00:00:00 - 00:00:11 Chris Thomas King

That we live in a blues era that might have been a classically over in the romantic era of the Baroque era. We've been living in the blues ever since Gerald Jelly Roll Morton published Jelly Roll Blues.

00:00:11 - 00:00:31 Ric Stewart

On Soul Country podcast Number Three. I sat down with Chris Thomas King, a Grammy winning musician, film actor and songwriter, now author of The Blues The Authentic Narrative of My Music and Culture. We talked about the book, his career, and the history of Louisiana blues and its Creole origins. I'm Eric Stewart, a community radio DJ and award winning filmmaker.

00:00:31 - 00:00:57 Ric Stewart

Now podcasting to get deeper into soul country tales from the intersection of Americana and R&B. Listen in as we revitalize our cultural roots in Westerns, blues and variety. And now, a word from our sponsor. Ace production produces Soul country for the Blues Center. Ace offers consulting and video production, YouTube channels, digital strategy and team building for companies large and small.

00:00:57 - 00:01:22 Ric Stewart

The ace your production access there1.com. Chris joined me during a Mid Jazz Fest week in New Orleans uptown in a hastily constructed studio, and we opened up a no holds barred conversation on the music, culture, and business of blues. It's the authentic narrative of my music and culture. By Chris Thomas. Key quote. Yet our greatest invention, the blues, has been anglicized and stripped of its creole meaning and cultural significance.

00:01:22 - 00:01:50 Ric Stewart

The Louisiana Creole term, or blues or blur, the original name the originators gave their musical invention and songs such as JellyRoll, Blues Buddy Bolden's Blues, etc. celebrated subversion, discordance and freedom from freedom of expression among blacks and Louisiana, who preordained underclass status constitutionally liberated them socially and musically. Blues mock Victorian prudishness. It was a humanizing force that threatened to normalize black sensuality.

00:01:50 - 00:01:58 Ric Stewart

So that opened up a few different avenues that you go into in depth in the book. But, could you situate our audience members a little bit on what you're getting into there?

00:01:58 - 00:02:28 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. First I'll give everybody a definition. We all speak, you know, the King's English here in America. So that's our first language. And, so when we hear the word blues, we think. And that definition, the English definition, sad, depressed, melancholy, that type of thing. But in New Orleans, it's important for everybody to, to, to understand that, the black community, the black newspapers and things like they were printed in French.

00:02:29 - 00:02:58 Chris Thomas King

And the first history of New Orleans, black community was written by Rudolph des doom was written in French. And so many descendants. That was her father. So, in other words, JellyRoll parents, you know, they spoke French. So, Creole, French. And so the word blues as when it comes to New Orleans and, and its origins is taken from the Old French blaspheme sacra deal or sacre bleu.

00:02:58 - 00:03:24 Chris Thomas King

And if you just Creole as that and just add, you know, do a slang of sacra blue, then you get the word blues, like we don't want we all respectable, John. We don't want any blues. To put it in context, for a long time, you have blue laws, and in a lot of places still have laws. You know, these moral codes or religious codes where you can't gamble on a Sunday or you can't have a ball or festival or play music and then but that's what that's what.

00:03:25 - 00:03:37 Chris Thomas King

That's what we did in Louisiana, you know, from its beginning, you know, on places like Congo Square. And just they used to call them balls, but really they were festivals would have festivals. And we did a week just like we did now.

00:03:37 - 00:03:38 Ric Stewart

Yeah. Nothing's really.

00:03:38 - 00:04:09 Chris Thomas King

Changed. Yeah. So Blue Bars is, is like the, the Anglo-Saxon Protestant trying to impose their, you know, rigid, prudish Victorian mores on Louisiana, let the good times roll kind of culture. And the blues kind of came out of that push back against it because Louisiana, you know, for people that just remind people, you know, it's more of a Catholic thing.

00:04:09 - 00:04:34 Chris Thomas King

And the Catholic and Protestant situation was very tense, you know, for many, many years in America right now, it doesn't seem like a big deal. The Spanish who controlled Louisiana for for it almost all the time, then the French, the Spanish, you know, we're pretty relaxed about, the expressive, the expressiveness of this black community, the free people and the enslaved.

00:04:34 - 00:05:07 Chris Thomas King

And, so, Louisiana just developed very differently from the British colonies like Virginia, the Carolinas and places like that. You know, we were more, a Spanish territory, you know, for the first hundred or so years of our development. And so we developed differently. And the drum was never banned here. So, even today, I think that New Orleans and south Louisiana is it still has a more Africanized, you know, cultural spirit than any other place in the United States.

00:05:08 - 00:05:33 Chris Thomas King

And as it comes to blows, I mean, I started off trying to give a definition, but the definition in French, when you say something is blue, it means that it is, shocking or holy blasphemous. Yes, yes. Blasphemous or is risque, to to sexy, you know, like Bourbon Street or, say, like a moulin Rouge or, you know, or Dave Chappelle might be a blue comic, you know, you might consider him a blue collar, that type of thing.

00:05:33 - 00:05:36 Chris Thomas King

Richard Pryor, you know, was considered a blue comic.

00:05:36 - 00:05:42 Ric Stewart

Lenny Bruce and a lot of these people were very close to the jazz and blues world, too. Like, they might have tried to cut their own song singing. They were they felt it, you know.

00:05:42 - 00:05:44 Chris Thomas King

That's right. And, yeah, I.

00:05:44 - 00:05:47 Ric Stewart

Think and Red Fox is another one who was. Yeah, go down to music.

00:05:47 - 00:06:13 Chris Thomas King

So if it, if it was a little too risque, you know, for polite society, you know, it was considered blue entertainment, off color. And so the word blues is more of, it's more subversive definition in the French language. So when Jelly Roll Morton in 1915 published Jelly Roll Blues, it's a subversive message. He's not trying to tell the world that he's sad and depressed and down in the dumps.

00:06:13 - 00:06:29 Chris Thomas King

He's telling people that, you know, after midnight, you know, we're going to let it all hang out. You know, this is this is this this was, raunchy, you know, late night, slow dragging or whatever, you know, kind of music.

00:06:29 - 00:06:48 Chris Thomas King

Whereas, before the blues came along, people, the even the black musicians and stuff, they would play a Scottish a or they would play a wall, so they would play whatever the dance was for the, for the occasion. They would play certain dances that people have practiced these dances and they got to dancing and women would show up to the bars.

00:06:48 - 00:07:06 Chris Thomas King

You know, if when women began to show up in the early 1900s, because before that they did not. But young girls will come to these places with corsets on and stuff, but at a blues course, at a blues venue, they would have a corset closet. So they take the court, they leave home. The mom and dad were simply home with the corset.

00:07:06 - 00:07:08 Chris Thomas King

But then they'll throw a literal.

00:07:08 - 00:07:10 Ric Stewart

Version of let it all hang out.

00:07:10 - 00:07:37 Chris Thomas King

Yeah, throw that in a closet and let it all hang out. You know, at the at the at the jail. So I use the old term, that we don't use as much anymore. Anglo Saxon. And the reason I use Anglo Saxon to talk about Louisiana culture, because Louisiana College is so complex. And if you if if I use dialog like white and black and not use some of the older terms like Anglo Saxon or Negro or whatever, or Creole, which we don't use much anymore.

00:07:37 - 00:08:06 Chris Thomas King

The Blues was born in Louisiana in the 1890s. And so, when the blues began to take shape here, Italians lived and worked side by side with, with, with, with blacks and with them. They weren't yet. They were not yet. White considered first class citizens. And, so they had access to this music and they had access to the people and the culture because they all lived and worked together and menial jobs and, and things like this.

00:08:06 - 00:08:30 Chris Thomas King

And, and that's how some of the early Italian musicians, were able to take part in music, hear the music, because it wasn't on record. You had to be in the place to hear. So Italians had access to black music, black culture, because they worked side by side and they and they weren't yet assimilated into whiteness in America at the turn of the 19th century.

00:08:30 - 00:08:52 Chris Thomas King

And and so a lot of these musicians would hear these bands like King Oliver, you know, kid Ory, and then play the blues, and the parks and some of the venues and stuff like that. And they, you know, made their version of that sound. And whereas King Oliver and these bands will call themselves the Creole Band, these all black bands comes up the Creole.

00:08:53 - 00:09:22 Chris Thomas King

And I don't mean like mixed race. It's not a mixed race issue. But, so the King out of a Creole band, which Louis Armstrong ended up being a part of, the Dixon, the Dixieland Jazz Band Blues band was, modeled after that band. And after that, that type of sound. But then instead of calling themselves a Creole band, which they, you know, were rejected because that was considered black, they call themselves Dixieland.

00:09:22 - 00:09:48 Chris Thomas King

It, you know, the Dixieland boys that, you know, to align themselves with with Civil War, nostalgia for the Old South and for Dixie. And so they use that as a culture. It's like, in other words, and it also help with their marketing of the record, because in 1917, white families didn't want to bring they like black music, but they weren't going to bring their black music and sit at homes.

00:09:49 - 00:10:15 Chris Thomas King

So having a Dixieland jazz band play this, the style of music that the nation was starting to take a liking to, and they didn't wear blackface when they did it, by calling themselves Dixie the Dixieland Boys, Original Dixieland Band. They they align them. They were Italian, but they align themselves with Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and kind of passed and made it acceptable in white homes.

00:10:15 - 00:10:27 Chris Thomas King

And that's when this, blues sound began to explode across the nation, you know, and, and in the mid 20s, well, it was, it was there was what you could call a blues craze.

00:10:27 - 00:10:38 Ric Stewart

I wanted to bring up the little factoid that the first blues song published by a lot of people view at the Antonio Maggio here in New Orleans, the Italian guy who was writing it down long before it was here, you know, half a dozen years before that was here.

00:10:38 - 00:10:45 Chris Thomas King

That's right.

00:10:45 - 00:10:57 Ric Stewart

So in your book, one of the key things you do is connect the earliest mentions of the blues and talk about New Orleans. But that's decades before the popularly accepted myth that the blues really from Mississippi Delta blues have a subsequent history.

00:10:57 - 00:11:22 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. Nobody thought of the blues coming from the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s, including W.C. handy. It wasn't even, it's because it just did, you know, there were no people, at least no black people in the Mississippi Delta until around the turn of the 19th century. All through slavery, there was never any black people.

00:11:22 - 00:11:37 Chris Thomas King

Like the spirit of the blues came from slavery and from work songs and things like this. And then they try to associate it with the Mississippi Delta, because the Mississippi Delta is impoverished. It's kind of like, they want to make that equivalent of an equivalency between that and Appalachian.

00:11:37 - 00:11:46 Ric Stewart

One of those performers from that era was one that you got to play in a movie. You wanted to get into the Tommy Johnson story. Did you do what kind of preparation to take to take that on?

00:11:46 - 00:12:08 Chris Thomas King

Well, I use people that I knew personally, like, people I had grown up playing with, like guitar Killen I used his mannerisms and things to, to, to model one because Tommy Johnson there's no video of him. There's no I've never heard an interview of his speaking voice anything. And plus it was a fictional movie. I mean, the word, though is just a sendup.

00:12:08 - 00:12:27 Chris Thomas King

You know, it's a forest. You know, when I see clubs and all this kind of stuff. So it was a fun project that was just kind of spoofing, you know, a lot of superstition and stuff, you know, about the Old South and about and about Mississippi in the Delta. And, and so, yeah, that was a wonderful opportunity to play, Tommy Johnson.

00:12:27 - 00:12:38 Chris Thomas King

But when I, I had just moved back to America from Europe, I had been living in Europe for some years, and I had just moved back to New Orleans, and settled here before I got the part.

00:12:38 - 00:12:42 Ric Stewart

What do you think it was that that one project became such a hot thing?

00:12:42 - 00:12:43 Chris Thomas King

I have no idea.

00:12:43 - 00:12:44 Ric Stewart

That's enough. It's become. Obviously.

00:12:45 - 00:13:02 Chris Thomas King

I think if I knew that day, I don't know if I would be sitting here today. I'd be, You know, everybody lined up, you know, to have me read their fortune or something. I mean, I have no idea why. The thing was, was a huge commercial success. I mean, I knew it was a success creatively and as a piece of art.

00:13:02 - 00:13:31 Chris Thomas King

You know, the movie, the score, the whole project, you know, it was just these people, they know how to make movies the same photographer. The way the movie looked, the way people captured the sound, you know, all of that was, you know, we knew we were they were making a first class film. It wasn't a B-movie or anything like that, but the how the public reacted to it, I mean, and that kind of music had never had that kind of success ever.

00:13:31 - 00:13:49 Chris Thomas King

And it changed a, I think, an influence a lot of young people, a lot of young people, that they were young then, they're not so young now, but a lot of them got introduced to the blues for the first time through my character, you know, through through me playing Tommy Johnson and, and, and the hard time getting through the blues.

00:13:49 - 00:14:01 Chris Thomas King

And the version that I do of Skip James and the film. But, that success was it was it was from and it's still ongoing. I mean, it's still, you know, it was what?

00:14:01 - 00:14:05 Ric Stewart

And you, you did some concert performances to write, some of that again.

00:14:05 - 00:14:32 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. We were, we were, we were in demand. I mean, we had to go out and, we played Carnegie and, and I as a, as a, as a co headliner, they put together a Live Nation, put together a tour across the nation and in, in Canada we played, every, you know, major like basketball arena, like the United Center in Chicago, sold out the Rupp Arena and Kentucky sold out.

00:14:32 - 00:14:48 Chris Thomas King

Red rocks, the Greek Theater in L.A., you know, all these all these great theaters and and concert halls and stuff, and huge basketball arena sold out to an acoustic concert. It was just it was just not. So,

00:14:48 - 00:14:53 Ric Stewart

Every once in a while, something with quality breaks through. Like when is when the, Bueno Vista Social Club was somewhat similar around that time.

00:14:54 - 00:15:19 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. And and but I think that that was at the peak of the music business and I would just I'll just add this little footnote, very at that time, people weren't streaming music, so I don't know even how you would qualify it as a, as a huge success if people streaming. People had to actually go to the movie theater and pay to see the movie, and they would go 2 or 3 times to see it take their friends.

00:15:19 - 00:15:40 Chris Thomas King

And then the you couldn't walk out of Virgin Megastore with the racket unless the, the, the, the, alarm would go off if they if you tried to steal the record out of the store, you had to pay like 17, 18 bucks to get that album. So. And they sold, you know, ten, 12 million or so of those albums.

00:15:41 - 00:15:58 Ric Stewart

So, there was also kind of an interesting bridge in that music, that kind of showed the, the sort of perseverance of the blues through all these different styles. So we had like the bluegrass where it's, you know, a relationship that's hard to figure out, but then you get things, you know, more country rock and tune, like Man of Constant Sorrow, which ties in that rhythm element.

00:15:58 - 00:16:07 Ric Stewart

And then you got, you know, straight ahead, Delta old country blues style things. Did they all have a common thread to you? Was that kind of material?

00:16:07 - 00:16:34 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. Well, I used to on the tour, you know, I'd sit around with Ralph Stanley. We'd talk about these things, you know, but the. What I know about early bluegrass and what I like, I write about. Oh, brother, where art thou? In my book? So there's a chapter in there where I spend some time going to details about how I got the role, you know, and, and, and give my thoughts and, you know, and everything on the making of the movie and its effect on my career.

00:16:34 - 00:16:56 Chris Thomas King

So I deal with that in the book. But I also, spend some time talking about rap here and talking about how Jimmie Rodgers and, and in the early what we call today country music had started, you know, with these rural white players, you know, basically just playing the blues and they were playing their medicine shows, whatever they might be, even wear black, give themselves up.

00:16:56 - 00:17:20 Chris Thomas King

But Ralph Pierre recorded Jimmie Rodgers, in upstate Tennessee in 1927 and kind of really captured that, that sound. And later, Jimmie Rodgers, you can hear him playing the blues when he recorded with even when black and white musicians wasn't supposed to be playing together. Him and Louis Armstrong did some recordings, almost. Angelus, you know, around this time as well.

00:17:20 - 00:17:44 Chris Thomas King

So the roots of, what they call hillbilly music, it's really just, again, just like the Dixieland band, you know, was doing their version of a of a black musical, invention. Same thing with the rural people they were playing, their version of, you know what they heard blacks playing.

00:17:44 - 00:17:48 Unknown

All day.

00:17:48 - 00:17:56 Unknown

These.

00:17:57 - 00:18:24 Chris Thomas King

For some people, at least when this book was published, the idea is that the blues came from Mississippi is what everybody believed. And my argument and the facts show that, there's no black history in the Mississippi Delta, because that was the place that the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation lived, and they lived there for millennia until they were rooted out of there in the night in the 1840s or so.

00:18:25 - 00:18:47 Chris Thomas King

And but they never settled the land before the Civil War and built levees before the Civil War. And, and so black people didn't start, making their way there until the Jacob we bought some land from a from a railroad company in 1895, but it was another ten years or so before he could entice, black people from Alabama.

00:18:47 - 00:18:47 Chris Thomas King

And so you.

00:18:47 - 00:18:49 Ric Stewart

Didn't really want to live there because they knew it flooded.

00:18:49 - 00:19:10 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. So the first thing ever, you know, this land for a penny for for pennies, really? Then you got to clear the land. So you got to get all the cane breaks and all the trees and the timber. That's the next thing. Get all that timber out of there, put it on the trains and and sell that. And then you got to try to build levees and you got to then start cultivating the land for cotton and things like this.

00:19:10 - 00:19:35 Chris Thomas King

So when we see Muddy Waters and we see these blues people in the 30s and Robert Johnson and stuff, picking their families, picking cotton in that era, that is that's, believe me, that's downtrodden. You know, I mean, that's pretty, pretty rough living, being a sharecropper. But, that shouldn't be confused with slavery, hasn't it? There were no blacks in the Mississippi Delta doing antebellum time.

00:19:35 - 00:20:12 Chris Thomas King

There's no gravesites of black slaves that I know of. Nobody was there. And but it. But but every year during black history Month, people go around to the schools and tell a little kids, the blues came from the Delta and it came from slavery and work. And there was no going to work songs there. It's a cultural swindle, not only a swindle to reap the financial rewards from the blues, but also a cultural swindle to make sure that black people that originated this great musical artform, which is the greatest musical art form on the planet at that we live in a blues era that might have been a classically over in the romantic era

00:20:12 - 00:20:18 Chris Thomas King

or the Baroque era. We've been living in the blues ever since Gerald Jelly Roll Morton published Jelly Roll Blues.

00:20:18 - 00:20:33 Ric Stewart

And let me take that one step further. So you've seen my documentary. It's called Blues Rock, it's Soul Country. It's sort of the companion to the podcast, but I go right into the heart of that issue. So out of the top 20 bestselling acts of all time, about 15 or more of them have paid a serious blues or rhythm and blues apprenticeship.

00:20:33 - 00:20:37 Ric Stewart

That was the raw material that led to the even the most popular man.

00:20:37 - 00:21:22 Chris Thomas King

I would go even a step farther. There is no, popular music in America that I know of that isn't blues. There's no other music. I mean, see, on a piano you see on the piano. So if you playing a C scale pentatonic is if you plan out A44 beat is. I mean, the only difference is the marketing and the marketing terms you have to understand or basically, you know, Jim Crow terms, meaning that even though these two people were singing the exact same song, you got the Beatles singing this tune and you have Chuck Berry singing, or you have a Little Richard singing, a Fats Domino singing, or whoever, Lonnie Johnson singing

00:21:22 - 00:21:43 Chris Thomas King

it. But then just because a person's skin is white in the and everything is segregated in America, they are playing the same notes, singing the exact same words, the same rhythm, and everything is just a cover song. But now it's they gotta label it differently. My book is a cultural. It's called the authentic narrative of my music and culture.

00:21:43 - 00:22:04 Chris Thomas King

So blues is a cultural expression and it's going to. It was here before the music business arrived, and it'll be here after the record business is long gone and buried. These are all the same notes that everybody's playing. And this is why I think that when you if you if a person leave my book with something, they'll leave with the blues as a musical philosophy.

00:22:04 - 00:22:23 Chris Thomas King

And nobody writes about the blues as a philosophy, meaning that I can take the national anthem and blue. It I can, I can make it subversive just by the way that I approach it. You know, like like Jimi Hendrix doing the national anthem. He took it in In Blue Blood, and people were outraged. You know, that's not respectable.

00:22:23 - 00:22:47 Chris Thomas King

And the man was a soldier, you know, he fought for his country. And it's a free country, right? So, I mean, you can take any particular piece, any kind of music and blue it it's a, it's in other words and realize it in other words, make it your own, use it as your cultural expression and this is not, I'm not saying that this is owned by, black Louisianans or black people in general.

00:22:47 - 00:23:09 Chris Thomas King

I'm saying that if you are in South Korea and you want to take rhythm and blues and take the blues music, you can sing your own language to it. You can take it and adapt it and make your own thing with it. You know, the Beatles might have started off as emulators and copying, but they became a very original band through their progression.

00:23:09 - 00:23:34 Chris Thomas King

And so they were singing about their culture, you know, toward the end. Through me, you do we hear from for for a jazz fest, whether or not the brass bands that you hear on the streets in New Orleans at a second line, whether their music sale and hit number one on the chart, I don't think they really.

00:23:34 - 00:23:37 Ric Stewart

It's not about that. Yeah, this is a cultural expression. It's a part of your life. Right?

00:23:37 - 00:24:00 Chris Thomas King

So, I mean, they're not even that's that's not even the reason that they pick up their horns and trombones and play and play the music. So and say, if Elvis Costello, you know, here's a brass band thing and he decides to write a tune to it, what's the guy, Paul Simon like you did in South Africa, you know, if you want to take this music and and create and make a hit record with it, that's fine.

00:24:00 - 00:24:21 Chris Thomas King

If that's what you want to do. But don't come back to New Orleans and start telling the brass bands, y'all got to play your music like Elvis Costello. Paul Simon, are y'all playing it wrong? Y'all doing the second line all wrong. It's like I'm music. The blues is a cultural expression and it's a it's a musical philosophy that says we don't want to be, we don't.

00:24:21 - 00:24:35 Chris Thomas King

And we're not going to and we're going to we're proud of our culture, and we don't want to, fully embrace, Anglo Saxon, evangelical.

00:24:35 - 00:24:36 Ric Stewart

They're just a bunch of prudes who can't have fun.

00:24:36 - 00:24:55 Chris Thomas King

Yeah, we like how we do it. So we. So if you want us to sing your Christian song, we'll sing you a Christian song. We'll sing when the saints go marching in. But we're going to do it. We're going to realize it. We're going to put our style into it. We're going to make it well. We can dance and make it, you know, adapted for our culture.

00:24:55 - 00:24:56 Chris Thomas King

And that's really how the blues is.

00:24:56 - 00:25:06 Ric Stewart

And I'm like. Popular perception got influenced by the popularity of rock n roll that pulled from Delta and Robert Johnson. There's not too many people like that that they're so popular when they weren't really known at the time, but then afterwards.

00:25:06 - 00:25:32 Chris Thomas King

But I'm glad you brought up Robert Johnson because nobody had heard of Robert Johnson. I knew anything about Robert Johnson really. And he wasn't seen as this genius guitar player. When he was alive, he was seen as a good player for people that heard him. But you had Leroy Carr. You had so many other different guitar players, that were amazing and doing the same thing.

00:25:32 - 00:25:54 Chris Thomas King

And he was an imitative art. There's a lot of songs he was doing. He didn't write those songs. They were songs that he heard on record. And that's very important because these, these, these pseudo folklore is like the Alan Lomax is and people like that who are not folk. I wouldn't call them folklore, especially when it comes to African-American folk culture, because they never consulted with any black, African.

00:25:54 - 00:26:22 Chris Thomas King

They never went to Africa and talked to the African professors and people who will know they made a false equivalency with the Delta and with, Appalachia and trying to enforce, enforce on to black people what they wanted our folk culture to be. So in other words, they want to make you think that the black person in the Delta is he's here in harmony for the first time and these complex chords and rhythms for the first time.

00:26:22 - 00:26:47 Chris Thomas King

And then he got a diddley, but he he had one be sufficient, one to the tree and another piece of twine. That's another board. And he started making a sound. And they want to make it like that's the origins or the beginning of black civilization or black high art, music and culture. And nothing can be further from the truth, because in my book I lay out the fact that harmony was it was invented by Africans.

00:26:48 - 00:27:09 Chris Thomas King

The trumpet, is an African instrument that is, found in ancient Egypt. The one trumpet is, is, is in the key of C 4000 years ago, and the other one is in the key of B. This is not somebody just taking a mus horn and blowing through it. This is like precisely, you know. Hi, Art. You know Harmony.

00:27:09 - 00:27:42 Chris Thomas King

They already knew I want this in the key of C. I want this one in the key of C. These are going to be in harmony together. That's that's 4000 years ago. And so you know that that knowledge was there earlier than that. This is like so anyway, I'm just saying that people try to create a situation to give the impression that black musicians heard white musicians playing the clarinet and the trumpet, and then we discovered harmony, you know, and melodies and things, and it's just ignorant and it's not true.

00:27:42 - 00:28:15 Chris Thomas King

And it's it's part of that eugenic story of trying to deny, black history. Now, authentic black history. And the other thing I need to, say, there's two things I want to do. There is, this book here that, this book is called Urban Blues. And this book was published in 1966. And in 1966, B.B. King was not considered an authentic blues musician.

00:28:15 - 00:28:40 Chris Thomas King

He was he was had some success. Him and Bobby Bland. And who else is in here that they feature? Jimi Weatherspoon, B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland and Ray Charles? But these people, these folk, these people I call the Blues Mafia, my book, these people rejected B.B. King because we never seen B.B. King with, even though he said he worked and plowed a field.

00:28:40 - 00:28:47 Chris Thomas King

We've never seen B.B. King with overalls and an acoustic guitar. So he didn't, countrified, even though he's from the Mississippi Delta.

00:28:47 - 00:28:51 Ric Stewart

This was this was in the folk music time frame, right where there was. Make everybody feel this is.

00:28:51 - 00:29:12 Chris Thomas King

Yeah, this is the 1960s when they ran Bob Dylan out of out of folk music, you know, for going electric, the blues was seen as, you could be playing a trumpet like Louis Armstrong. You could be singing and playing the blues like Lonnie Johnson. You could be playing the blues like. Like Joe Turner. You know, jump blues is all kind of blues is coming in in every kind of way.

00:29:12 - 00:29:17 Chris Thomas King

And nobody is arguing with his blues. Not because it was just race music and nobody really cared to give it.

00:29:17 - 00:29:20 Ric Stewart

These are kind of made up anyway. Yeah, yeah, it's just culture.

00:29:20 - 00:29:40 Chris Thomas King

It was just all racist, no matter what it was doing up until about 1948. And so, by the 1960s, you know, you get these people trying to, separate blues from rock and roll. In other words, rock and roll is where are we going to make this money? Rock and roll is where are we going to get, you know, we're going to turn this thing into a multibillion dollar industry.

00:29:41 - 00:30:04 Chris Thomas King

And yeah, they are playing black music, but somehow we're going to shape the public's perception of the black performers and make them think that they're doing that. They're doing something else. And so, and B.B. King at this time had no white audience, why people wasn't following him around and going to his concerts. And he was frustrated by that.

00:30:04 - 00:30:29 Chris Thomas King

But, but the acoustic guitar players by Mississippi John Hurt, somehow. And so was making it on the folk festivals and like I said, these folk festival, oh, near Harvard and that's you got to remember, that's the epicenter of racial science in America. And so he was this is the reason I want to read from this book, because this is his definition of what they're looking for in blues in 1966.

00:30:29 - 00:30:33 Chris Thomas King

And B.B. King did not fit it, even though we think of We Revere B.B. King now.

00:30:33 - 00:30:34 Ric Stewart

Yeah, he seems like Mr. Blues.

00:30:34 - 00:31:07 Chris Thomas King

But he couldn't get booked on these folk festivals. On these blues festivals in the 60s, he wouldn't have been invited. So I'm going to quote from here the criteria for a real blues singer, implicit or explicit, are the following old age. The performance should perfectly be more than 60 years old, blind, arthritic and toothless. And he has a quote, as Lonnie Johnson put it when first approached for an interview, are you another one of those guys who wants to put crutches under my ass?

00:31:07 - 00:31:30 Chris Thomas King

Then the other criteria is obscurity. The blues singer should not have performed in public. I have made a recording in at least 20 years among deceased bluesmen. The best seem to be those who appeared in a big city one day in the 1920s, made from 4 to 6 recordings and then disappeared into the countryside forever. Correct tutelage.

00:31:30 - 00:32:07 Chris Thomas King

The singer should have played with or been taught by some legendary figure. Agrarian milieu countrified. A bluesman should have lived the bulk of his life as a sharecropper, coaxing meals and picking cotton, uncontaminated by city influence. Now that's the definition of blues in 1966. And if you didn't fit that definition, then you weren't part of this whole blues canon that these record collectors and these blues mafia types were, erecting.

00:32:07 - 00:32:27 Chris Thomas King

And I'll just add that, Lonnie Johnson, who is the father of blues guitar, was eliminated from this criteria. He didn't want to, play into these people's, idea of what the blues should be because, hell, he he originated he was already, you know, everybody was like.

00:32:27 - 00:32:28 Ric Stewart

4 or 5 decades.

00:32:28 - 00:32:52 Chris Thomas King

In. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, and here's the thing they said that the criteria should be for for an authentic folk performer is that, you know, you learn on oral history, you know, you learn it from your parents. So you you don't learn the music in a conservatory, a sheet music and things like this. When Lonnie Johnson played with his family on the streets in New Orleans, he didn't learn it in some kind of musical school anything.

00:32:52 - 00:33:18 Chris Thomas King

He didn't learn it from phonograph records because they weren't in it, weren't any. When he was starting out. On the other hand, Muddy Waters told that Lomax, I learned all these songs from the jukebox. I learned all these songs from my record collection. Robert Johnson learned all his blues recordings and things like that, emulating records. B.B. King, who we all Revere as an authentic blues performer.

00:33:18 - 00:33:33 Chris Thomas King

I don't think anybody had a bigger record collection than B.B. King. I mean, he was a DJ for us from for early in his life in Memphis, but this man record collection, he donated it to the University of Mississippi. I mean, his record collection was in the hundreds, maybe hundreds and thousands of records.

00:33:33 - 00:33:35 Ric Stewart

He stuck with it.

00:33:35 - 00:33:58 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. So, I mean, in other words, the jelly Roll Morton, Lonnie Johnson, King all over these early blues performers out in New Orleans, they didn't learn from records. They learned from hearing it on the street, a hand in person. They are. If you're going to go by the folk criteria of oral passing on a culture orally, if that's your criteria, it still brings you to New Orleans.

00:33:58 - 00:34:07 Chris Thomas King

It don't take you to Mississippi because Mississippi learned the blues from phonograph records.

00:34:07 - 00:34:40 Chris Thomas King

I'm not here to rag on Mississippi. And, you know, I was on the board of, of of of advisors to create the B.B. King Blues Museum. And when we we would go, I would go into Mississippi and it would been in his home town before we built the, and I say we before we built, B.B. King's Blues Museum, and we would ride around and kind of say, okay, this is the farm where he was at a child, and the barn was still there that he had worked at and drove, drove a tractor.

00:34:40 - 00:35:03 Chris Thomas King

And we would people would come in and do interviews and tell us stories and stuff. His old classmates, so people that knew him as a child. So other words, I've done movies, I've done down, the, last of the Mississippi Dukes. I've done so many documentaries on the Delta and on Mississippi Blues. I've done so many things to promote Mississippi culture.

00:35:03 - 00:35:28 Chris Thomas King

But, the movies that I played, at least a movie over the white House fictional. So it's not a true story, of the Delta, but it's playing with popular myths. So, yeah, I was playing Tommy Johnson, but Tommy Johnson wasn't the guy at the crossroads. And so that's what I'll do. Robert Johnson so none of it should be taken too seriously when it comes to a fictional movie that's just having fun in a spoof.

00:35:28 - 00:35:49 Chris Thomas King

But some of these documentaries that I've been a part of, I have sit down like I'm sitting with you and I have told people some of these things. Now, I'm not saying that 20 years ago or 30 years ago, as a teenager, I knew everything there is to know about blues. Now, I did believe that I, was part of a continuum here in Louisiana with my father, Rock and Tabby Thomas.

00:35:50 - 00:36:06 Chris Thomas King

I grew up in a juke joint, you know, playing the blues. That was a family business for 25 years. So I think I know a little something about a Friday or Saturday night in a joint. That's what I had to do for a living from, from, I've been doing this since I was 11 years old, professionally, so.

00:36:06 - 00:36:47 Chris Thomas King

And I and when, when I was writing my book, I went to Africa and had these conversations in West Africa, researching the blues. And did the blues come from there and all this stuff here? And they told me they laughed at me and told me, you know, you need to stop promoting that myth. So, so I'm saying all that to say that I've done a lot to promote, Mississippi, culture, and they've made some money with things that I have done, but, but here on out, my focus is not to dismiss, Mississippi, but to embrace, my, culture here in Louisiana.

00:36:47 - 00:37:07 Chris Thomas King

I'm from Louisiana, and I think that the Louisiana musician blues musicians get shortchanged. I mean, and we a lot of times we don't even include it when they talk about blues. We're out of sight, out of mind. It's like we're not even part of the South. It's like we're not even part of the whole story of the blues.

00:37:07 - 00:37:11 Chris Thomas King

How can you talk about the blues and talk about the South and never mention any New Orleans?

00:37:11 - 00:37:19 Ric Stewart

How much how much that you feel like is the fault of Louisiana, the state for not getting behind it in quite the same way that Mississippi did, because they've got their Blues highway and they've got so many museums.

00:37:19 - 00:37:44 Chris Thomas King

Yeah, I mean, there's a plague on, on on the state of Louisiana for not they, they dismissed ownership of the blues and often the blues made an orphanage of the blues. Many, many years ago. But I think the origin story is so important just to get that straight, because we need we, you know, because we need young musicians that's going to come up and play this music.

00:37:44 - 00:38:04 Chris Thomas King

You want to reach young people and have them be attracted to this music. But if you, tell them they can only play these three cards if you play that fourth horn. No, that's not the blues. You only got it if you give these people these false and these. It's not like if you give them these false, boxes and you try to put them in these boxes, what are they going to say?

00:38:04 - 00:38:32 Chris Thomas King

Well, I don't like the blues when that's not what the blues is. Anyway, I was discovered by a folklorist, you know, in 1979. So I'm the last, you know, blues musician to come to prominence. Being like Murray was, were discovered by folklore, some Library of Congress, so many other people. Jelly Roll Morton, you know, made those famous recordings for the Library of Congress.

00:38:32 - 00:38:44 Chris Thomas King

My first album is at the Library of Congress. So I came into the picture as this primitive, supposedly primitive, illiterate, you know, blues musician who learned from his father in a juke joint. And this.

00:38:44 - 00:38:46 Ric Stewart

Was on our belief was the same.

00:38:46 - 00:39:09 Chris Thomas King

Record. But my first album came out on a Hooley, which is the preeminent, you know, folk label, Chris Strack, which, thank you very much. And, this, this this was my beginning. And so for me to come and write this book and, and to kind of, you know, it was kind of like the lion, you know, telling the story or the or whatever, you know what I mean?

00:39:09 - 00:39:22 Chris Thomas King

It's like I'm the last one that came out of this whole thing. I didn't know it was a eugenic thing that I. And that that brought me into the world. I was looking to go to Fucking and Soul Train, you know, I was trying to make a record to get, you know, to have a hit record or something.

00:39:22 - 00:39:28 Chris Thomas King

I didn't know that I was supposed to be, you know, this, illiterate, you know.

00:39:28 - 00:39:35 Ric Stewart

And that gets back into, like, your, your origins. So you got Baton Rouge. Your father's a bluesman. You grew up at the blues juke joint club.

00:39:35 - 00:40:01 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. And so when, when our brother came out to try to answer your question, when older brother came out, I had no idea was going to be a success, but it it is superseded anything that Leadbelly had done, anything that any other folk blues musician that had been discovered by folk laws and, and brought to the attention of the world like I had been, it exceeded, you know, commercial expectations, and, and just shattered what anybody had imagined, you.

00:40:01 - 00:40:09 Ric Stewart

Know, and it had a lot of everybody's blues in there. So it's been the the prison song, the work songs, the bluegrass gospel. I mean, that's all in there.

00:40:09 - 00:40:29 Chris Thomas King

The New Orleans music is the original blues that came out here. And then what we find in the Delta with the with Mississippi John Hurt and people like that, they're just emulating what Lonnie Johns left. Lonnie Johnson took with Louis Armstrong. And these people were doing, and what JellyRoll was on a piano. He he transposed that to the to the guitar.

00:40:29 - 00:40:50 Chris Thomas King

And then, the rural people in Oklahoma and Tennessee and all over the South heard Lonnie Johnson records and from 1925 onward and begin to try to emulate that sound and the way he sang and played the guitar. And that's how we got this. Delta blues is like a derivative of.

00:40:50 - 00:41:02 Ric Stewart

Okay, so another time you got into the delta, frame of mind to be an actor was with film vendors, one of Germany's cinematic greats. I was a film students. I like talking about these things. What was it like working with with inventors?

00:41:02 - 00:41:07 Chris Thomas King

I don't remember from working with inventors very much.

00:41:07 - 00:41:09 Ric Stewart

It was Martin Scorsese. He it's a.

00:41:09 - 00:41:30 Chris Thomas King

I mean, I remember the project exactly, but if you asked me to talk to you about them, I remember going to his house out in, in Hollywood, in the Hollywood Hills, interviewing with him. He had been successful from, then it was a social club with a musical documentary. And so he was making this documentary, wanted me to play Blind Willie Johnson.

00:41:30 - 00:41:49 Chris Thomas King

And I had just filmed all. But I don't know if your brother had come out yet or not, but maybe it had come out. I don't know, I mean, I think I was in between that and the movie, you know. But anyway, I was in Hollywood, you know, all kinds of projects was coming my way, and I decided I'd do that with I think it maybe, the one person who might have benefited from it was Bobby Rush.

00:41:49 - 00:41:53 Ric Stewart

I think he look good. He took him to the church the next day. I remember I said, yes, I got it.

00:41:53 - 00:41:58 Chris Thomas King

Yeah, I think I think Bobby Rush it it gave him a leg up, you know, maybe introduce some people to.

00:41:58 - 00:42:08 Ric Stewart

He was in episode two. So we all know about him. Yeah. All right. So let's talk about this one. The country blues guys of the 2030s, 40s who brought the guitar working and and the songwriting about.

00:42:08 - 00:42:35 Chris Thomas King

A mid 20s to the late 20s. The whole nation was aware of the blues and the whole nation was. This was this was popular music. It was like the rap music of its day, you know, was it was popular music from coast to coast. And this is what everybody wanted to hear and whatever. When most musicians wanted to play the sharecropping musicians, you know, on the like in the Mississippi Delta, those musicians, they weren't professional musicians.

00:42:35 - 00:42:55 Chris Thomas King

A lot of them were dilettante musicians. They could hardly take a solo anything. And people have sat around and tried to tell me that, George Benson is not as good a guitar. Players. Charley Patton, somehow Ray Charles is just not as good a blues singer is. I mean, what what are you talking about? You know, what I'm saying is this is nuts.

00:42:55 - 00:43:15 Chris Thomas King

And you can't. You can't reason to rationalize it other than what they're doing is the old switcheroo where it's a cultural swindle. They are trying to, present to the world that this is authentic African American. So ignore those geniuses, ignore Louis Armstrong, ignore these other people over here, and focus on this primitive guy.

00:43:15 - 00:43:37 Ric Stewart

So like, also, you talked about, like, the last century of actual time here back to 1922, there was the enormous popularity of Jimmie Rodgers. He was a kind of a blues, knowledgeable guy who was a railroad guy and heard the songs. Hank Williams was similar. Had the black teacher, all the kingpins of country music, were parlaying the engine of blues, through country.

00:43:37 - 00:43:39 Ric Stewart

Or it didn't even call it country's call it music back then, I think.

00:43:39 - 00:43:42 Chris Thomas King

Yeah, because there's no such thing as country music. It's just.

00:43:42 - 00:44:00 Ric Stewart

Blues. It's so blues related. Yeah. And so, then popular. I'm going to keep moving here. Popularization of blues in some form went well into the blues rock era in the mid 70s. That's when we both grew up, the LED Zeppelin and Cream and in stones and all that stuff was heavily blues. And I think in your book you refer to it as low down and dirty.

00:44:00 - 00:44:04 Ric Stewart

Were you a rock fan back then? I guess if I question.

00:44:04 - 00:44:18 Chris Thomas King

I'm not a rock fan. But, I just like the guitar and I like loud guitars.

00:44:18 - 00:44:42 Chris Thomas King

So uncle Don Washington, would take me to his home and give me. He was a trumpet player, and he would give me, trumpet lessons. And I had a little cornet that he bought and career when he was in the war. And he came back and gave it to me and and brought me to his house, and I learned how to play scales and the trumpet and stuff and how to play the corner through him.

00:44:42 - 00:45:04 Chris Thomas King

And, so I was going to be I was set on being a trumpet player like my uncle. And but this was also at the time that the guitar was the coming the dominant instrument in the blues. And so, you know, my dad kind of said, if you want to lead a band instead of playing a trumpet, you might want to play the guitar because the guitar had superseded the trumpet.

00:45:04 - 00:45:26 Chris Thomas King

And that's interesting because Miles Davis, tried to compete with the guitar and tried to continue to make the trumpet the, the management of the blues. He tried to play it through an electric amp, through one, one pedals. He tried everything, all kinds of echo and all kind of experimentation. But the trumpet just is not going to. It just wasn't going to be an electric instrument.

00:45:26 - 00:45:57 Chris Thomas King

The harmonica, however, were good through an amp, through amplification, you know, little Walter, you know, prove that it sounds fantastic on record, but a trumpet through electronic gadgets just didn't work. The main thing you could do with a dual one? The mute. He innovated those things. And, I would say even, but that goes back to, to, Papa Joe, you know, King Oliver, you know, that's that's the kind of stuff that he was doing that he innovated, originated.

00:45:57 - 00:46:16 Chris Thomas King

But, but the trumpet was, was, becoming less and and going to the background, and the guitar was louder, more, more able to cut through the audience more over there, reach a larger audience, and it became the emblem of the blues. And so I gravitated toward the guitar.

00:46:17 - 00:46:23 Ric Stewart

What advice do you have for a young musician who's trying to succeed in the business?

00:46:23 - 00:46:41 Chris Thomas King

Oh, man, I don't really, my first instinct is to tell them, don't do it. The second thing I would just tell them is, you know, try to try to be true to yourself and don't don't take shortcuts with your talent.

00:46:41 - 00:46:52 Ric Stewart

All right? Good, solid answers. Good for life, even, you know, tell me about your next tour or your next shows. Upcoming. Anything big coming up for you?

00:46:52 - 00:47:09 Chris Thomas King

I don't have a big announcement. I'm just going to continue. Now that Covid is kind of behind us, I'm going to try to get out here and tell people about this book and, and tell this story and try to shift the nation's attention from the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans. When they think of the blues.

00:47:09 - 00:47:19 Chris Thomas King

I want people to I want when people think of Delta blues, I think of the blues, period. I want them to think New Orleans first and everything else second, because that's the way it should be.

00:47:19 - 00:47:23 Ric Stewart

If you could get a ticket to see any artist of all time play, who would it be?

00:47:23 - 00:47:25 Chris Thomas King

Honestly, I don't like loud music.

00:47:25 - 00:47:26 Ric Stewart

Oh, really, I was okay.

00:47:26 - 00:47:52 Chris Thomas King

I mean, I'm not. I don't hate it, but the record is what drew me into the music business and I don't, I don't, I don't, you know, I'm just not, I don't need to see him perform it. So. But but I will say they might find interesting that what was what pulled me in was the sound of the room.

00:47:52 - 00:48:10 Chris Thomas King

It wasn't the guitar and the bass and drum. It was. It was the spaces in between. When I can hear the room, it just sounded like something was some exciting. Was happening in the room, and I wanted to be in the room. I want to be there when this excitement was happening, you know what I mean? So you can kind of hear when the band sit there boom.

00:48:10 - 00:48:33 Chris Thomas King

And then they stop, and then you can kind of hear the little, the echo and stuff in some of these earlier records, not 20s. I'm not I'm talking 60s and 70s, 80s, you know. But now the room is, is, is sampled. It's not it's not a, it's not a real room, you know, where as you, you hear hit the road jacket, you hear some you know, you hear some good old.

00:48:33 - 00:48:35 Ric Stewart

Crack of the snares. Something.

00:48:35 - 00:48:44 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. It's like that, that that room is authentic. And you and it tells you a lot about the excitement in the space and the fun everybody was having. And I just wanted to be in there.

00:48:44 - 00:48:47 Ric Stewart

Now I'm thinking about Cosmo's at the laundromat.

00:48:47 - 00:49:03 Chris Thomas King

We haven't talked about that, but that's that's so important to the story. The the sound of the records is what drew me in to, wanting to make records of my own. And if I don't perform, you know, but a few concerts a year, I'm okay with that.

00:49:03 - 00:49:09 Ric Stewart

And then you're writing enough to fill up your whole plate as producer. You don't ever go produce other artists.

00:49:09 - 00:49:10 Chris Thomas King

They don't ask me.

00:49:10 - 00:49:11 Ric Stewart

Okay. I got to say.

00:49:12 - 00:49:15 Chris Thomas King

All right. But I'm open to that.

00:49:15 - 00:49:28 Ric Stewart

Thank you, Chris Thomas King, for venturing into Soul Country and a special taping in New Orleans. Uptown. Truly one of the Crescent City's great music rooms. Chris, time is king. We've got the blues. The authentic narrative of my music and culture. It's just come out in hardback.

00:49:28 - 00:49:50 Chris Thomas King

Yeah. So the book is available. It's or it's an audiobook. It's, a hardcopy book. It's, it's, it's actually out on, CD as well, and it's electronic. And so you can, you can purchase it at Amazon anywhere in the world. And if you want an autographed copy, you can get that from, my website, ChrisThomasking.com.

00:49:50 - 00:50:01 Ric Stewart

And I want to say a special thanks to Reed Mathis for our title track, We Ride. Tune in again to Soul Country for more insight into the music, culture, and lore of roots music. Chris, thanks again for coming by Soul Country.

00:50:01 - 00:50:04 Chris Thomas King

My pleasure

Chris Thomas King

Soul Country #3

Airdate Jul 30, 2022

Podcast 50:11

Recorded in New Orleans, LA

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Description

Hear Multi-Grammy®-Winner Chris Thomas King discuss his new book The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music and Culture revealing the Creole origins of the blues, O Brother Where Art Thou? and more in Soul Country #3. Chris a native of Baton Rouge and son of Blues Box operator Tabby Thomas, holds forth on the story behind the evolution of the blues in 19th Century New Orleans. Well before recorded music, the forces coalesced in the Crescent City. Covering his film work with the Coen Brothers, Wim Wenders and Taylor Hackford, Chris talks about the movie making and the spinoff projects. One was a series of international tours as O Brother’s soundtrack sold 10M units. Made possible in part by a grant from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation.

More about Chris Thomas King

Chris Thomas King is a Grammy® award-winning musician and actor, renowned for his innovative approach to blues music. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was influenced by his father, Tabby Thomas, a legendary bluesman and club owner. Growing up in Tabby’s Blues Box, King developed a deep love for music but sought to push the genre's boundaries by blending blues with modern styles like hip-hop. This fusion resonated with younger audiences while honoring blues' roots. King's breakthrough came in 2000 with his role as Tommy Johnson in the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? His performance introduced a new generation to the blues, with the film’s Grammy®-winning soundtrack boosting his profile globally. Despite Hollywood success, King remains devoted to blues, continually performing and recording music that reflects his passion for the genre. In 2021, he published The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music and Culture, offering a personal and insightful history of blues and its impact on American culture. King's career highlights his talent, creativity, and dedication, ensuring the blues remains relevant for future generations. His influence on contemporary blues is undeniable, cementing his legacy as a key figure in the genre.

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