I have long believed that a part of you dies in winter and doesn’t come back to life until you feel the sun on your face and a mid-westerly breeze in the air.
I have long believed that a part of you dies in winter and doesn’t come back to life until you feel the sun on your face and a mid-westerly breeze in the air. We must take comfort where we find it in these dark days and I have recently discovered a splendid pick-me-up that might just get you through the next couple of months with a spring in your step.
An admirable fellow called Nick Duckett has been labouring for several years now on a remarkable project — to tell the history of American rhythm and blues music, tracing its roots in the Twenties and Thirties and working right through to the arrival of rock’n’roll and the birth of soul in the mid-Fifties.
You begin with an extraordinary spiritual holler accompanied by wild percussion that clearly has its roots deep in African soil and end, 12 discs later, with the music of Ray Charles and James Brown.
The History of Rhythm and Blues comes in three box sets, each comprising four CDs, with every track and artist annotated in detail in the richly informative, splendidly illustrated booklets that come with each set. This is a labour of love, and a work of genuine scholarship, but it is also hugely entertaining. I have been listening to almost nothing else for the past fortnight but still feel I am only scratching the surface of a wonderfully rich treasure trove.
Duckett bravely tries to define rhythm and blues, describing it as ‘the accidental synthesis of jazz, gospel, blues, ragtime, country, pop and Latin into a definable form of black popular music which would influence all popular music from the 1950s to the present day’.
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