Blues Run The Game
Successfully fusing together elements of blues, gospel, old-timey music and English folk might seem like an impossible task for anyone to undertake, but it’s all in a day’s work for Martin Simpson
Not only has Martin Simpson spent time researching country blues, he’s also lived and travelled extensively in the USA, absorbing the culture at first hand – an experience that has resulted in him authoring classic songs such as Love Never
Dies, honouring the spirit of Delta blues while capturing the essence of the best of this country’s traditional music. Nominated for countless awards and recognised as one of the best acoustic slide players around today, he’s also covered songs by his heroes, including a hauntingly beautiful version of Blind Willie Johnson’s I Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes from his album Righteousness And Humidity. We begin by asking how his all-encompassing attitude to many different forms of music began in the first place… “I was very fortunate in that there was a parallel and integral nature to the folk scene when I started. I would go to my local folk club and see Martin Carthy one week and then I would see Mike Cooper with his National guitars the next week. I might see Stefan Grossman in a month and then I might see Finbar Furey playing the pipes, which was, as far as I’m concerned, like seeing Jimi Hendrix. There was all this extraordinary availability of fantastic guitar players playing everything from morris tunes to the darkest experimental blues, so it was a great time to be me.
“But it’s fair to say that getting the banjo opened a door to me for this whole thing of alternate tunings. Obviously, you get the guitar and you put it in D and you put it in G and that opens a massive door to oldtime fingerpicking and blues and what have you. But then the moment that you introduce the banjo, you’re immediately into the realm of modal tunings: Gsus4, Cadd9 and DADGAD – all those which now are universally accepted as guitar tunings, they’re all banjo tunings.
“So I had this other element and it all felt like the same stuff to me. Listen to Clarence Ashley playing The Cuckoo Bird on the banjo and I thought I’d not heard anything much more bluesy than that; it’s extraordinary. It doesn’t really change chords and it has the best riffs in the history of the universe. So I was very fortunate, just coming into it at my most wide open as a kid and seeing this enormous range of possibilities.” Did you go into a period of intense research and start looking back at the blues’ founding fathers such as Charley Patton and Robert Johnson? “Robert Johnson, absolutely, but it was actually a lot of the gospel players that nailed me and it was because of slide. I heard Blind Willie Johnson and the top of my head came right off and I thought, ‘Well, here’s a man who’s got at least three voices going on.’ He’s got his own singing, then he’s got the top string on the guitar
and the middle string on the guitar and he’s like a gospel choir all on his own. It was that vocal quality to the slide guitar. I’d put him on at regular intervals and go, ‘Oh Jesus!’ And [Lord, I Just] Can’t Keep From Crying – if you listen to him play that there’s one phrase where he hits the string with his right hand once and then plays about 15 notes with his left hand and it’s like listening to Indian classical music. It’s extraordinary well played – fluid and vocal. I can’t over stress how strongly that appeals to me and how important it is to me.
“It wasn’t that you could just play blues or gospel music, you could play Irish slow airs or you could play an English folk song and you could use the slide and conjure up the sound of an old English Gypsy singer. It didn’t have to be specific to the blues, but the initial technique came right out of the blues. So yes, it was a thing and I still have all those old records and I still have my ‘borrowed’ copy of The Country Blues, the Sam Charters record, and that’s an absolute mind fuck. You put it on and every single track is explosive, whether it’s Leroy Carr playing In The Evening When The Sun Goes Down or Memphis Jug Band or Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers or Blind Willie McTell playing Statesboro Blues. All this stuff, it’s just remarkable!” How have you gone about channelling the influence of early blues players into your own music? “People think they can play like Mississippi John Hurt, but they can’t because you don’t have the same equipment. You’re not issued with the same brain or the weight in your forearms, fingers, whatever. I realised very early on that it was all very well to glean elements of these people, but I was never going to sound like them and it was always going to frustrate me if I tried. So I decided that what I would do is get on with being myself and get on and have my own voice, which I look back on and go, ‘Well, that was kind of ballsy.’ A bit mad, but it worked because I was right; the basic theory was right. You can’t sound like anybody else. You’ll never be able to play like so-and-so or so-and-so. You can do it a bit as an exercise, but then get on with being yourself.
“I just recorded Stealin’ – an old Memphis Jug Band song that was on that first Country Blues record – and I had just internalised an impression of the recording, a sense of the melodic statements in there. I recorded it with Nancy Kerr, the English fiddle player, and Andy Cutting, the monster English box player, and I said, ‘Guys, I really think you can do this…’ and they absolutely jumped on it. So we’d go from the Memphis Jug Band in 1929 to a bunch of English guys completely nailing it. Doesn’t sound anything like it, except it does, you know?
“I’ve just worked with Dom Flemons and that was really interesting, because Dom – who is in his mid-30s now – is completely steeped in the same repertoire that I was steeped in during my teens, which I just think is fantastic. I was so fortunate to have access to all that stuff. The English Folk, Dance And Song Society put us together to do this work and I thought, ‘I dunno… How’s this going to go?’ And I called him up and said, ‘There’s a song by Peg Leg Howell that he recorded in 1927 called the Coal Man Blues…’ I figured out a way to play that on the guitar maybe 30 years ago, which I’m really proud of. It’s in standard tuning, I really love it and it’s great, but I could never sing it and he said, ‘I’ve wanted to sing that song for the last 10 years, but I can never figure out how to play it because it’s so mad!’
“So bang: there we were. And I don’t play it anything like the original recording. I took advantage of the fact I’d played quite a lot of ragtime infused stuff and a lot of fingerpicking and a lot of melodic ideas on the guitar and so it came out being what it is, and it’s a joy. But it is definitely an impressionist’s approach to the country blues, if you like.”