COPELAND TAKES BLUES ‘HOME’ TO AFRICA

The African roots of American blues have always been acknowledged by music scholars, but it took Johnny Copeland to put that intellectual concept to the acid test. The Texas-born blues guitarist/singer went to Africa to record his latest album.

“Bringin’ It All Back Home” (on Rounder Records) was recorded in two days during a weeklong stay in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in March, 1984.

And it wasn’t easy.

The Ivory Coast was suffering through the worst drought in its history, causing brown-outs that forced the sessions to be scheduled at times when the power would stay on. And some of the local musicians hired for the sessions assumed that recording with an American act automatically meant a big payday.

There were other snags. “We brought down the wrong recording tape so we went through a crisis getting tape into the country because they have a 300% tax on things like that,” reported Dan Doyle, Copeland’s manager and the LP’s producer.

“They don’t have trap drums in Africa so we had to borrow a set from the lounge band at a resort hotel in the afternoon and drive them back and forth in taxicabs.”

But the results are worth the effort. The album boasts a wider range of styles than a typical blues record. “Ngote” is an extended funk jam, and “Djeli Djeli Blues” is an instrumental played by an African on the kora , a 22-string instrument from Guinea. “Abidjan” and “Same Thing” are probably the LP’s most successful syntheses of blues and African forms.

The project’s seeds were planted in 1982, when Copeland went on a six-week West African tour arranged by the USIA. Of the 10 countries he visited, Zaire left the deepest impression.

“They had all the cultural people from the different tribes playing their original music on a field the second day we were there,” recalled Copeland by phone from his New York City home. “There was a lady and a man playing a stringed instrument and blowing bass lines on a bottle and the lady was chanting.

“It was the closest thing I saw to the blues because it was coming from the soul. People were dancing in the trees. It looked like the whole world was shaking and all you could hear was music.”

Copeland immediately began sketching out material. “I De Go Now,” a song on his 1983 album “Texas Twister,” evolved from hotel-room jam sessions with local musicians in Sierra Leone. A Zairian cab driver taught Copeland the phrases for the new album’s “Bozalimalamu.”

But the tour wasn’t just a one-way learning experience.

“The audiences were really seeking to see what the blues was,” Copeland explained. “They had heard it was the moan of the black American people and that we use it for some kind of outlet.

“They were more hip to a Delta blues. One of the ministers at Conakry, the capital of Guinea, told me they came out for a down night, a slow pace, but it was a pleasant surprise because the night was jumping.”

Copeland dropped a boxing career and begin playing music in the early ‘50s, inspired by T-Bone Walker and Albert Collins. He became a regional favorite before moving in 1975 from Houston to New York, where he built his reputation through a regular Harlem club gig that became a hip musicians’ hangout.

How does Copeland expect the traditional blues audience to respond to the new flavors of “Bringin’ It All Back Home”?

“Everybody that spoke to me has a lot of respect for the idea and they seemed to understand what I tried to do,” he said. “I tried to blend the two forms of music and you can hear the results.”

How about a return to Africa?

“That’s what I caught myself doing, writing my ticket back,” he said with a laugh. “I told (his manager) Danny, ‘The government sent us the first time, but I’m going to try and write my own ticket back.’ I did get back to cut the record and hopefully I’ll get a chance to go there and tour again.”