On Music

...They are not receiving the kind of fees and recognition they deserve, yet never have so many done as well with this music...

...It was recently issued as Beware of the Dog (Alligator AL 4707) by Hound Dog Taylor and the House Rockers...

...The jacket photograph shows Taj in his college days, standing proud and happy beside Mississippi John Hurt, one of the nicest men ever to put hand to guitar...

...He sang them at parties and country dances and, later in his life, at concerts and festivals...

...But Whatever the quality of the songs, King has a feeling in his voice that places him among the most comfortable of blues singers, and his guitar style is as dramatic as his vocal style is relaxed...

...Taj was born Henry Fredericks in South Hadley, Massachusetts...

...The album features a selection of blues (e.g., "Sweet Home Chicago") and ballads ("Corinna") that old Mississippi John himself would have been pleased to record...

...And he sang mean...

...you can practically hear the El rumbling by overhead...

...He appeared less and less often and died early this year of a heart attack...

...He talks mean, too...

...Taylor recorded two albums for Alligator and a third was in production when he died...

...And, alas, time is on their side...

...By his graduation from the University of Massachusetts sometime in the '60s, he was more committed to music than to the career in agriculture for which he had studied...

...From his first album onward he has concentrated with love and devotion on the preservation of the old country blues...

...Partly this is a matter of image, for there never has been much glamour attached to performers of the music...

...Remarkably, King avoids getting buried in this musical morass, despite the uneveness of offerings that range from fair to very good...

...The one sad note here is that interest in the blues among young black listeners has been declining...

...What distinguished Taylor was his mastery of the amplified slide guitar style established by the late Elmore James, and it may be too much for sophisticated tastes: all crash and jangle, a little like a ukulele gone berserk...

...They were all gold-plated originals, men who played their kind of music because it was the only kind they ever knew or wanted to know...

...Most of it is primitive stuff, rocking along with a steady, pounding boogie beat over which Hound Dog shouts out his lyrics...

...Big Mama Thornton, Jimmy Witherspoon, J. B. Hutto, Freddy King, B. B. King, Bobby Bland, and other graduates of the chitlin circuit now regularly tour the entire country, not merely the South, and besides the Apollo in New York or the Regal in Chicago, several of them can look forward to big-money bookings in Las Vegas...

...It was recorded live before bar and concert audiences, and the feeling is right for Taylor's music—informal hooting and hollering with a lot of answering back...

...In the past few months alone four of the great old-timers have gone?Mance Lipscomb, Jesse Fuller, Chester Burnett (known universally by his stage name, Howlin' Wolf), and Hound Dog Taylor...

...A little over a year ago, a stroke left him unable to perform...

...Hound Dog wouldn't have wanted that...

...A performance by Howlin' Wolf in his prime began with him crawling onstage on all fours, growling out animal sounds...

...For years he worked as a construction laborer and kept playing and singing around the Bay area...

...In a short jacket note, Iglauer explains: "The music, cover, and title of this album are exactly as Hound Dog and I originally planned them before we knew of his illness...

...So, for that matter, does the work of a young black who goes by the name of Taj Mahal, whom you may have seen a couple of years back in the movie Sounder...

...He's got that mean look," Mance Lipscomb said of him...

...Cuts from the album were played on underground FM rock stations throughout the country and suddenly Hound Dog found himself somewhat of a celebrity...

...He had been gigging around the South Side in relative obscurity when Bruce Ig-lauer, a young Chicago blues enthusiast and owner of the Alligator label, recorded his first LP live years ago...

...Indeed, it is one of the most satisfying I have listened to in months...

...It makes a good starting point on the road up (or down, if you prefer) to Hound Dog Taylor...

...As he used to tell me, 'When I die, don't have a funeral—have a party!'" A party is exactly what this album sounds like...

...Here I was," Mance Lipscomb once told me, "an old farmer with his head down, given up on things, and these people come along and gave me a whole new life with my music...

...Just as he was beginning to catch on, however, a pain in his stomach that he had lived with for a while was diagnosed as cancer...

...Partly, though, this reflects the outright hostility of militants, who consider the blues a holdover from their parents' generation and attack it on ideological grounds as a symbol of resignation...

...A Albert King's latest album, Truckload of Lovin' (Utopia BUL1-1387), demonstrates how much better things are for the distinguished graduates of Chitlin U. It is a slick, glittering production, replete with full orchestra and female chorus...

...Like Howlin' Wolf, Hound Dog Taylor was a native of Mississippi who moved to Chicago...

...He wanted to be remembered with the same kind of irreverence that he put into his music, and into his life...

...His "San Francisco Bay Blues" became a kind of classic and he himself was a fixture at clubs and concerts in town...

...Wolf was born in Mississippi in 1910...

...Though he did not make much money as a performer, he took home many times what he had earned as a sharecropper, and his old age—he died at 80—was quite comfortable...

...On Music RECYCLING THE BLUES BY BRUCE COOK The way scholars and folk-lorists have been sifting through the materials of the blues—arguing over the accuracy of transcriptions, debating analogues and sources?you would think they were discussing Middle English ballads...

...As long as Taj Mahal is recycling the blues, they will not only remain alive and well but continue to attract an ever wider audience in America...

...Dick Waterman, the man most responsible for bringing traditional black music to colleges in America, became his manager and booked him on campuses around the country...

...Then a bad heart slowed Burnett's energetic style, ultimately forcing him to sing from a chair...

...For a man who stood six-feet five, weighed a good 250 pounds and had always charged his performance with terrific masculine strength, that was pretty hard to take...

...We have more great singers and shout-ers whooping and hollering it up today than ever...

...In his '60s he was "discovered" by Chris Strachwitz and Mack McCormick, two young aficionados who recorded him on their Arhoolie label...

...Death came at 59...

...He played and sang in the Delta region until just after World War II, when he joined the great blues migration up to Chicago, became a mainstay of the urban scene and had some local hit records...

...Chester Burnett was an immense, rather fierce man who used to scare some of the people he appeared with...

...Jesse Fuller also died at 80...

...He picked up songs during his years of shareoropping in southeast Texas, and from troubadors on the streets of Dallas and Houston like Blind Lemon Jefferson...

...Mance Lipscomb didn't write or improvise his own material...

...But it sounds just right on the old Robert Johnson classic, "Dust My Broom.' Listen to that and you will think you've dialed direct to 47th Street in Chicago...

...I think not...

...I particularly like "Cadillac Assembly Line," a variation on the old "Goin' to Chicago" theme...

...A second stroke killed him...

...Audiences ate it up, and they liked his rough, backwoods style of singing even better...

...Fuller left home while still a boy, hoboed across the country and eventually settled in Oakland...

...The title of his latest album, Recycling the Blues and Other Related Stuff (Columbia KC 31605), says it perfectly...

...In Coming Issues Richard H. King on Paul Robinson's The Modernization of Sex Elliott Abrams on Andrew von Hirsch's Doing Justice: The Choice of Punishments...

...You get the feeling these earnest custodians of culture can hardly wait until the last old bluesman has died, leaving them free to pick and parse at will...

...A hero of the '60s blues revival, he did tours and college concerts and was almost as big a favorite with the young white audience as Muddy Waters...

...He has the style down perfectly, yet Taj is less concerned with imitation, than with recapturing and remolding the music in his own good fashion...

...With the old bluesmen going, though, will their music soon become the exclusive preserve of the academics after all...

...Born in Georgia and raised in different parts of the state by various relatives, he learned little beyond how to play guitar—but that, judging from his performances on the 12 string, he learned well...

...This isn't one of those somber 'memorial' albums...

...Mance, who had never been outside Texas before, did a lot of traveling in the last 15 years of his life...

...Anyone who feels in the least timid about the blues could do no better than to try Albert King's Truckload of Lovin...

...It is dismaying, to put it mildly, to see people deny a beautiful, deeply meaningful aspect of their heritage because it does not seem to fit in with some current notions of how they should be different...