One night in 1903, W.C. han-was standing on a railroad platform in Tutwiler, Miss., wait-ing for a train, when he heard a man playing a guitar using a knife for a slide on the strings. Handy, who would later write "St. Louis Blues," the first great blues pop song, said he'd never known anything like it. He called it "the weirdest music I had ever heard." One hundred years later, the blues still sounds ... not weird, maybe-it's too familiar and ubiquitous now -but still utterly distinct, almost otherworldly. And while it's astonishingly influential-this brainchild of black American musicians has supplied the roots of jazz, rhythm & blues, rock and rap-amazingly, none of this dalliance with other musical forms has diluted the original. In the right hands, the blues retains the same raw, elemental power that startled Handy on that railroad platform 100 years ago. In "Feel Like Going Home," Martin Scorsese's new documentary about the blues, he subtides the less decipherable songs as they're being sung. Was this his way of emphasizing the inscrutability of the music? (The songs, after all, are in English.) Scorsese replies, "Exactly."
展开▼
