At some point in my own education I discovered the limitations of just theorizing about the music, sitting in your room and mulling over lyrics you could never fully decipher or going to see Lightnin’ Hopkins perform at a college concert... The way that we had been introduced to the music, the blues was dead almost by definition because we had encountered it only on records, we never heard it on the radio, it wasn’t presented, like rock & roll, say, at shows. It seemed somehow as if it was something that had been tucked safely away in the past, even if in many cases it was the very recent past, a subject for historical study, however passionate that study might be.
The light only dawned for me with the coming of soul music... It has long been my firmest belief that in order to write, fiction, nonfiction, it doesn’t matter, you need to make the empathetic leap. But, really, in order to live you have to make that same leap, whether or not in certain harsh literary and political circles empathy has become a dirty word... And the music in almost every case sprang directly from the living tradition of the blues, and of course, the church, from which the blues ultimately sprang. There is no music like that music, Baldwin also wrote, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Leadbelly and so many others have testified, to rock.
Barney Kessel - Ain't Got No
Recorded in: London, November 1968
Released in: 1969
Genre: Jazz, Soul Jazz
"Kessel was rated the No. 1 guitarist in Esquire, DownBeat, and Playboy magazine polls between 1947 and 1960. Both Kay Musical Instrument Company and Gibson Guitars manufactured Barney Kessel artist signature guitars."
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