Bright Lights, Big City Blues America

It's the sound of the 20th century.

A music created by the poorest people in the richest nation on earth.

The blues.

We now hear it as the root note of rock and roll.

But it first appeared in the early 1900s.

A black pop format performed by modern men and women using the latest media.

Later generations heard the blues as authentic folk music

expressing the pain of an oppressed people.

Over the last 100 years it has crossed borders from south to north.

From black to white.

From weak to powerful.

You can have the blues anywhere, any time.

This is the story of how the blues rose up to define a nation and soundtrack a century.

And how, for generations of its performers, curators and audiences

the meaning of the blues kept on changing.

1940s America.

A nation is booming.

But for black southerners life is the same as ever.

I wonder will I ever get back home...

A country remains racially and economically divided.

A long time ago. Been a long time.

Most of the time in the southern state where you went to get food.

You had to go round to the one that said Coloured Only or Black Only.

My family didn't have nothing, I didn't have nothing.

Just picked cotton all day and you eat to live and live to eat.

I don't know how they raised us like that but that's what it was all about.

I thought that was a way of life.

One room for these people and no room for the other people.

One door for these people, no door. Totally segregated.

"Mechanical cotton pickers at work in the Mississippi fields.

This is the first commercial acreage of cotton produced entirely by machinery."

The mechanisation of the cotton farming industry

meant that vast numbers of cotton pickers began to search for new work.

So the African American south began to look north.

Chicago.

In the morning, eight o'clock. Chicago.

732 miles from here.

Don't you want to go...

It was sort of like the promised land.

Down south on the direct siege, you know what I mean?

And if you were picking cotton for 50 cent a day you come to Chicago,

they was paying 50 cent an hour.

The trains all led that way and that's where the money was.

That's why they went there. Nothing simpler than that. Economics.

Chicago was the place. There was a stock yard, steel mills, domestic work.

IT was a panacea for a black person.

Masses of migrants from the sparsely populated rural south

were now living freer lives in Chicago's west and south sides.

A black southern fiesta was brewing

and the soundtrack would be every black southerner's favourite party music, the blues.

Here I am driving around and I see signs.

Elmore James. Tuesday night.

Or Muddy Waters this weekend.

Howling Wolf. I couldn't believe it.

I couldn't visualise that many musician.

That many entertainers.

That many juke joints.

That many ladies in the whole bit was in Chicago in one block.

God, I thought I was in heaven, man!

This scene wasn't about the good old days.

Modern black audiences required a modern black music

and a generation of forward-thinking blues artists were emerging,

eager to leave the past behind.

At the vanguard of this scene,

one record label in particular was blazing a blues trail.

Every good record that Mick and I heard was coming out of Chicago.

And it was basically coming out of Chess.

Chess honed us in on Chicago blues.

And we found in there such a wealth of material.

You didn't really need to look much further.

Art was never in the picture for the artist or my family.

It was about making hits which made money.

The Chess family came from Poland.

My father didn't like working for people so started with a liquor store in the black neighbourhood.

He then opened a corner tavern with a jukebox.

Not only did he see them buying alcohol, he saw them putting nickels in the jukebox.

Three years later started Chess Records with my uncle. 1950.

Muddy Waters was their first real star.

I think I'm responsible for Chicago blues.

I think I'm the man who set Chicago up for the real blues.

Muddy had that voice and that very sparse way of playing things.

The perfectly framed voice. Even talking about it I still get the chills up the back.

Well, I'm gonna wake up

Won't be back no more

In 1948, Muddy Waters released I Can't Be Satisfied.

This electrified take on the down home blues sold out overnight.

Can't Be Satisfied.

This is the country coming into the city.

And the city sort of melding in to the country.

And I think at the same time Muddy didn't know what he was up to there.

Suddenly a sound can be born in the studio.

Muddy had been playing an acoustic guitar in Mississippi

now he's in Chicago where things are faster, more modern.

There's electricity! It's a whole different world.

So it's just a natural progression, to get an amplifier and plug in.

Electric guitar.

Muddy put a band together to convey this new electric sound.

Blues was entering a new era.

When blues musicians first began playing electric guitars or amplified instruments,

it was just basically louder.

Over a relatively short period of time they discovered electrification

could create its own sounds and tones that it could have more attack.

That could have more sustain, have intentional distortion.

And all of these things became part of the language of blues recording.

Those hot steamy clubs were the first amplified loud music.

Guys that got their first pay cheque on Friday, women in red silk dresses.

Grinding and bumping. This was an amazing time for black culture in Chicago.

This harder slicker urban blues was perfectly distilled

in the revolutionary amplified harmonica sounds

of a former Muddy Waters band member Little Walter.

Walter was a little wild.

You had to be careful. He always wants fights about something like that.

He was a tough guy.

He was a little guy, they didn't call him Little Walter for nothing,

but pound for pound he was one tough little dude.

You wouldn't want to mess with him.

Boom boom out go the lights

With his club hit Boom Boom Out Go The Lights,

Little Walter would usher the blues into some psychologically unsettling territory.

It's about this lady that he was in love with.

And she had left him for some other man,

but he said if you ever get her in your sight,

boom boom, he going to shoot her, that's what he talking about.

Boom boom out go the lights

The woman might be all you had.

And if somebody's hitting on her,

he ain't gonna stand for it.

There'll be some cutting and shooting going on.

These bluesmen's new sound was as tough as the city that spawned it.

Despite being a mecca for African Americans,

life in Chicago could be as brutal as the south they had left behind.

You had bad luck

A long long way from home

You had bad luck

Honey long long way from home

Well now since I know you love me

Honey love will keep you going

There was all kinds of problems with drinking, with early drug use, cocaine and things.

And there was a lot of physical abuse.

These were people trying to survive in a white culture

that was not that accepting to black people.

This guy walked in the bar early in the morning with a shopping bag.

And the guy ordered two bottles of beer.

And the guy set them up and went back to work

and all of a sudden he raised his head from filling a box out.

The guy took the woman's head out and set it beside the other beer.

He had a drink. Just a woman's head. He had cut her head off at that club.

But it wasn't just Chicago that was modernising the blues.

280 miles east of the city a dirty new groove was brewing in Detroit.

John Lee made no compromises.

John Lee was John Lee.

Here come John Lee Hooker with Boogie Chillen'. I'm like saying what is this?

Just that rhythm.

HE HUMS

I'm like, Oh my God.

With Boogie Chillen', Mississippi migrant John Lee Hooker

took his primitive modern sound to the top of the black R&B charts in 1949.

The way he's kind of talking it too,

it's like this conversation.

I was walking down Hastings Street

Everybody was talking about

Henry's swing club

In Boogie Chillem' he's talking about Detroit.

Everybody's having a ball, drinking beer and wine.

I got there, I said, yes, people.

It just goes on and on. It's like a narrative of him in Detroit.

If you're playing with John Lee,

it was, OK, what key are we in, John?

And he'd hit the bottom string on his guitar.

That one.

It could be F sharp, it could be E flat.

That was it, whatever his guitar was tuned to, that was it.

Boom boom boom boom

Gonna shoot you right down

Right off your feet

Take you home with me

Put you in my house

Boom boom boom boom

There is nothing more erotic than John Hooker and a guitar when he's playing in that groove.

When you talking to me

It's treacherous how deep that kind of groove goes.

There's nobody that can cut as deep.

And he's somebody who didn't lose any of the feel of the really low down Mississippi Delta

when he moved to Detroit.

He electrified it.

Brilliant, wonderful way to express blues.

He's unlike anybody else.

Nobody sounds like John Lee Hooker.

For black audiences, the industrial northern cities

were now producing some of the most exciting new music in the country.

But back down south on the banks of the Mississippi,

life continued at a different pace.

Lay me down padded on your floor

Lay me down

Lay me padded down soft and low

Lay me padded on your floor

Memphis was a dirt roads crossroads.

Everything was smaller, everything was quieter.

In the north they make cars, here the big factories make tyres.

In Memphis Tennessee a pioneering southern record producer

by the name of Sam Phillips had grand musical designs of his own.

We're here in Sun recording studio.

The amazing thing about Sun is how small it is.

This little shoe box, you can't believe the sounds that came out of here.

And in large part that's because of the way Sam designed the room

with a ceiling that is made to still the sound.

So it's not flying all about the room.

I think the records are testament to his success.

A lot of people holler about I don't like no blue

but when you ain't got no money

and can't pay your house rent and can't buy you no food,

you damn sure got the blues.

In 1951 Sam Phillips cut a record

by Mississippi native Chester Arthur Burnett aka Howling Wolf.

His debut, How Many More Years,

was instantly noticed by Leonard Chess, who signed him up immediately.

Howling Wolf began with the great record producer, Sam Phillips.

He called my father and said, "I've got a great artist here."

My father heard it right away.

It was the kind of artist my father would jump at. Original, different.

Wrote his own material.

You can't belive what I say

And you better believe what I say

You wanna set up crazy

That you just wanna have your way

And you can't do that with me

His voice it was, wow.

It was so, I still feel it, from the first time I saw him.

Oh, stop your train darling

I'll cope all right

Don't you hear me crying

Oooh

Oooh

I don't think there's a person that can listen to Howling Wolf's music

and not be absolutely awestruck.

The enormity of the power of his singing style

and his raw and his ferocity.

Oh moving in

Wolf was probably the most intimidating and in a great way overwhelming

for a young woman or for any age.

He stands as the most powerful of all the blues singers, I think.

I think Sam Phillips had a commercial sensibility.

And I'm sure it must have dawned on him that if a white person were singing this music

he would get an audience for it.

Sam Phillips kept up a steady stream of blues releases

with the likes of BB King, Bobby Blue Bland and Junior Parker

until 1954 when he struck gold with a white boy

singing an Arthur Crudup blues track.

Well, that's all right, Mama

That's all right with you

That's all right, Mama

Just any way you do

Things changed when Elvis Presley walked in that door.

To me Elvis hits eternity with the first record That's All Right Mama.

Elvis took that black art and embraced it and sang it to a white audience.

And became a portal through which white people could experience black culture.

He snuck across an invisible racial barrier.

All these rhythms got smuggled in this very attractive young man

and once he unleashed that

there was no putting that back in the box

and putting the lid on it and locking it back up.

A tectonic shift was stirring in American pop culture.

Musical and racial categories were becoming redundant.

Blues and country, black and white were all morphing into a brand new sound.

Rock and roll.

So when an aspiring blues performer Chuck Berry walked into Chess Records

with a cover of a country song, Leonard Chess's eyes lit up.

Ida Red, Ida Red

I'm a plumb fool about Ida Red

My father and my uncle had that ear for something different.

And as soon as they heard that Ida Red song,

they told him change the lyric, come back.

Maybelline, why can't you be true

Oh Maybelline

Why can't you be true

I remember hearing Maybelline when it came out on the radio.

It struck me as like that's a hillbilly song.

Chuck Berry's a black guy doing a hillbilly song.

This is cool!

When I first heard Chuck Berry I thought he was a white person.

All my friends thought he was white.

And all the girls thought he was white too.

It changed everything with Chuck. We never had a record like that.

We never sold records to white people before.

This was a big change.

People were hearing Chuck Berry records and thought they were hearing a white person.

People were hearing Elvis Presley records and thought they were hearing a black person.

Oh Maybelline, why can't you be true

Oh Maybelline, why can't you be true

You started back doing the things you used to do

Rock and roll was musical desegregation.

And this new mood began to echo the racial politics of the time.

In 1954, the US Supreme Court

ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional.

The early rumblings of the civil rights movement were beginning to stir

and for African Americans this was a time to look toward the future.

This new movement would call for a new soundtrack.

Blues ended for young black people. They began to buy soul music.

And then Motown hit really strong.

It was just a cultural change, a new sound for a new generation.

They equate blues with slavery.

They wanted to try to upgrade themselves.

Back in the 60s when I talked to black people,

especially like when I was in jail, about the blues,

they said don't talk that slave shit to me.

They was uninterested.

They didn't listen to what they called plantation music, stuff like that.

By the end of the 50s the hits had dried up for even the most famous blues artists.

I leave you honey

My time has just run out

Young black Americans had left the blues for dead.

I leave you running

My time has just run out

You never wanted me baby

I've come to find out

I worked with black guys in the factory

and we'd sit there on the break

and I'd say something like, "I went to hear Muddy Waters."

"Muddy Waters? What's wrong with you? That's old folks' music."

The blues had been largely abandoned by its own audience.

So when Muddy Waters turned up at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960

he was yesterday's news.

But against all odds, in front of a largely white audience

his set went down a storm.

Got my mojo working

But it just don't work on you

Got my mojo working

But it just don't work on you

He plays his electric blues in front of a fully white audience.

He does this great performance of I Got My Mojo.

Got my mojo working

Got my mojo working

Got my mojo working

Got my mojo working

Got my mojo working but it just don't work on you

All of a sudden we're getting tons of album orders from Boston.

And that was the big turning point.

That's when we noticed white people admiring the blues in album form.

Suddenly the blues looked like it might have a future after all and its future looked white.

At the dawn of the 60s

a group of white educated blues enthusiasts

were beginning to look back past rock and roll

and the electric blues that had spawned it.

They heard something deeper in the blues and began a quest to unearth the real thing.

In the footsteps of pioneering musicologist Alan Lomax,

and at the forefront of this new generation of blues hunters, was Sam Charters.

It was an incredible adventure.

This was one of the most exciting periods of my life.

I set out 1959 with my wife in the car.

And I just set off and went to Memphis.

And from that moment on one singer led me to another.

Sam Charters set about documenting his mission

to track down these obscure, long-forgotten bluesmen

with a book, The Country Blues,

as well as filming and recording his discoveries.

What I wanted to get was the sense of wonder I had

that I could knock on a door

and the door could open and there would be a man.

Wrinkled but still active and everything.

He'd say, "Come on in, I'll play it for you."

My feeling was get every voice I can, get every verse I can.

Get every word I can.

But this wasn't just a romantic musical quest, it was a political one too.

We were on the other side of a barrier.

The racial divide was so total.

That we had no conception of what society was on the other side.

And to discover the fear, the level of danger.

I started to go by train from New York down to Memphis.

The train got south of Washington

and it stopped in the middle of a field.

And every black person got up and walked to a car at the back.

1960!

What on earth was going on?

What I was attempting to do was to say, "Listen! Listen.

Here's something beautiful."

And if you listen to that you'll understand the human being who is singing it.

Sam Charters' book, The Country Blues, and also the LP he produced to go with it,

really kind of changed the world in terms of blues.

Suddenly a generation was inspired to go out and find people like Mississippi John Hurts,

Skip James, Sun House, Booker White.

Really Sam Charters started all of that.

What we now call the blues revival.

Charters was not alone in his mission.

Other white blues enthusiasts like Dick Waterman

were also searching for these forgotten old southern blues musicians.

This is a clarion call for racial equality in the United Sates.

Especially among the young left Liberals.

This opened the door for racial equality on a musical level.

And nothing fits that better than an old black man.

People were finding all these old artists that we assumed were only these mythical characters.

Coming out of an old scratchy recording.

And they were going to the rural south and finding they were perfectly alive and well

and still performing in their communities.

Before you knew it, Sun House was back, Skip James was back.

All of these people long thought to be dead

were now suddenly back and performing.

These elderly, often penniless bluesmen

who hadn't made a living out of music for nearly three decades

were brought north and improbably given a new lease of life.

And to their new white audiences

this was the unmediated sound of the blues as a pure American folk art.

In 1964 everybody was gathered for the Newport Folk Festival.

They just brought Skip James from the hospital.

And nobody knew if he could sing.

I had to simply introduce Skip James as this great singer,

and turn the microphone over to him.

This man sits down and fingers the guitar

and he hits the first step, he brings his head up,

and he sings, "I'd rather be the devil than to be that woman's man."

And there was a gasp. Wow!

I'd rather be the devil

I'd rather be the devil

Than be that woman's man

I thought I was gonna faint right there on the spot.

You lay down all your love

You know this day that I sing

And boy he was back!

Just an explosion! Who is this guy?

The woman that I love

It was just amazing to be a young white college age kid

getting to interact and learn so much

from these what really I would consider old masters.

You know he got lucky

He'll get her back again

These were people who had learned their music and created their music by living it.

It was first person music. People singing about their own lives.

It was people who lived very hard lives.

I was a comfortable middle-class kid.

When I come to her again

Backstage at the blues festivals that I got to hang out at,

rightfully so it was a big party,

and Dick would tell me don't let so-and-so have too much.

Sun House in particular was very famous.

If he didn't have his airplane bottle of vodka

sometimes he couldn't remember his lyrics.

You know I'm so sorry today, girl

Than I ever know, girl

He had to have some to jog his memory

but if he had one too many then he wouldn't remember them.

But when you give love

They never had any idea what was happening.

There was a strange audience of people they hadn't been allowed to look in their eyes.

And suddenly here was this audience.

And they had no idea what they were hearing, they just knew that the audience seemed to like it.

So they did it.

Can you imagine the culture shock?

You had to take your hat off, step out into the street,

be careful of your speech.

And the script flips over.

You're 67 years old, here are these white kids.

"Oh my God, you're so-and-so! I know all the lyrics!"

And then it's like...

They didn't know what it was.

The meaning of the blues had changed.

What had been a black pop phenomenon till the 60s

had now been reframed as a music of pain and alienation from the old Delta.

And these old musicians, practically unknown when first recorded,

were now performing songs that spoke to this new white vision.

There is a yearning on the part of wealthier, whiter middle-class audience

for something that is primal.

To do with the rhythms of life as it used to be known.

That we lost in the industrial revolution.

The Delta was a vibrant place.

Muddy Waters left for Chicago on the train.

By the time the blues hunters turned up in the early 60s,

those trains had stopped running a long time ago and the tracks were grown over with grass.

This was a world that seemed like a modernity had never come near it.

Understandably it was hard for anyone who went there

to imagine that it had ever been any other way.

But for this new generation of fans, one enigmatic country blues artist in particular,

would come to embody all of the darkness and gothic mystery of the Mississippi Delta.

There were a number of black people. especially ministers, who were very religious.

They thought if you could go to a crossroad where two dirt roads intersect, at midnight...

They'd sit there with two roads going on each side of you

and the one behind you at midnight.

And you play the best you can.

And you hear somebody coming up behind you playing guitar.

Don't look around, Satan will walk up behind you.

Tap you on the shoulder, you hand him over the guitar,

and once he plays that guitar you have made a deal with the devil,

you have sold your soul to the devil.

When you get up the next day, you can play anything you want on guitar.

That's the story I heard when I was a kid.

Early morning

You knocked up on my door

You stand at a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta, at night.

And tell me you're not scared.

You stand in the dark, it's an isolated place.

There's panthers still in the Mississippi Delta.

And I said hello

I believe it's time to go

Robert Johnson. The bluesman who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.

This myth grew to fill a void of historical fact.

He was the ultimate blues mystery

and became the most seductive blues rediscovery of the 60s.

Robert Johnson had always been kind of just this mystery.

We knew nothing about him.

Except we had heard he was dead.

But one blues hunter would make a breakthrough.

People love myths or they love stories.

Johnson's the perfect man. Nothing was known about him.

I first started asking about Robert Johnson around 1964.

But there was very little information on Johnson.

And in 1965 I went to the Department of Vital Statistics in Mississippi.

To search for a death certificate on Robert Johnson.

And this is the death certificate I received on the 11th day of January 1968.

The man is dead in August 1938. At age 27.

But the death certificate caused a lot of controversy because no one knew where he died.

Some say he died in a bar room brawl,

others that he was the victim of syphilis

or maybe he was poisoned and died howling like a dog.

Even until recently the whereabouts of his grave was much disputed.

Here we are at the grave site

of the legendary Robert Johnson in Greenwood, Mississippi.

This is the place where he took sick and died in 1938.

For a long time people weren't even sure where he was buried.

Up until just a few years ago

there were three different places that would tell you they had the remains of Robert Johnson.

But now this has become the official location

of the body of Robert Johnson.

I think the reason why Johnson has become so interesting and so famous to us

is because we don't know a lot about him.

He's really kind of a phantom.

All this began in 1961 when Robert Johnson, King Of The Delta Blues Singers, was released.

While the search for forgotten bluesmen continued,

a dead artist virtually unknown in his own lifetime

was suddenly being hailed as the greatest blues artist ever.

The record cover, the picture, was the black poet.

The idea of this lone figure in his own world.

He's hunched over his guitar, he isn't looking out at the audience.

He's looking into his own soul.

Robert has become that portal figure

for a whole white world to enter into the black experience.

If you were someone like the Rolling Stones and you had already heard Muddy Waters,

this just sounded like where all of that came from.

But with a complexity in the guitar work that you'd never heard.

It felt like the roots of everything.

You better come home

The structure of the songs are so unique.

Come Out In My Kitchen. These are not the everyday blues.

He raised the bar.

There's visuals in that music.

Can't you hear that wind howl?

HE HUMS

You can feel it and you can see it.

It's so beautiful.

Johnson somehow crystallised the whole point of it.

What could be done. Everybody still reaching for that bar.

He was the perfect artist.

When rock came along and you wanted to understand where it came from.

The rediscovery of Delta blues artists like Robert Johnson

may have been making waves among the folk festival and coffee house crowds.

But the sound of young black America was now Motown

and for mainstream audiences, the blues remained a dead music.

So when a group of scruffy London blues fanatics arrived in the land of their idols in 1964,

they were confused by what they found.

I'm the little red rooster

By the time we got to America we were well aware that these guys were not in the mainstream.

We couldn't understand why

especially when we got into an American cars,

and they got 15 channels, and there's always a blues channel,

a black channel playing this stuff.

You know, "Why do you want to listen to this?"

You know, they just didn't go down that end of the dial.

Mick and I and the boys would walk in in '64 to juke joints in Mississippi.

And be considered a novelty of course!

But at the same time a pleasant novelty.

And plied with drinks and other stuff.

If we went into a white club we'd be treated like that because of the hair.

I remember driving Brian Jones back to their hotel and people screaming "Homo! Homo!"

cos he had shoulder-length hair!

Are you guys wearing wigs?

As part of their blues pilgrimage

the Rolling Stones recorded at Chess,

where they came face to face with their idols.

I just wanna make love to you

I'm only 21. I'd died and gone to heaven.

Everybody was very supportive

cos you feel you're walking into the lion's den at that age.

And to come out with everybody's goodwill is yeah, OK.

Now we can talk!

They were drinking hard liquor out of the bottle. Jack Daniels out of the bottle, you know.

And the black artists would pour it in a water glass and sip it, it was a different style.

I know a lot more about the blues by meeting the people

than you would by listening.

I slept at Muddy's house.

I woke up at Howling Wolf's but that's another story!

When the Stones broke big a year later, America was suddenly all ears.

We just thought more people should hear the blues.

And then as we got popular we found we were more in a position to do that.

We were missionaries in a way!

An invitation to perform on a top teenage TV show called Shindig

presented them with an irresistible opportunity.

I was at the 1965 Shindig taping.

Where the Rolling Stones would not be on Shindig unless Howling Wolf could be on.

ABC thought it was an animal act!

A howling wolf? Sure! Whatever you like.

Bring a howling wolf.

They had no idea who Howling Wolf was.

And probably wished they didn't.

These are tight white cats from LA and it's the early 60s.

It's about time you shut up and we had Howling Wolf on stage.

How many more years

Since I have let you go feel right

How many more years

The audience loved Howling Wolf.

And they were like, he overwhelmed them.

The Stones had managed to smuggle a 54-year-old, six foot three inch, 21 stone

forgotten Mississippi bluesman onto primetime television.

Mainstream America sat up and watched the Wolf smash through a racial barrier.

From that a lot of guys who felt that their music was being drifted off

because of Motown and R&B

found a whole new audience.

They went and told the world who these great people was.

And then that's why white America was saying let me go see.

The Rolling Stones were the first pop stars to insist they were playing the blues.

With them a new wave of American white kids

picked up electric guitars and started playing blues licks.

I didn't know any white people who listened to blues music before the English bands come over.

All of a sudden everybody's name was a blues band.

All of a sudden it was like Santander Blues Band.

Or Steve Miller Blues Band.

But for those who still saw blues as an acoustic folk art

these electric blues bands were imposters.

So when pioneering musicologist Alan Lomax

introduced the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at Newport in 1965

these two opposing visions of the blues would collide.

I think amongst the white folk fans

there was the feeling that if you didn't have an acoustic guitar,

if you had an electric guitar,

you weren't the real thing.

In 1965 we went to Newport.

It was the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Alan Lomax, who was the curator of the workshop,

just took great offence at the fact that these guys were plugged in and playing loud.

He didn't like the idea of this group at all.

They were electric.

Lomax said you've heard the real thing, you've heard blues musicians from the south play this music.

Now we're gonna hear some kids from Chicago

with the help of all these amplifiers up here

try and play the blues.

They just tore it up. They were bad to the bone.

And there was me standing on the sidelines

just almost jumping out of my skin with my friends

because we were so knocked out by the sound they were putting out.

Albert Grossman, who was managing the Paul Butterfield Band,

said, "That was a real chicken shit introduction."

And the next thing they're throwing punches.

We looked over and these two big old guys are engaged in fisticuffs!

And rolling around in the dirt there on the side of the stage.

That was an interesting indication of how the old guard

decided they were going to be the people who defined what the blues were.

The blues represented a certain kind of idealised Americana.

It represented a kind of communitarian vision.

Putting electric guitar on it was like sticking a dollar sign in front of it.

He was upset because these people with their decades and centuries honed style of making music

and singing were just kind of being swept aside.

What fascinated Alan was where the music came from.

I don't like the word pure but I like the word basic.

That they were finding all the original forms of the blues.

But then I'm not sure he liked what happened to it.

Because it did partly become commercialised.

You can understand, he's from his era.

He's been honking around these penitentiaries

looking for the original thing.

Looking for fool's gold.

Preserving this vision of an authentic acoustic blues

was rapidly becoming an irrelevance.

A new generation of white American blues rock fans

were rediscovering the electric blues greats.

One bluesman who had no nostalgia for acoustic guitars

and depression-era Mississippi was BB King.

His urbane uptown blues sound instantly struck a chord with this new breed of fan.

In my opinion BB King is the greatest blues singer, guitar player, that ever recorded.

And his longevity speaks for that.

He had class and dignity and that's what white people wanted to see.

You never said, BB King, see a funky show.

You'll see something outrageous.

You went to hear very finely honed, beautifully played music.

He just exudes this quality of, like, royalty.

I think he's raised blues to be something that's full of pride.

While BB King's refined brand of blues was filling up auditoriums across the States,

the influence of the blues was beginning to underpin new musical directions.

As the 60s became the 70s, its licks, attitude and mythology

evolved into the foundations of rock culture.

Songs well over three decades old,

by the likes of Robert Johnson and Skip James,

were being reimagined as a brand new sound.

Blues rock became hard rock.

Hard rock became heavy metal.

What was left of the blues seemed lost in cliche and excess.

But by the dawn of the 80s a new wave of musicians and audiences

began to cast their eyes back past the bloated beast of rock,

and in doing so kick started another blues revival.

The success of new artists like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray

proved beyond question that the blues was a music with vast commercial potential.

Now even yuppies liked the blues.

There was a burst of interest in blues in the 80s.

Especially led by Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Stevie was at the forefront of the 80s and early 90s blues revival.

There was a resurgence of the blues

and in R&B the music was a little more simple, more accessible.

I think that the public heard it as something new.

From out of the shadows and into this bright new musical landscape

emerged a familiar figure with an unfamiliar sound.

It turned a lot of people on to blues who ordinarily would never have listened to blues.

Or know anything about it.

Santander wanted to cut John Lee Hooker with The Healer.

And that was a big thing. I was so proud of him.

Because you couldn't forget him from Boogie Chillem' but he was kind of being forgotten.

The Healer made 72-year-old John Lee Hooker into a global megastar.

It was great for John.

It was great for blues.

Blues a healer all over the world

Blues a healer

He appreciated the success.

He dressed nice, people knew him.

As a man coming from Mississippi and moving up and being successful,

I think that was it.

That was as good as it gets.

When I saw who was going to collaborate on that record I couldn't wait to be part of it.

And luckily I'm In The Mood hadn't been chosen and that was my favourite song.

I'm in the mood

Oh

He and I start going together without any rehearsal.

It was a moment that will remain a highlight for me.

Now now no now now

I try but you love nobody

-I hear you call

-Nobody nobody

It felt exactly like it sounds.

And it just went on and on and the end of it

I literally asked for a towel, that's how deep it was.

I wanna thank you, baby.

The revival of John Lee Hooker in the early 90s

pointed to a wider trend in American culture.

The blues was now firmly embedded at the heart of the great American narrative,

and big brands were quick to take note.

I think advertisers use the blues because it speaks to rough authenticity.

To being genuine.

To being unvarnished.

These are jeans worn by working people who are out there in the real world,

Not slick. It's anti-slick music.

There was a big campaign going on at that time.

It was hip to be blue!

Blues was now being used to sell everything from jeans to beer.

Now of course blues is being used in Viagara commercials.

Why would you let something like erectile dysfunction get in your way?

Isn't it time you talked to your doctor about Viagara?

I'm very scared this is the new blues demographic!

But if I eventually need an ED mediation,

I'm using the one that uses the blues in commercials!

Seek immediate medical help for an erection lasting more than four hours.

In 2012, President Obama hosted an evening of blues at the White House.

After 100 years, a music created by a generation of Americans who had nothing

was being used as the ultimate emblem of the American dream.

It's a once in a lifetime and I still pinch myself now.

And say is that really you?

That's a long way from picking cotton on a farm!

Picking the guitar at the White House.

Then he come up and made a speech after we finished playing.

I said, "Mr President, I understand you can sing Sweet Home Chicago."

Come on, Mr President, sing it!

Come home, baby don't you wanna go

Sweet Home Chicago, Robert Johnson's 1936 anthem of black migration from the despair of the south,

being sung by the most powerful man in the world.

The blues narrative has seemingly reached its symbolic peak.

Sweet home Chicago

I was overjoyed. I cried after we finished the show.

Because that's a dream come true.

I never thought something like that would happen

to a blues guy to be up in the White House

playing for the president of the United States.

Over the last 100 years,

the blues has transcended racial, musical and national boundaries.

Its icons, songs and stories now form part of the DNA of a nation.

And for what remains the poorest region in the country,

the blues is beginning to provide a much-needed economic boost.

People of the 30s, 40, 50s, 60s in the south

would be amazed that a large part of the tourism economy here in Mississippi

is about blues history.

To see modern day south embracing black culture, I think that's a remarkable change.

Whatever you're listening to now, there's not one thing you're listening to

that isn't in some way influenced by the blues.

That's I think why they're talking about it is that it's very simple in concept

but to deliver it is another thing.

All over the world wherever I travel, there's people playing blues.

Even if they don't understand the words their heart knows that feeling.

And they want more, they gotta have more.

That's the beauty of the blues.

You can't deny it, it ain't going away.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media