vocal and honking harp. ‘Snatch it Back’ got the Town Hall moving, followed by the bass-driven ‘Honeydripper’ (soon to be a staple of Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons’ set list). ‘Bad Bad Whiskey’ was in there somewhere, as were ‘The T-Bone Shuffle’, ‘Messin’ With The Kid’ and ‘A Man of Many Words’ with its New Orleans feel; and the band took it down with ‘Ships on the Ocean’. The whole thing concluded with the meat cutter groove of ‘Hoodoo Man Blues’ and ‘Little By Little’. The audience was on their feet, they’d been set free, and they called for more — but there was no more. That low-down, dirty, voodoo blues was over, for now. And so the audience politely filed out of the door and disappeared into the black Melbourne night.
As I left through the foyer I thought about what a contrast the night had been to the Daddy Cool gig eighteen months prior. There was no house wrecking, no dancing in the aisles, just mature appreciation of two stunning blues performers in their prime: a robust, magical encounter with history. It was also a glimpse into the direction Melbourne’s emerging blues and roots scene would take, dominated initially by two bands — Chain, and Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons — and supported by Broderick Smith’s duo of outfits, Adderley Smith Blues Band and Carson.
I often reflect how fortunate I was to be at the Melbourne Town Hall that night, a night that had a huge influence on the multitude of Melbourne performers and musicians who were in the audience. In my case, it planted a seed, I was too new to the art form to immediately run to a bar and start playing Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroad Blues’, but I knew something had moved. Like Sam Cooke said, ‘Change is Gonna Come,’ and I knew that it was gonna happen fast. A door had been unlocked, and I was about to explore what was on the other side. Meantime I’d work in the public service — not a bad option, given that Bolte had been replaced in August by the reformist Rupert Hamer, who was about to introduce wide-ranging reforms to the public sector that would greatly favour young people of potential. I’d also keep rehearsing and hope that one day I too would feel the visceral, stark emotion that was, and is, at the heart of this most spirited of musical forms, a form on full display that December night at the Melbourne Town Hall. Thanks Alan Lee.
Chapter 2
The Roots of Jazz
American black music is self-evidently deeply political in the important sense of having clear and perceived connections with the oppressed position of black people in American society … to some extent the blues negotiate the tensions between opposition to the status quo, accommodation to it, and transcendence of it through the joy of sensual release …1
Blues and roots are words that have an elemental quality, words you can build something with, words that, for many, have a personal resonance that make nerves quiver like piano wires.
The Encyclopedia Britannica2 says blues originated in America’s South in the early twentieth century and developed from nineteenth century field hollers and funeral processions. From there it evolved into music played by itinerate singers, guitarists and piano players. It contains elements of jazz, ragtime and church music and, according to the BBC News Magazine,3 was initially made broadly popular by W.C. Handy in 1912 when he published his song ‘Memphis Blues’. Its roots go way back to Africa, the drums, the rhythm, the ju ju.
Essentially, though, blues is a lyrical vocal form and at its core is emotion: think Bessie Smith, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy, Etta. Sure there’s slide guitars, bottles and paper bags full of twelve bar forms, but at its heart, at its elemental base, is a blues feeling, a dark weapon that can cut your heart in two.
Roots music incorporates elements of the blues; it also incorporates folk music, country, rhythm and rock. But on a deeper level there’s the howl and whisper of working men and women heard in its ballads. Originally it was music made by white rural workers in the Deep South of America, but then it grew to incorporate the hopes and sorrows and convictions of everyday people’s lives. It’s sung and played on porches, in churches, in the fields, in bars and concert halls. It incorporates Cajun, zydeco, gospel. It’s a form that can tell us about the history of a whole people in the face of changing social conditions. It’s a music drawn from the lived experience of ordinary people, it’s a music that gives dignity to identity and celebrates being alive.
All these forms of music are organic. After World War Two, rural black workers moved north to Chicago, Detroit and the West Coast in search of a better life, and the blues adapted to the social and economic conditions it found in each location. Suddenly urban themes bled into lyrics, electricity and amplification were added, the blues got loud, they were infused with groove, they became sophisticated. The West Coast blues were championed by T-Bone Walker; John Lee Hooker came from Motor City, but it was Chicago that produced the electric Muddy and Wolf and Elmore James, Little Walter, Koko Taylor. And so in America in the ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s, blues became the language of the urban black industrial working class.
Roots music drifted to the city. Woody Guthrie, the Reverend Gary Davis, Peggy Seeger, Josh White, Joan Baez — they ended up at The Gaslight and Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, New York City. As did this little frostbitten Jewish fella from Hibbing, Wyoming, a boy in search of destiny in the heart of Modern Gomorrah. John Hammond, the AR mastermind of Columbia Records, the man who discovered Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman and Count Basie said that when he first heard Bob Dylan he felt he incorporated the tradition of blues and jazz and folk.4 So, if you want to know how roots music has adapted and changed over time, listen to Bob.
So to summarise, the blues isn’t just one thing. Son House said that: ‘The blues ain’t nothin’ but a low down achin’ chill.’5 Sure, that’s one thing it is. But the blues can be a good time too, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy gave us a good time at the Melbourne Town Hall back in ’72 but they also gave us that low down achin’ chill. Roots can do that too; that’s the thing about folk culture, it comes in many forms, from historic Irish ballads, to bluegrass, jazz to reggae, R&B, Cajun … Dylan. At their essence blues and roots music gives voice to the disenfranchised and repressed; it’s the sound of the lived experience of people, and in Australia — and Melbourne in particular — we lapped up both genres.
Melbourne has always been a kind of magnet that has attracted all things American to our shores, be it Fords, fashion, language, movies, and of course music, be it jazz, country, folk and blues. Yeah, Melbourne loves American music, but we’re not American. Our blues and our roots didn’t come from ‘walking behind a mule back in slavery time …’ like it did for American blues singer Booker White6 our blues was coloured by the songs first heard on convict ships.
What we did was take the form and feeling of blues and roots music and adapt them to our cultural, social and political circumstances, and in the process we created something uniquely our own.
Jazz Roots — Dixie Blows into Melbourne
Jazz too was a musical form that came straight out of the United States. Like country music, jazz was made popular in Australia via the introduction of a radio in the early twentieth century. What we heard on our radiograms we adapted to our lived experience here in Australia, especially in Melbourne, and there is no better illustration of this process than the career of Graeme Bell, a career we will examine in detail in the following chapter — but first, some historical context.
Nineteenth-century Marvellous Melbourne was booming like a thunderstorm; we were the Chicago of the south, that’s what they said, a city that grew from nothing like Lodz or Odessa. It was gold that made Melbourne boom and bloom, gold that made it rich. Buildings rose from the grey clay, marvellous buildings like Parliament House, the State Library, the Exhibition Buildings, Treasury, the Courts, the Town Hall and Post Office. Melbourne was brash, boastful, and modern. Train lines snaked over empty fields, and newfangled cable trams ran down wide Victorian boulevards lined with Italianate terraces dripping with ornate, wrought-iron balconies. At that time many Melburnians were on
