THE BLUES--FADING INTO SILENCE

It was a searing Saturday afternoon. The West Texas heat hit one’s skin like dermabrasion and the sunlight scoured the retina. Inside Antone’s, the blues club located on a bend of Guadalupe Avenue, the musicians, mostly black and mostly male, (with the exception of white guitarist Jimmy Vaughan and vocalist Angela Strehli) sat in the deep calm characteristic of off-duty athletes and performers. They had done their talking in their music last night, and would again tonight.

Some of the blues’ legendary names, including James Cotton, Eddie Taylor, Snookie Pryor and Jimmy Rogers, were there. So were Pinetop Perkins, Albert Collins and Mel Brown, sitting at various tables around the club conversing softly and gnawing at fresh batches of Stubbs’ Bar-B-Cue ribs, whose sweetish smell hung in the air.

Despite their influence on other musicians, the performers gathered here represent a last generation of artists. They’re the final direct link to an American root--the Delta blues--that will in all likelihood dry up once they’re gone.

In one corner, the soft, somewhat plaintive voice of Clifford Antone, the club’s owner, could be heard talking to an attentive group of listeners from the media. They were drawn to the club by the big names attending Antone’s 10th annual blues festival. But tonight it sounded as if Antone might be singing the blues’ last song.

“Elvis and the Beatles changed the world,” he said, waving his arm out into the afternoon torpor of the room. “But people don’t know how much they stole from these musicians. How many know that Big Mama Thornton wrote ‘Hound Dog’? They’re humble people. All they want to do is live, pay their bills. They never complain. Just growin’ up in Mississippi is tough enough. But they’re gettin’ a raw deal.”

“Elvis grew up in the Delta, where most of this music originated,” Antone continued. “When they migrated to Tennessee, so did he. Howlin’ Wolf went to London in ’64. Blew ‘em away. What were the Rolling Stones then? Zeroes. Kids.”

If Antone’s complaint--that their effort had resulted in some whites’ glory--was shared by the musicians, it was in an understated way; someone might mention it in passing as though it were a fait accompli , or acknowledge it with a shrug. What else is new? They had come to perform, pure and simple, and the night before they had cut loose in the raw, rambunctious, hot, passionate, piercing, melancholy and good-natured music that has reached like an artery from Texas up to Chicago and back down again into the Delta.

From a musicological standpoint, the blues is a relatively simple form. But within it is a variety of shadings that are infinitely suggestive and freighted with the shifts of fresh-felt emotion. The blues have basically two subjects, whose variations are endless: relations between men and women (usually sore), and getting up to face a rough day. A good blues lick cuts to the heart of a matter; its embellishments are celebratory or untrammeled rather than ornamental--they’re spirited bursts.

It’s the sturdiest, most primitive and existential of American musical forms whose passages reach back through Mississippi and Georgia sharecropper days to musical expressions of West and Central Africa.

At Antone’s one heard the echoes of Charley Patton, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters--a few of the numerous country figures who from early in the 20th Century moved around the Delta and played for small change, and whose music tied together not only the themes of world-weariness, sexual longing, exuberance and skepticism, but echoed the field shout, the gospel song, the Saturday night dance shuffle, and the chuffing rhythm of the locomotive, with its piercing whistle that brought evidence of implacable industrial might (read white power), and its evocation of something hauntingly far-off, hoped-for, and maybe lost for good.

In the sets that had been played the night before, which ranged from Snookie Pryor’s plaintive harmonica in “Someone to Love Me” to Sunnyland Slim’s wry “Every Time I Get to Drinkin’,” punctuated by a Woody Woodpecker laugh, one piece stood out--Albert Collins’ rendition of “Got That Feeling.”

At best it has a simple four-note melodic line, which is purposeful and strong. But underneath, its shifting rhythmic scheme conveys a sense of confusion and being off-balance. “Got That Feeling” isn’t a premonition about something good, or of feeling high-spirited, as you might expect; it’s the suspicion of betrayal, and with Abb Locke’s hot, terse, tenor saxophone ostinato kicking in, the whole piece cooked up into a riveting metaphor of obsession.

Collins, who has to be in his 50s, looks like a small, taut ebony-colored Indian who has had everything superfluous burned out of him. After four songs, any of which may last 20 minutes, he’s through for the night. He appears to have given everything he has.

The lean figure of Mel Brown, wearing the spiffy white fedora that is his trademark, drifted by along the periphery of the room, suavely acknowledging the small cluster of people listening to Antone speak.

He sat down at a table to a small bottle of beer and talked about the career that had taken him all over the world--mostly with Bobbie (Blue) Bland, though Brown is perhaps the most versatile of the musicians who worked the weekend. He’s played with Oliver Nelson and T-Bone Walker, as well as having done television work for Bill Cosby and Jerry Lewis. He once played the bouzouki on a Greek segment of the Doris Day show. When he was through with his beer he didn’t order another; he turned the empty bottle around pensively in his big dry hands.

Brown’s beginnings are not atypical of the blues performers of his generation and earlier (he looks to be in his 50s). “I was born in Jackson, Miss.,” he said. “I have two brothers and two sisters, and at one time just about all of us were into music. My daddy taught us everything. He had an old Silvertone electric guitar. He played it, and he played jug, bass, fiddle, and piano. He told jokes. He trained us in pitch. At the age of 3, I had perfect pitch. My daddy worked in a glass factory. He formed a union. Tried to make it better for his people. He once went up to Cincinnati to break into a union meeting and tell them what it was like in Mississippi. You made a dead man of yourself doin’ that stuff.”

His head was positioned straight, but his eyes peered sidelong at his visitor suspiciously. “His family and his music meant more to him than anything. When I was a kid we played for the governor’s parties. We called them ‘white parties’ because we were the only blacks allowed in. On my own, I’ve played all kinds of music and traveled coast-to-coast, top to bottom. You need to change, to get different sources of energy.

“I haven’t done much theory on the blues. I’m more interested in playin’ than research. I’d say the blues is like a feelin’. Could be happy, could be very unhappy. Classical music is more like reading. You think about what you’re seeing on a page. The blues we play until we get a feeling inside.” He nodded his head curtly and included the room in a sweeping gaze. “Nobody here reads.

“The Texas style you get here is a combination of all the other styles, especially Chicago, and that’s derived from Mississippi, that straight line. Most of the guys here are from Mississippi.”

The line Brown mentions corresponds to that of the Illinois Central railroad, which brought so many migrant farm workers from the Delta--where Jim Crow and economic hardship were inescapable--up to Chicago, which enjoyed an economic upsurge in the ‘30s and through the war years, opening the labor force to Southern blacks.

In effect, the great exodus from the South was comparable to an internal immigration, where the first generation to make the move knows a different experience and often speaks a different language from the generations that follow.

“The black kids comin’ up now think the blues is depressing,” Brown said. “They don’t wanna hear, ‘In 1932 it was so hard / My old lady cooked biscuits without any lard.’ In those days, the music was a personal thing, instead of the sound. Now, the kids want to escape the real.”

Brown isn’t especially alarmed over the allegations of theft. “The Beatles and Eric Clapton may take from the blues, but Sammy Davis Jr. and Nat King Cole took white music and refined it their way. What bothers me more is that there ain’t no 28-year-old blues singers. All we got as people is our music. All these people--” he pointed to the men at the other tables--”This is history, and this is a dyin’ breed.” And with them lives a peculiar knowledge, implicit in Brown’s statement as he looked sidelong and cautiously, not knowing what their passing would mean: “The difference between blacks and whites is that we cooked for you. You didn’t cook for us. We know you. You don’t know us.”

“My real name is Willie Perkins. I was born in Belzoni, Miss.” Pinetop Perkins sat in a chair near the door, and the sunlight, dressed in a sports jacket and a modified 10-gallon hat, facing the room with an enormously pleased looking expression on his face, like someone ready to hold court.

At 72, Perkins is a solid and dependable boogie-woogie and blues player whose name crops up in blues anthologies in connection with a number of the old heavyweights, a Horatio to several Hamlets, including Big Joe Williams, Robert Nighthawk, Houston Stackhouse and Sonny Boy Williamson. He was one of the early pianists on “King Biscuit Time” in 1943, a radio program in Helena, Miss., that became epochal in the spreading of the blues. His seniority was assured when he joined Muddy Waters in 1969 and stayed with him for 12 years.

“When I was a kid I listened to the records of Roosevelt Sykes, Leroy Carr and Little Brother Montgomery on the phonograph,” Perkins said. “I said, ‘I got eight fingers and two thumbs. I can do that too.’ My first instrument was the guitar, which I picked up at 11. But the piano kept drownin’ me out, so I switched. I was a fractious kid. I worked on a farm with my dad and granddad. I was playin’ while drivin’ a tractor. Later I worked a government farm. I could make that tractor sing . I quit at 17 though. It was all music after that.”

Susan Antone, Clifford’s wife, a pleasant, business-like blond woman, brought over a cup of coffee and some home-cooked coffee cake in a box. Perkins scooped out the cake and ate lustily. “Oooh, I’ll have some more of that ,” he said.

“The blues is what you come up with when you have a sad feeling, or you’re lonesome,” he said. “If your old lady ups and leaves you, well you know you got ‘em then, even if you can’t sing ‘em.” Perkins is not one to entertain rueful feelings beyond the call of duty, “The white boys are learnin’ the blues now. They’re gonna be playin’ it.” Not that he’s ready to pass the mantle. “I always like to be somewhere and make people happy,” he said. “If I ever retired, the motor would stop. I’d stiffen up.”

Most of the musicians might prefer to play in Chicago, or the South, or in ego-massaging European tours, or in bigger American cities. But Antone has been such a fervent preacher of the blues, through good times and bad, that he’s considered a brother, someone who works for the musicians, even though he’s white. At 35, Antone is a dark-haired somewhat overblown six-footer--his shirttails always hang out and his heavy neck appears never to have suffered the constraint of a tie--with the faintly viscid paleness and physical langour of someone who’s grown up in the muggy airlessness of the Gulf (he was born in Port Arthur).

He’s often visibly and audibly aggrieved, not only about the small amount of money paid to many of the great blues players who have come through his doors, but the commercial indifference towards them as well--though his late summer festival was raucously well-attended, principally by young whites.

“Part of the genius of the blues,” Antone had said earlier, “is the tone, the feeling and the words. The Eric Claptons and the Stones, they stole from these people. Led Zeppelin has been sued by Willie Dixon, who learned business when he was with Chess Records. Otherwise, most of these guys are basically farmers. A lot of them, when they were hungry and had to eat, would give up their songs for $100. It’s all been documented.”

Antone put Austin on the blues map 10 years ago, when the city was in the grip of a progressive country movement and no one expected that a club devoted exclusively to the blues could survive. But most of the best of its living practitioners had shown up at one time or another to play, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, Bobby (Blue) Bland, Bo Diddley, Otis Rush, Fats Domino, Esther Phillips, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Ray Charles and James Brown.

Antone’s lionizing of the blues is one thing but he’s also known as someone who is true to his word, and his reputation has prospered accordingly. At 77, Sunnyland Slim, who is credited with being one of the main influences in the transition of the Delta blues sound to the Chicago style, came down to play the festival (he’s a fixture in Chicago now, and is so popular that he doesn’t have to go anywhere).

Pinetop Perkins is also Chicago based, but came to Austin to play, before flying the next day to a European blues festival in Nice.

“He’s my boy,” Perkins said of Antone. “Every time he calls, I’ll come.”

Angela Strehli opened the night’s festivities around 10, fronting a six-piece band for three numbers (she complained of sinus problems later, but her voice sounded husky and sensual). Then Perkins followed with James Cotton (another prominent blues man who plays mouth harp and is also a veteran of the “King Biscuit Time” days). Perkins for the most part was satisfied with his supporting role, but he took a bouncy, rollicking turn in “Boogie Like You Wanna,” and everyone kept quiet for a minute while he brought the number to a boil.

The place was packed. Exuberant dancing couples crowded the floor, but they listened too and occasionally stopped to face the stand and applaud, just like movie depictions of working musicians. By 1 o’clock, the volume in the room was almost never beneath a din and the air had grown heavy and dense in the roistering atmosphere.

The musicians were generating the keenness of a party mood reaching full pitch. Snookie Pryor came on with with guitarist Eddie Taylor to play a rocking “Crazy ‘Bout My Baby” and sing a slow, fervent, gospel-sounding “After You (There’ll Be Nobody Else)” that sounded like a fat man sauntering through a sad memory. By this time, nobody was dancing. Everyone stood and listened.

It was just right, therefore, for Sunnyland Slim to come up with his good-natured treatment of “When I Was Young,” another rocking, saloon-style up-tempo piece couched in the legato floating phrases of Snookie Pryor--which momentarily cooled things off.

Sunnyland Slim is unquestionably one of the elder statesmen of the blues. His handsomest photos show him in his 50s, confident, avuncular, worldly. Age has attenuated him somewhat. He’s long and lean and walks flopping his feet out as though he has lead in his shoes. But no one embodies more of the history of the blues.

Robert Palmer tells an anecdote about Sunnyland in his book “Deep Blues” that captures the catch-as-catch-can quality of the lives of those early musicians:

“Sunnyland was traveling with a pimp-gambler friend and a car full of whores the night he met (Little Brother) Montgomery. They had been jailed overnight in some small Mississippi town, the whores had left under their own power, and the car broke down on a gravel road outside Canton, Miss. As luck would have it, there was a large sawmill nearby, with an impressive, two-story wooden barrelhouse where a hot Saturday night was in progress. Before long, Sunnyland and his friend were heavily involved in a popular card game, Georgia Skin, but there was accomplished piano blues, with occasional ragtime and jazz thrown in, coming from upstairs, and eventually Sunnyland left the game and went up to investigate. Montgomery, who was still, like Sunnyland, a teen-ager, was loaded on corn whiskey, but he was playing and shouting lustily there in the makeshift parlor, where roaring drunk sawmill hands with ready cash picked out whores to take into the adjacent rooms.

“Sunnyland began talking with Brother, expressing admiration for his playing, and Montgomery, whose voice was starting to go, asked him if he could sing. They worked as a team until 4 or 5 in the morning, Sunnyland singing in his high but powerful voice while Montgomery played just about every blues he knew. Finally Little Brother stumbled away from the piano and collapsed in a corner. The house madam offered Sunnyland some bread and molasses and a cup of coffee, and after he’d eaten, he felt emboldened to try the piano himself. He sat down and started playing his own version of ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’,’ which he’d learned in the Delta, and Montgomery sat bolt upright. ‘He got up and staggered over,’ Sunnyland recalls with a chuckle, ‘and asked me, ‘Why in hell didn’t you tell me you could play? ‘ ‘Cause they had him playin’ there for hours and hours. Then we both laughed, and we been buddies ever since.’ ”

Sunnyland played one of his standards “She’s Got a Thing Goin’ On” (“She got it and God gave it to her”), where the loud, full, busy momentum of the sextet behind him ended just as he uttered his silly Woody Woodpecker laugh.

“I first came to music through the church,” he recalled, “and I had my stepmother’s uncle willin’ to teach me too.” While he was learning music, Sunnyland worked as a cotton picker and truck driver, but after he ran away from home for good at 15 and tied up with Montgomery, music became his way of life--aside from his skill at cards. He worked his way up to Memphis, and by the early ‘40s, Chicago, where he held his own and blended with the top blues musicians of the time, and worked with Ma Rainey and Muddy Waters. Throughout the fast times, Sunnyland remained a sensible man, playing, recording, but never letting the night-life cut into him too deeply.

“I’m gettin’ too old to run and sell records now. As far as sellin’, you know, you can’t do nothin’ til people get hip.” As for the evolution of the blues, Sunnyland said, recalling music he heard in the ‘20s, “I look at people talkin’ this and that. But the players, these folks can knock hell out of you.”

That was a good enough description of what one felt during the sets that followed, when various figures would play support and then step out to lead. Guitarist Jimmy Rogers played “After the Sun Goes Down” and “Angel Child” (“We’re gonna get close to it,” he announced). Eddie Taylor nimbly finger-picked his way through “Look Out at the Weather,” where weather becomes a metaphor for sex, and called up a ringing solo from Sunnyland (“We’re goin’ back, back,” someone on the stand yelled).

Lu Ann Barton, a tall, white pouty young woman who sings in a sexy ‘50s rhythm and blues style, followed with several numbers. Then Albert Collins came back to reprise his songs of the night before. In one, he disappeared into the dark density of the crowd but kept on playing. You couldn’t see him, but you heard the sharp, piercing phrases that touch the skin like dry ice.

The atmosphere by this time seemed impenetrable, further saturated with the exhalations of the crowd’s boozy fatigue and loose cries and shouts. Then the room began thinning out after the waitresses swooped up glasses to meet the 2 o’clock curfew, and hollowness began looming in the emptiness of the crowd’s departure.

But James Cotton and a quartet, including Jimmy Vaughan with his piercing guitar style and Mel Brown once again, kept going with “Leaving Here Tomorrow,” “I’m a Man” and “Every Night and Every Day.” The blues speaks so much of weariness that one tends to equate the form with melancholy lassitude. But for some time after most of the crowd had shuffled out the door, the players were still going strong, as though the heartaches they recalled could be exorcised in their spirited rite, and by being shared, vanquished. At least for now.