1960s had come to that music through
an earlier involvement with the folk music revival that
immediately preceded it. This, you will recall, was a period
that saw tremendous interest in the guitar-accompanied blues of
the rural South, with many of the veteran performers of that
music sought out, rediscovered and brought before appreciative
collegiate audiences where interest in America’s bedrock
musical traditions ran highest. They were palmy days
indeed, what with such as Son House, Skip James, Big Joe
Williams, Robert Wilkins, Sleepy John Estes, Bukka White and
other titanic figures of the blues’ early days on the concert
trail sharing stages with such newly discovered tradition
bearers as Fred Mcdowell, Robert Pete Williams and Mance
Lipscomb, among others. These were the models on whom many young
white singer-guitarists of the day initially based their music,
learning from the country blues reissue albums that proliferated
during the late l950s and early ‘60s, as well as from the
performers themselves.
Eventually it
dawned on a number of these young performers that however
gratifying such recidivist activities might be - at least on a
personal level - ultimately they proved more than a bit
stultifying, even frustrating. Once a number of the basic
country blues styles had been mastered, the performer found
himself at an impasse, painted into something of a musical
corner. Product of a particular set of cultural and temporal
circumstances in American musical history, the country blues was
already moribund by the time these young performers had come to
it, its glory days long since passed, living on only in the
memories of older Southern blacks and in the grooves of old
78-rpm shellac recordings made when the music was a vital,
living thing.
The spark still
burned, and brightly too, in the modern electric blues
approaches that had come into being in the years following World
War II. Natural outgrowth of the earlier country styles, these
mirrored the changed circumstances, values and worldview of
urbanized blacks to whom the music addressed itself so
tellingly, just as in earlier years the country blues had done
for rural Southern blacks. Increasingly, young performers turned
their attention to these modern blues approaches, mastering its
techniques, its electric instrumentation and its ensemble
practices.
They took to it
like the proverbial duck to water, for the simple reason that
they were much closer to it in time, temper and spirit. Not
only was the electric blues a contemporary music that could be
heard as a living form in the bars and clubs of black
neighborhoods all over the country and on large numbers of
records being produced by countless independent record firms
serving the needs of black listeners in the North and South,
where it still was followed avidly, but it could be heard in
various other ways as well, as one of the very foundations of
rock-and-roll, rhythm-and-blues, and even in country music and
rockabilly. Its sound was already in their cars, for it
colored the entire edifice of postwar popular music.
For most young
performers it simply meant stripping back to basics, seeking out
the pivotal performers and recorded performances of the modern
electric blues styles that had come into being in the late 1940s
and early ‘50s. Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton in essence
giving way to Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howling Wolf, T-Bone
Walker, B.B. King, Lowell Fulson, Albert and Freddie King,
Little Walter, Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, Junior Wells and the whole
glittering panoply of performers who charged the modern electric
blues with such vitality and excitement.
For Michael
Bloomfield it meant discovering the wealth of contemporary blues
that had come into flower in his hometown, where so much of the
modern blues’ history had been, and still was being
written. He was fortunate in that when he was
investigating and learning to perform the music he was able to
do so directly from some of the music’s major shapers and
movers - Muddy, Wolf, Walter, Junior, Buddy, Hound Dog Taylor,
Smokey Smothers, Eddie Taylor, Jimmy Reed, Big Walter Horton and
many others all lived in Chicago and could be heard on a regular
basis in the clubs and lounges scattered through the city’s
teeming South and West Side ghettoes.
He learned from
all of them and, through recordings, countless others as well,
spending hours each day in diligent practice, studying,
absorbing the music and what made it work, polishing, refining,
tightening his phrasing working on tone projection and all the
other nuances of technique and expression that charged the
modern blues with such thrilling, exciting emotional potency.
Also he continually monitored his progress through frequent
sitting-in with the city’s blues masters who not only shared
their stages with him but selflessly offered encouragement,
advice, friendship and, not least, ungrudging respect for his
fast growing abilities. And, make no mistake, he was a quick
student but, natural ability aside, Michael worked long, hard
and diligently to master the instrument and its expressive
potentials.
When American
audiences first heard him, with Bob Dylan and, most importantly,
the Butterfield Blues Band of which he was a charter member, we
heard a fully formed artist, confident, assured and utterly
masterly in his total command of electric blues guitar. Few
players of his generation were in his class, let alone surpassed
his fluent, perfectly poised, idiomatically assured handling of
the instrument, and of these perhaps only Eric Clapton
approached his bristling, supercharged, non-clichéd creativity
of expression. In fact from the start Michael was a world-class
player.
Over the next
few years, first with Butterfield and then on his own, with the
Electric Flag, KGB, and the various superstar sessions along the
way, he extended and refined that basic mastery even further.
Come to that, Michael never stopped studying guitar; he was
always working one or another aspect of the instrument. For a
time he might concentrate on speed of execution; for another
tone projection or plectrum technique or any of a number of
other technical or expressive matters. The process was
never-ending, he said, and humbling as well, for no matter how
adroit one was, there always was something more to learn or to
perfect. Since he loved the music so deeply, he never begrudged
or stinted on the time needed to do this. No, he did it gladly
and constantly. Then too, there was the repertoire to explore,
new songs to write or learn. And, always there was the acoustic
guitar, a constant companion and source of inspiration, to which
he always returned.
During the
final years of his career when more often than not he was
performing as a solo act, he generally divided his shows between
both instruments, acoustic and electric guitars. His repertoire
reflected his wide-ranging familiarity with the entirety of
black folk-based musical expression, and a typical performance
might encompass immaculately played ragtime pieces, country
blues, hymns and country spirituals (for which he had a
long-standing fondness), electric blues and R&B pieces with
the support of a rhythm section, as well as original tunes
drawing on various of these sources. What held his phenomenal
musical diversity together, in fact what made it joyously whole,
was the performer himself doing nothing less than just being and
playing. But then, few performers have had the deep sense of
history, of the continuity and interconnectedness of all the
forms of black musical expression that Michael had. Perhaps none
could offer in the span of a night’s performances such a
staggering array of idioms and styles as he did so effortlessly,
beautifully and movingly, with as much unfeigned affection and
sincerity and make it such an enjoyable listening experience, as
this sampling of a typical evening’s performing makes so
clear.
Listen, enjoy
and marvel, Michael Bloomfield was one of a kind, a true
original, and we’ll not soon hear his like again. Honor
his memory.
Pete Welding
|
I'm
with You Always