Blue Horizons

One of the best exponents of modern day country blues, Eric Bibb has gone deep into the history and lifestyle of the genre’s forefathers

Born into a musical family – his uncle is John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet and his godfather is Paul Robeson – Eric Bibb has not only made playing the blues his career, its history and players have been part of a passionate lifelong study. His music reflects the spirit of the past, referencing its great players to the extent that his compositions sound like they could easily have been written a century ago. He was just seven years old when he first picked up the guitar and by the time he was out of his teens his path was set and, so far, he has received a Grammy Award nomination and won several WC Handy awards, having recorded over 20 studio albums.

We talked to Eric about his very personal journey with the blues and how he manages to maintain such an authentic voice in everything he undertakes. “My first exposure to the whole sound of folk blues, and AfricanAmerican folk music in particular, was probably through Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White,” Eric Bibb tells us. “These were the early people I heard. As a late teenager/young adult I had an experience in Paris that was really formative. I met the great legendary Mickey Baker and he basically gave me a cassette player and a cassette and put me in a room in his apartment and said, ‘Don’t come out until you’ve listened to this all the way through.’ It was Robert Johnson: King Of The Delta Blues Singers. I’d heard country blues before that, but this occasion was a defining moment that put me firmly on the blues path.

“Johnson’s mastery of the Delta Blues is still, for me, an achievement, a phenomenon that seems supernatural. Once you’ve heard Johnson’s music, you can’t imagine the world without it – I can’t, that’s for sure. I’d seen Son House, Robert Johnson’s mentor, live at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and that completely blew my mind. But, for me, part of Johnson’s genius is the way his playing, singing and composing distilled and revealed the inherent genius of the country blues. In his music, you hear all the defining elements of this great folk tradition – framed in gold. From that point on, I dove deep into as much blues as I could find.

“I moved to Stockholm and befriended a guy who had a record shop, Early Bird Records, a guy named Bjorn Hamrin, and he had an amazing collection of pre-war country blues. So that was my second baptism, you could say, where I decided that I was going to focus on taking this music in and figuring out some of what was going on. I wasn’t the kind of student that really went for that kind of note-for-note approach; it was more a question of really marinating myself in the language of it, the sound of it.”

Did you choose to focus in on the Delta style in particular?

“There was so much that I listened to. Not only what was considered Delta blues,

“One of the definitions of blues is its honesty. It’s not a pretentious pasted‑on attitude. It’s something that comes from your experience – that’s essential to good blues” Eric BiBB

but stuff that was further east and north – the Piedmont style, as it’s called. I listened to the Texas guitar players – Blind Lemon Jefferson and Willie Johnson – but one of the people who really stuck out for me, in terms of a way to find my own way into this music, was the fingerpicking style of Mississippi John Hurt. I would say he was definitely a formative influence. That alternating thumb, rolling kind of fingerpicking style that became something that I used as a building block to my own way of writing new songs that sounded like old songs. To make it sound authentic is difficult if you were born in New York City in the 1950s and you were a long way from mules and ploughs and cotton fields.

“Recently, I’ve been listening to another country blues artist, Garfield Akers, who recorded four songs in 1929 and 1930, and might very well have been an influence on Robert Johnson. In my opinion, Akers, like Johnson, was one of the greatest Mississippi Delta blues singers to have ever recorded. His playing is similar in its precise funkiness and his Dough Roller Blues is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. Robert Johnson and Garfield Akers both belong to the mother lode of Delta Blues.

“One of the people that was really immensely influential is Taj Mahal. I stress this because Taj, to me, is the living link between my blues elders, my pre-war heroes like Mississippi John Hurt, Son House and Skip James. He had a chance to see these guys that I’m talking about once or twice: Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Mance Lipscomb. Taj was the guy who said, ‘You can do it like this, you can be yourself. You can reinterpret this stuff so that it sounds hip but doesn’t sound like you’re imitating somebody who you’re not.’ So he was a huge influence, not only to the music but how to approach the music.” How did you go about drawing all these influences together in your own compositions? “I came along at a time when several other younger AfricanAmerican artists were coming to the fore. People like Keb’ Mo’, Guy Davis, Alvin Youngblood Hart – these were folks who, like me, were just passionate about this music and just had to find a way to include it in our own expression and, at the same time, find our own voice. We more or less emerged at a similar time and it was like a wave of new, younger African-American players who were enamoured of acoustic pre-war blues.

“This was something that was not so popular among AfricanAmerican musicians, you know? When Taj was around and really making a name for himself, he was one of the only cats out there who was recreating country blues in his own voice at the same time that he was paying homage to his heroes.” Since then you’ve continued your research into early country blues players and their music… “It’s one thing to see the lyrics written down or a photograph of an old 78 label. It’s a whole other thing to actually hear that song that was recorded in the 20s or 30s. Fortunately, not only have I been able to collect a lot of stuff through the years, but most of it’s on YouTube so it’s a great source of finding stuff. So I listen, then I read books because I like context; I want to know what the back story was. Why did this come out? Where? Who was playing it? What were they writing about? What did that have to do with their everyday lives? That’s really interesting. The performers who really breathe life into this older form of music are people who’ve been able to understand something about the actual people who were being honest about expressing who they were, their time and their place, and I think that’s one of the definitions of blues. It has to be that kind of honesty. It’s not a pretentious pasted-on attitude. It’s something that comes from your experience – that’s essential to good blues.” How do you strive for authenticity, writing new songs that sound like they could’ve been written in the distant past? “If you’re singing in the style of the people who made the early great blues records – Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt – one of the things they were singing about had to do with a world that was mostly agrarian. They’re talking about living in the country. This is not music that came into being in the big cities; this is music that happened on plantations where share croppers were basically picking cotton or ploughing fields.

“So that whole agrarian scenario is such a big part of it that I feel one of the hooks for a person like me with this music is you have to have a love of that poetry, that language that describes trees and rivers and mules and barns and old cars and whatever. That terminology has to ring a bell in you – and it did in me, even though I’m city-born and bred. I felt some kind of connection. So I find that many of the songs I write have to do with either travelling, because I travel a lot, or specifically using metaphors that are connected to the countryside, the land and farming. It’s something about that world that inspires me, so it makes it easier for me to write songs that sound like they could have been in the repertoires of my heroes.” www.ericbibb.com