1930s-1950s
Folk and folk-blues
Topical folk music became popular in America in the 1930s with the Depression
and the social ills
that it brought. Its most famous exponent was Woody Guthrie. Certain
blues artists as well,
however, particularly Leadbelly, may be categorized as folk or folk
blues since unlike pure acoustic
blues performers, their repertoire included blues songs as just one
of many styles.
This style of music had little impact directly on the Stones. Yet it
was very important as an influence
on the blues background in which they evolved. At art school, the music
Keith was exposed to, just
as he was starting to play guitar, was this type of blues, rather than
the electric Chicago stuff the Stones later
cut their teeth on. In a similar way, when the Stones joined up in 1962
around the Alexis Korner R&B
scene in London, the blues they were often exposed to often retained this
strong folk or folk blues influence. The Stones eventually rebelled and
defined themselves against this particular way of treating the blues, opting
for a more electric and rhythmically aggressive format.
Born in Georgia, Fuller is a guitar player and vocalist (and harmonica
player) who was important in
helping along the acoustic blues revival of the 1950s and '60s. His
own success came in writing and
performing folk and blues tunes in the San Francisco area in those
same decades.
Fuller's folk-blues, like Guthrie's and
Leadbelly's,
was not the stuff that the Stones were into. He was
a very influential figure, however, in the art school environment in
which Keith grew up in his teens
and where he formed his early guitar playing.
(O)nce I
started learning guitar, I began attending art school, second year. The
atmosphere
was very
free. You'd walk into the john to take a pee and there'd be 3 guys sitting
around
playing
a guitar, doing Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott stuff. I was getting
into
the blues
- Big Bill Broonzy, Jesse Fuller - by hearing these guys play.
Like Leadbelly, Oklahoma-born Guthrie, though he is probably the greatest
folk singer ever (along
with Dylan), is not
much of an influence on the Stones. Guthrie is the incarnation of the topical
folk
artist, composing politicized folk material in the 1930s and 40s that
defined the genre. He himself had
been influenced by early country artists like the Carter Family and
Jimmie
Rodgers. He came to be
an important influence on Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, in addition
to all the folk artists of the
1950s and 1960s.
Guthrie is worth mentioning, however, because he was a figure, along
with Leadbelly and Broonzy,
whose music Keith was exposed to often during his years at art school
in the late 1950s, during the
time he was getting into guitar playing.
I was 15 and there are kids there 19, in their
last year. A lot of music goes on at art
schools. That's where I got hung up on guitar,
because there were a lot of guitar players
around then, playing anything from Big Bill
Broonzy to Woody Guthrie. I also got hung up
on Chuck Berry, though what I was playing
was the art school stuff, the Guthrie sound and
blues. Not really blues, mostly ballads and
Jesse Fuller stuff.
Leadbelly is a great figure in Afro-American music, but he represents
somewhat of an outsider in
terms of his influence on the blues. His music is more typically defined
as folk-blues, since he sang
not only blues but many types of musical styles, including spirituals
and minstrel songs. Born in
Louisiana, Leadbelly spent many years in prison as a convicted murderer
and on his release was
discovered by Library of Congress archivist John Lomax, who recorded
him and made him the first
Afro-American blues artist to be appreciated by white audiences. His
influence, however, was
stronger on the folk audience (Woody Guthrie,
Pete Seeger, eventually Bob
Dylan), than on the
blues circuit.
It was this type of acoustic, folkish blues that Keith was first exposed
to at art school, and which
was also still a discernible influence on Alexis
Korner and his musicians in the early 1960s. As with
Broonzy, he may have appreciated it but his greatest passion, and the
Stones', lied elsewhere, with
rock and roll and electric Chicago blues especially.