True blues

Talk of blues music and you’re likely to think of Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, but most of these guys actually learnt their craft from women like Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Precious Bryant.

Talk of blues music and you’re likely to think of Muddy Waters, B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, but most of these guys actually learnt their craft from women like Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Precious Bryant. In Lady Plays the Blues on Saturday, Cerys Matthews (who usually DJs on BBC 6 Music) took us to the Mississippi Delta to talk to people who knew these extraordinary female singers and guitarists. In fact, 75 per cent of all the blues recordings made in the American South between 1920 and 1926 were by women, who plucked and slid their way through songs about their thievin’, deceivin’ partners; songs which later inspired Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan.

Some say it was Memphis Minnie who first took the broken neck of a Coca-Cola bottle and started sliding it across her electric guitar to produce the eerily potent wailing sound of a blues ballad. We heard snatches of her singing and playing on this Radio 4 documentary but not nearly enough of her. Frustratingly, the focus was on Matthews when what I really wanted to hear were these female balladeers who have been mostly forgotten, in spite of their huge influence. What character it must have taken to break out of their sharecroppin’ life and set off on the road to play the music they were driven by some inner compulsion to make. ‘My mamma cried, pappa did too,’ sings Memphis Minnie in her most famous track. ‘…I hit the highway, caught me a truck, Nineteen and seventeen, when the winter was tough… In my girlish days.’ Minnie knew what it meant to be truly blue and hungry.

Over on Radio 3, also on Saturday afternoon, World Routes was this week in North Carolina, where Banning Eyre went in search of the square-dancing, fiddle-playing octogenarians whose music takes us straight back to the first settlers of the 17th century. How did you get started? Eyre asked 89-year-old Benton Flippen who still sings with his Smokey Valley Boys. ‘I bought a .22 rifle to start with, but traded it for a banjo. It cost me 22 dollars.’ He was aged 11. He learnt by ‘listening to somebody else’, picking up tunes that were sung by the men who fought in the Civil War, at one time holding more than 100 songs in his memory.

Eyre also met 90-year-old Jo Thomson, a fiddle-playing African-American who played to white audiences back in the days before strict segregation, calling the dances as he played. Being Radio 3 we actually heard whole songs by Jo and co., not just infuriating snippets, and were taken right into the heart of the music, which sings of the high peaks and wooded hills of its home country. ‘You got to be ready,’ says Thomson, who suffered a stroke a few years ago but by some miracle can still play his fiddle as furiously as ever. ‘You got to be ready to go “home” one day.’

The contrasting styles of the BBC’s radio stations could also be heard this week on a couple of programmes about dealing with life-threatening illness. On the Asian Network on Monday, the DJ Nihal gave us a penetrating study of heart disease among the South Asian population of the UK. His father collapsed and died ten years ago, without warning in their living room, right in front of his brother. In Our Breaking Hearts Nihal reported on a recent study by the British Heart Foundation which reveals that South Asians are 50 per cent more likely to suffer heart disease than other ethnic groups in Britain. It hits them young, sometimes in their twenties and thirties, and the usual barometers of smoking, drinking, eating too much sugar and salt and doing no exercise do not apply. Other factors come into play and need to be recognised, says Nihal.

He had pulled together some moving interviews with women and men who had been through some real heart-stopping moments, but what was strange to my ears was that the interviews were undercut by a continuous current of South Asian music, which changed gear from upbeat dance music to soupy strings whenever anyone touched upon emotional moments. Did we really need it?

In contrast, on No Triumph, No Tragedy this week, Peter White interviewed the historian and writer Tony Judt, who for the last couple of years has been struggling with a severe form of motor-neurone disease. Who would you most like to sit up with you through your sleepless nights? asked White. ‘Someone who was well known for liking silence,’ said Judt, only his weakening voice betraying his fast-increasing paralysis. Pure radio, crafted by professionals.