BUFFALO NICHOLS
BRINGS ANGER BACK TO THE BLUES
“Race is the reason blues exists.”
BUFFALO NICHOLS
FOR THE place that packaged up rock’n’roll’s early years inside the eternal optimism of TV sitcom Happy Days and The Fonz, Milwaukee has punched well below its musical weight ever since. Arrested Development’s Speech, the Violent Femmes and Bob ‘The Chicken Dance’ Kames are about as notable as it gets for Wisconsin’s most populous city.
Add to the list, however, Buffalo Nichols (Carl to his mum), a 30-year-old guitarist and singer fast rising as part of a new vanguard of black musicians reclaiming the blues from middle-aged white guys and injecting it with a modern political and social voice.
“People look at the blues very academically, like it’s something that only lives in the past,” Nichols says from his current home in Austin, Texas. “But it’s important not to abandon this pillar that virtually all modern music stands on.”
Nichols first picked up a guitar when his older emo sister cast hers aside, something to do instead of watching MTV and sniffing glue while skipping school. “I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Ramone. Jimi was the guitar god you looked up to, and Johnny was the guy you could actually play like.”
Milwaukee’s deprived north side didn’t have much of a music scene, so Nichols started playing in church and, eventually, with any band that needed a guitarist, whether they were reggae, hip-hop, R&B, punk or a still-born Mars Volta tribute band. Working menial side jobs, he eventually scraped together enough money for a ticket to Europe. On a random bus trip from Berlin to Ukraine, Nichols stumbled across a Kiev blues club, sparking an epiphany that led him to return home and start playing his own modern blues.
Nichols’ spartan, self-titled debut album showcases not just his mesmeric fingerpicking, but also deep political beliefs which, sadly, aren’t so far from the concerns of the original blues players. The track Any Man and its lyric, “why wear a hood when a badge is just as good”, crystallises his point that little has changed in more than 100 years.
“Race is the reason the blues exists,” he says, “and I don’t see it changing because America is built on inherent anti-black white supremacy. People may have been listening more recently, but when it came time for action they were like, ‘I thought listening was the work.’”
Which paints Buffalo Nichols as a serious man, with a serious message on a serious album. Surely there’s a lighter side to life too?
“Nah, I’m just angry all the time,” he says with a laugh. “Every artist in music history has serious songs and more fun, dance party stuff. But I’ve always skipped over the dance songs and gone straight to the doom and gloom.”