But thanks to segregation, most white Americans still knew little
about the blues before the mid-1960s. Ironically, it took a wave of
British acts to bring the blues "home" to the white mainstream.
Bands like the Rolling Stones, the Animals,
The Yardbirds, and Eric
Clapton's
Cream took songs by Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, and other
blues originals, turned up the volume, and rocked the blues.
Suburban white kids filled nightclubs and stadiums to hear the Brit
bands and home-grown blues stars like
Janis Joplin. While most of
the riches still flow to rock-and-roll and country artists, the
later careers of
Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and
Bonnie Raitt prove that, packaged the right way, the blues can
speak to a white audience. Which begs the question: What does an
audience, black, white, or other, hear in the blues? What's the
source of the power that creates such fervent loyalties?
"The core of the blues is emotional honesty," says Peter Guralnick,
author of Searching for
Robert Johnson and a definitive two-volume
biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to
Memphis and Careless
Love. "It reflects honestly and directly the emotional condition of
the moment. That may be celebration, it may be utter dejection, but
it gives you what the person is feeling."
Seconding that notion, producer Alex Gibney says the blues'
emotional intensity makes it a needed counterpoint to much of the
dance-machine fluff crowding the airwaves.
"In an era when so much music is manufactured, the blues provides
an important tonic because it feels so true, so raw, so immediate,"
Gibney says. "It's not always PC, and it often connects with the
way we are rather than the way we imagine ourselves to be. But you
gotta sing about that, you gotta get that. Otherwise, as Freud once
said, the repressed always comes back to haunt the repressor."