Jack White
There’s always another saviour comes along who is supposedly breathing new life into the blues. Jack White is one of those who really did.
There’s always another saviour comes along who is supposedly breathing new life into the blues. White is one of those who really did.
Iwould much rather have lived in the twenties or thirties,” Jack White sighed to the NME in 2001, the morning after The White Stripes’ second gig in the UK, “but that will never be. My dream of being a black man in the thirties is not going to happen.”
It’s as bold and manic a statement as any white rocker has ever blurted about the questions of race that dig like spurs into rock’n’roll’s use of the blues. It’s what Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page likely felt in Surrey’s leafy ghetto, and Elvis Presley before them. Jack was a twenty-first-century blues acolyte willing to go way too far in his unhinged pursuit of authenticity.
He grinned as he finished making that statement to the NME, faintly recognising the absurdity of his words. But still he continued. “As far as hardships go,” he said of a generation of black
Americans who could still be lynched legally in Mississippi, “at least their lives made sense to them. They were playing for money and they were playing to get by. Music was a form of communication.” Born John Gillis (he later took his wife Meg’s surname) in Detroit’s Mexicantown and having attended a largely black and Latino school, he was hardly ignorant of race’s musical trip wires. Distaste for hip-hop’s dominance among his 90s classmates had left him a freakishly inverted, archaic figure as a teenager. This tall, deathly pale white boy could be found after school strumming blues guitar on his parents’ porch like a cotton-picker after chores, to the violent derision of his peers. The idea that such a nerdy outsider could be a bluesman despite his mojo not noticeably working would broaden the music’s scope when the monomaniac White forced the world to listen.
“My dream of being a black man in the thirties is not going to happen.”
As I discovered on trips to Detroit and Nashville researching my biography of him, Jack White: How He Built An Empire From The Blues, he has in fact made a thriving music business materialise around him, through The White Stripes’ campaign of blues evangelism. This was a march into the heart of the charts so redolent with mystery that it already seems a historic product of an almost pre-internet age, when a woman’s ex-husband could turn her into his sister and the world chose to believe it, falling for a brazen smoke-and-mirrors deception that brought the blues songbook’s incestuous voodoo to life every night that his White Stripes partner Meg faced down Jack’s bitter guitar sallies from behind her drum kit.
And yet in 2020, his label, Third Man Records, has not only been fundamental in the equally archaic vinyl format’s revival, it is also reissuing old blues gold for a new generation, pressing up the complete works of the Mississippi Sheikhs, Blind Willie McTell and the early, Detroit John Lee Hooker, in stylish editions designed to snare generations too young even for The White Stripes. He has also set Beck, Laura Marling and others to work making often blues-based seven-inch singles in his Nashville Third Man HQ’s studio. White has become both custodian and salesman of America’s blues legacy.
His own path to the music was a twisted one, including study of the Gun Club, Captain Beefheart, Bob Dylan, Betty Boop cartoons (where he and Meg heard St. James Infirmary Blues) and Led Zeppelin, the latter influence so obvious, as his solos in later Stripes shows threw off their punk straitjacket and went squalling, Page-like, into the stratosphere, that he has felt compelled to studiously ignore it. He was also a Nirvana fan when MT V Unplugged in New York was released in 1994, and the 19-year-old White heard Kurt Cobain’s bloody evisceration of Lead Belly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (itself an epochal, enduring transmission of blues values).
It was in the unlikely setting of a 1993 Radiohead gig, though, that Jack heard
Son House’s John The Revelator played as intro music, and was truly transformed by blues. Investigating further, Son House’s Grinnin’ In Your Face, its lyrics describing how this troubled adolescent felt the world treated him at times, pierced his heart even deeper.
Although Son House had inspired even a virile young Robert Johnson, it was the shaking, booze-wrecked House of the Father Of Folk Blues LP (1965) that Jack heard. With just his ravaged preacher’s voice and hand-clap beats, he already had everything he needed.
“I didn’t know you could do that, just singing and clapping,” an awed White said to Jimmy Page and U2 guitarist The Edge in the guitar-summit film It Might Get Loud. “It meant everything. I heard everything disappearing.”
The White Stripes’ primal, two-piece M.O. was born here. “It was as if someone, with a single blow of the axe, had opened up the world to me… After that, my life received meaning.”
After this, Robert Johnson, whose cool young face had seemed “legitimately scary” when White first saw it on 1990’s The Complete Recordings compilation, “became extremely beautiful”. He also bought a stack of discarded blues reissues on the Document label, deepening his blues studies with Tommy Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, Mississippi John Hurt and Blind Willie McTell. “You pull certain things from those guys,” White told Rolling Stone. “From Kokomo Arnold I get the natural phrasing. From Blind Willie Johnson it’s the slide.” Blues was anyway already widespread in the Detroit underground of record-collecting garage bands that White joined in the 90s, as cheap CD reissues made it readily available to cognoscenti.
The White Stripes’ 1999 self-titled debut album included St. James Infirmary Blues, and 2000 follow-up De Stijl had a raw, fuzzed-up Death Letter plus a spindly take on Blind Willie McTell’s Your Southern Can Is Mine. In the slipstream of 2003 single Seven Nation Army, both became million sellers. “I’m not black, I’m not from the South and it’s not 1930,” White
“If we can trick fifteen-year-old girls into singing the lyrics to a Son House song, we’ve really
achieved something.”