Uno de mis libros favoritos sobre música popular es Feel like going home. En él, Peter Guralnick da cuenta de sus entrevistas con pioneros del blues y del rock and roll: Muddy Waters, Robert Pete Williams, Charlie Rich, los capos de Sun y Chess records, etc. Es un viaje por carreteras sin asfaltar y cuyos hitos son figuras que viven en el limbo de la historia musical, aún en activo pero relegadas por la irrupción de un tiempo que ya no es el suyo, susceptibles de ser rescatadas por aquéllos que experimentan con angustia la inautenticidad del presente.
Un Guralnick adolescente había asistido al primer sepelio del rock. Cuando comienza su periplo por los EEUU para hacer las entrevistas que incluirá en Feel like goin home ha transcurrido poco más de una década. En el epílogo el autor cierra contando su propia experiencia y de alguna manera nos devuelve la mirada de ese niño de catorce años que vive con intensidad la emoción liberada por el pequeño pick-up de su dormitorio.
We had never been South before, and everything was strange to us. The language, the heat, the social customs, the Negro road gang that we saw in their striped convict’s suits somewhere in Virginia or North Carolina. The Festival itself, however, was the same old shuck. It was contrived, it was disorganized, and it was geared irremediably towards a white audience. So that most of the time the bluesmen were overshadowed by the very groups that had come to pay them homage (Canned Heat failed to show, but Johnny Winter appeared with twenty-two amplifiers and assorted equipment), and when they did get to play there was a musty flavour to it, as if the music had been embalmed and specially trotted out for this occasion. These were, in fact, many of the same problems which have plagued every blues “concert” I have attended since I first saw Lightnin’ Hopkins at Harvard twelve years ago: a stiff, unnatural atmosphere, an unbridgeable gulf between performer and audience, and a tendency to treat the blues as a kind of museum piece, to be pored over by scholars, to be admired perhaps but to be stifled at the same time by the press of formal attention. It was a depressing realization and one that left me on the whole with the feeling that even in its own backyard blues had ceased to be a living experience.
Well, I no longer feel that’s true. Certainly blues is the property of an older generation whose days are just as certainly numbered. Then, too, there is little question that the sense of regional isolation which gave rock ’n’ roll as well as blues much of its original impetus is fast dying out, to be replaced by a form of cultural homogeneity which denies local differences or distinctions. All across the country the radio announcers have the same bland voice, and I couldn’t help thinking as I drove down to Memphis how different it must have been for Elvis or Johnny Cash or Carl Perkins, growing up listening to B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson on the radio, seeing Muddy Waters and Junior Parker and Joe Hill Louis as popular artists of the day. It’s almost as if they were living in another world. And yet doing this book taught me that world still exists, and that despite the fierce assault of time upon it the music has an ongoing vitality.
Seeing Hound Dog Taylor at Florence’s a few blocks from the University of Chicago playing for a crowd that has no more idea of the existence of twentieth century comforts than it did before leaving Mississippi. Listening to Buddy Guy relaxed and singing for his own people in a way that was altogether different from any of the countless times I have seen him perform for white audiences. Couples dancing and life surging around the pounding relentless beat. Robert Pete Williams at home in rural Louisiana, playing his guitar for himself and his friends with a confidence and a sense of place that no frequenter of jazz festivals or blues concerts will ever sense. Charlie Rich singing from the depths of his soul for an audience of boosters and parvenus—native Memphians who want to make good in an ad agent’s world. The girl who selected “Dust My Broom” on the jukebox of one of the Chicago clubs and then sang along with lyrics that had been composed before she was born. The atmosphere of any one of the South Side joints where heads turn when you walk in not so much out of hostility as real curiosity that a white should venture into their sealed-off world. A man named Honey offers to buy you a drink, his girl wants to dance, and you look for the catch, you wait for the delayed explosion. There is none; it is just manifest good will, people are glad to see you somehow and after a while you, too, begin to feel part of a community that has been created almost as a shelter against the storm outside.
All these glimpses add up to a picture which is not necessarily coherent but which puts me back in touch with the feeling that originally drew me to the music. It was, when I first heard it, an emotional experience which I could not deny. It expressed for me a sense of sharp release and a feeling of almost savage joy.
Peter Guralnick. Feel Like Going Home. Back Bay Books. Nueva York, 1999.
