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Post by JamesP on Apr 14, 2015 15:27:10 GMT -5
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Post by AlanB on Apr 15, 2015 0:40:01 GMT -5
Here's a rather odd review
Incurable Blues The Troubles & Triumph of Blues Legend Hubert Sumlin Will Romano Backbeat Books; pp 264; pbk; ISBN 0-87930-833-8 $17.95
Apart from his abundant talent as a guitarist, Hubert Sumlin has always been a unique character. His affability and modesty are cherishable and gratifying to encounter in an area of music that down the years has promoted self-importance and mendacity as career objectives. Nothing wrong in that, of course, as long as the music's good. Time and again here his fellow musicians pay tribute to his qualities: 'He is a great human being. He is one of those people you want to root for and you want to be around. He is a rare spirit.'(Butch Trucks, p. 61): 'He was just the nicest guy in the world from the moment we met. I never saw him with a bad attitude. I always thought that if everybody in the world were like Hubert it would be a lot nicer place.' (Charlie Musselwhite, p. 80): 'I don't think Hubert is aware at all of the impact he has had on people.' (Tommy Shannon, p. 136)
Sumlin unquestionably deserves all the praise heaped upon him but sadly his biographer cannot let it rest there. The fact that his subject was essentially (and by temperament) an accompanist (and an excellent one) to one of postwar Chicago's major blues heroes, that after Wolf's death he stood reluctantly in the spotlight but has never really transcended his inherent reticence, is not enough. As he does on so many other occasions here, the author must cast his subject as 'a legend' when printing the unvarnished truth would have done him more justice. It would've obviated the strain evident in the text as increasing amounts of hyperbole are attached to Sumlin's essentially workmanlike recording projects in order to maintain the author's fiction of his status. This heavy undercoat is applied with a broad brush right from the first paragraph of his Preface, in which the author is 'rocked to my very core' by Howlin' Wolf's voice. 'How could this man speak to a human experience from a place that few dared live?' (Where exactly is the sense of this sentence? Heard on a film trailer it might provoke an extra large lick of an ice cream but not when written on the page.) It took the author years to recover; 'I had to turn away from it and bury the experience .' Eventually he overcame his trepidation to disinter his fear and discover Hubert Sumlin.
Then there are those curious American locutions whereby, for instance, Hubert 'is exposed' to Wolf at a young age, an indignity that doesn't accord well with society's current sexual mores. Like a serial poetaster, he's convinced of the efficacy of metaphors, so there's 'Like a wild animal starving for nourishment and never quite getting it, Hubert twists, gnaws, suckles and bites the "hard blues nipple" until it bleeds' (p. 64). Nine pages later, 'Like two dolphins jumping up from the sea . . . 'When he's not a dolphin, 'Hubert is like the Shroud of Turin'. Then, in amongst the 'astoundings' and 'stunnings', the breathless astonishment and a multiplicity of its variations, there are unsupportable claims such as, 'It's hard not to think of Magic Sam as the frontman Hubert might have become without Wolf'. No blunatic worth his salt would think any such thing.
On the credit side, the author is sensitive to Sumlin's travails, from the death of his wives to the removal of a cancerous lung. His observations of a proud but diffident man struggling against physical disability to not let his audiences down are warm and sympathetic, stripped of the exaggeration found in his musical assessments. For those who've become accustomed to the veneer of idolatry to be found in contemporary blues writing, this biography is a good and easy read. Incidentally, the above comments would still have been made had the author shown the slightest awareness of my miniscule role in Hubert's recording career (yes, this is where you can snigger). Photographs commemorating the 'Kenley sessions' can be found in the text of 'The Blue Horizon Story Volume One'. Me an' Hubert, mate, like two metronomes on Viagra. Neil Slaven
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