Struggle is no stranger to the blues, and the already marginal genre — less than 1.3 percent of all music sales — is being forced even farther into the cracks as chains like Tower Records reduce their stock of older titles and independent distributors go out of business. And yet, the blues has always found joy in the caldron of adversity. So when this year’s Handy Awards weekend, May 22 through 25 in Memphis, unfolded into an ebullient celebration, it was once again a testament to the indomitable spirit of the music and its players.
The highlight was the annual W.C. Handy Blues Awards ceremony on May 23 at the Orpheum Theatre, though another sign of the times was the less-than-capacity crowd. Backstage at the gilded landmark, which is perched on a hill over the Mississippi near the end of Beale Street, a who’s who of the blues socialized: Ike Turner, B.B. King, Charlie Musselwhite, host Dr. John, Little Milton, Marcia Ball, Bobby Rush, Alligator Records president Bruce Iglauer, Roscoe Gordon, Sam Phillips, Ruth Brown, Carla Thomas, Otis Taylor, James Montgomery, and many more.
The night’s stage-stealing performance was a reunion of Sun Records alumni B.B. King (who won Entertainer of the Year for the fourth time in a row), Milton (Soul-Blues Album and Male Artist winner), Turner (Comeback Album), and Gordon in tag-team jams on King’s "3 O’Clock Blues" and "Let the Good Times Roll." Just before King took the stage, Turner delivered a blow-torch version of his guitar instrumental "Prancin’," charging to the front to weave a series of unpredictable melodies and whammy-bar howls, wagging his tongue and dancing like a 14-year-old high on sex and rock and roll. It was a good-natured throwdown to the 76-year-old King, the snow-capped Mount Everest of the style, who joked about the 70-year-old Turner’s Dorian Gray looks.
The sole disappointment was Chef Chris and his Nairobi Trio, a Detroit foursome who narrowly beat Boston’s Nicole Nelson Band in the Blues Foundation’s International Blues Challenge competition in February. All provincialism aside, the group’s music was strong, mixing Delta honk with avant skronk, but their 10-minute "Gumbo" was hookless drivel. As usual, a host of New Englanders were nominated, including Mighty Sam McClain, Duke Robillard, Toni Lynn Washington, Ronnie Earl, and Montgomery, but only the Roomful of Blues horn section copped a big blue-note statue, for Best Instrumentalist — Horns. Mississippi hill-country bluesman R.L. Burnside won his first Handys, for Traditional Male Artist and Traditional Album. Twenty-three-year-old Shemekia Copeland took Contemporary Female Artist of the Year, and Buddy Guy was the night’s big winner, with Contemporary Male Artist, Guitarist, and Contemporary Album scores.
The celebration had begun the night before with a Blues Hall of Fame dinner in the ballroom of the Old-South-luxurious Peabody Hotel. That was capped by the induction of veteran singer Ruth Brown and Sun Records architect Sam Phillips. Brown, as usual, charmed the crowd with her sassy wit; she also announced she’s about to make a new album with Rhode Island guitarist/producer Robillard. Phillips, still leonine after all these years, offered a stirring discourse that invoked the name of Martin Luther King Jr. and detailed his own efforts to cross the color line and promote human understanding with music in the Jim Crow era.
For four days, grand music seem to leak from almost every crevice of the clubs and theaters in the Beale Street district, which usually hosts cover bands and caters to boozing revelers who’d rather hear "Mustang Sally" than the likes of Best New Artist winner Otis Taylor. The Colorado musician, who held court at Blues City Café for two nights, dispensed a blend of John Lee Hooker–filtered Africanisms and psychedelic sonics. His hypnotic sound and lyrics of discrimination, retribution, and, jubilation evoked powerful ghosts.
So did a May 24 concert at Beale’s New Daisy Theatre in tribute to Howlin’ Wolf, where former Muddy Waters guitarslinger Bob Margolin, Wolf’s MVP guitarist Hubert Sumlin, and — oddly enough — vocalist David Johansen tapped the powerful vein of the late blues giant’s legacy. And B.B. King held court elegantly at the Beale Street club that bears his name.
Sometimes the most wonderful moments were intimate. The capper may have been the discovery of Louisiana Red, the expatriate bluesman who performs fairly often in Cambridge, sitting in the Hampton Inn’s lobby at 2 a.m. softly singing and playing acoustic slide guitar for an enraptured Keb’ Mo’. As the younger generation of blues listened, Red whispered and cried through spontaneous stories of how his brother once burned his home in a fit of jealousy, and how he became orphaned as a child — his slide wailing in sympathy with the honest pain in his voice. That was the blues as pure heart-to-heart communication, and all the volume of the world’s biggest stages couldn’t touch the power of it.
