Blues Legends celebrated at Lincoln Center

If music is the international language, then the blues is the international emotion of music. "Nothing but a good man feeling bad, remembering what he lost or never had." is how the song goes; clearly a feeling that crosses all social lines, wealth, faith, ethnic background and felt by people of all walks of life. The blues is felt everywhere all over the world in much the same way.

This was made evident last night when the blues were celebrated at Avery Fischer Hall. In an event that could only be described as a crash course in the living history of the blues, Lincoln Center was treated to a progression of blues artists that traced both the bloodlines of the blues and the musical development of the blues throughout the years.

The program started with solo performances by "Honeyboy" Edwards and Robert Lockwood Jr., the closest living link and son of Robert Johnson, who performed "32-20 Blues." As blues music progressed and became more popular it moved from a music centered on a solo performer and blues bands became the norm. This shift was expressed as the original members of Howlin' Wolf's band, representing the Delta Blues style, and the original members of Muddy Water's band, representing blues' move to Chicago.

After a brief intermission the program moved to feature the second generation of blues legends, who are still actively touring and playing the blues in this era. Little Milton took the stage and was joined by our own Warren Haynes, and before long they were joined by Buddy Guy, who brought along John Mayer. This section of the evening showed how blues transformed from its traditional forms to help create the guitar oriented rock sound that define artists like Warren Haynes and John Mayer.

As Little Milton and Warren Haynes left the stage, Guy and Mayer further demonstrated this point by playing a non stop sampling of the blues' influence on popular music with a medley of hits including "Fever" popularized by Patsy Cline but written by Eddie Cooley and John Davenport, "Boom Boom" by John Lee Hooker, "Strange Brew" by Cream, and T-Bone Walker's "Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday's Just as Bad) made popular by The Allman Brothers Band, among others.

Perhaps the story of how Little Milton authored the nights closing song, and worthy anthem for the blues "The Blues Is Alright" best demonstrates the power of the blues to transcend any situation. While touring in Europe with a new band Little Milton had trouble teaching his guitarist to play a particular rhythm comp for one of his songs. So in the evening, during the performance he would work with the guitarist to steer him into the correct pattern by ad-libbing some sort of vocalization to emphasize the down beats. First this started out with humming, something along the lines of John Lee Hooker's style but as it developed into "Hey Hey... Hey Hey" he found that even though the audiences didn't speak English as their first language they would pick up on the chant and repeat it back to him. That is how the call and response section became the song "The Blues Is Alright."

Truly the universal language of music.