The Elgin Marbles of Music

The Elgin Marbles of Music

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By Eddie Dean

The mangy, road-stained group of rockers tumbled out of the Rolls-Royce limo onto the lawn of a tidy brick house in rural Maryland. It was the fall of 1967. Flush with cash from a show nearby, the members of the group Canned Heat had taken a detour for their biggest score yet. The promised stash had the beardos drooling: thousands of rare 78-rpm records, one of the best collections of prewar blues on the planet. Here was the stuff they craved most, like "Canned Heat Blues" from 1928, a song about the perils of drinking Sterno—an alcohol-based cooking fuel that, for down-and-outers, served a double purpose. It was that song, heard a few years earlier after they first caught the collecting bug, that had given the band its name.

Their host, a crew-cut Goldwater Republican, hated hippies and didn't allow rock 'n' roll in his house. But he made an exception for these longhairs because they shared his infatuation with country blues. That, and he had a nose for a deal. A beat-to-hell copy of "Pigmeat Blues" by Smokehouse Charley went for $50, followed by stacks of other choice records. When the dust settled, the group had spent nearly $10,000, almost as much as the fee they earned at the Woodstock festival a couple of years later.

It was a good investment. These records were the fuel for Canned Heat's amplified, stadium-rattling boogie, often note-for-note renderings of the originals, overhauled for electric instrumentation. The band's "Going Up the Country" made a catchy anthem for the peace crowd dancing in the mud at Max Yasgur's farm. It was closely based on a record about hitting the road to escape floggings, a virtuoso solo performance, from the 1920s, by Henry Thomas, an itinerant Texas songster who played guitar and accompanied himself by blowing on a woodwind-type instrument made of cane reeds.

This sort of scenario—popular new cover versions and uncredited adaptations of old blues songs—has helped give the '60s blues revival a reputation for plunder and exploitation, with rock stars getting rich by ripping off destitute or long-dead musicians even while singing their praises. Whether the reputation is deserved or not, the revival has a tangled history, where missionary zeal and mercenary self-interest often merged to elevate an obscure music made by outcasts.

In "Crossroads," John Milward focuses on the creative ferment that happened when the 1960s counterculture met traditional black culture on its home turf. His narrative ranges from the back porchsteps of the Delta to the juke joints of southside Chicago, chronicling a tumultuous give-and-take that put the blues on the map. Instead of a rote account, Mr. Milward presents a series of encounters and exchanges, what he calls "connections," featuring characters "who built a bridge between black and white, as well as rock and the blues."

At the center are the musicians: the founding-father bluesmen and their adopted sons—young folk and rock acolytes from the U.S. and England. At the periphery are carpetbaggers and scalawags from the record business, as well as assorted eccentrics from the collector underground. Rich in anecdotes and insight, "Crossroads" offers a welcome tribute to the blues revival's most important legacy: the collaboration—across race and class and generations—that galvanized a music that had been left to wither and die.

In the postwar years, "acoustic" country blues was considered nearly obsolete in the places where it was created, the poor black communities of the rural South. The collectors canvassing for surviving discs of country blues were a brotherhood close to a cult, traveling hundreds of miles to listen enraptured to an excavated 78. "These days, you can download the song from iTunes, or purchase a CD," notes Mr. Milward. "But in 1952, you had to work to hear music that had nearly been lost to history."

What the Elgin marbles were to the Romantic poets, these shellac 78s were to the collectors: timeless expressions of the human spirit worthy of a lifetime's study. The members of this cadre—mostly Northern collegiates, along with lone-wolf oddballs like that Marylander—shared a sense of awe for "the raw, lonesome power of a solitary guitar player singing a down-home blues," as Mr. Milward puts it. Their pantheon of performers was headed by Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Skip James and Son House, now rated among the finest blues musicians ever.

Meanwhile, a new style of blues had moved north with black migrants to cities like Chicago, where it found an outlet in amplified bands working the southside bars. This electrified urban blues had its share of young admirers as well—local interlopers like Michael Bloomfield, a teenage guitar prodigy who sneaked into taverns to catch shows. He would later introduce this underground music to white mainstream listeners, most notably with his incendiary lead guitar on Bob Dylan's epochal "Highway 61 Revisited," as well as the infamous Dylan-goes-electric concert, spearheaded by Bloomfield's manic, delirious Telecaster, at the '65 Newport Folk Festival.

The revival's flash point came in 1963 and 1964, when collectors tracked down some of their heroes from the 1920s and '30s and relaunched their careers. The country bluesmen, with their old-fashioned fedoras and formal attire, looked as frozen in time as their Depression-era music, lending them an allure that appealed to folkies hoping to break from America's supposedly plastic, homogenized culture and looking for wise elders from the past.

Of the rediscovered legends, Mississippi John Hurt shone brightest. The spry 70-year-old charmed with his courtly manners and dazzled with his delicate mastery on guitar. "It was more swinging than a lot of the finger picking that I had heard up to that time," says John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful, a group that took its name from a line in Hurt's "Coffee Blues." Other performers, such as Son House and Skip James, couldn't rekindle their youthful magic. They alienated audiences unprepared for the harrowing intensity of, for example, House's "Death Letter Blues" and James's "Devil Got My Woman."

Phil Spiro was a student DJ at MIT in Boston when he and two friends located Son House in 1964. He tells Mr. Milward that, by plucking House and Hurt and the others from obscurity and putting them onstage and in the studio, he and his fellow enthusiasts unwittingly forced these aged bluesmen to compete against the 78-rpm records they had made in the 1920s and 1930s at their peak. "I'm half inclined to say that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't do it . . . , " Mr. Spiro says to the author. "Our motivation was a strange combination of ego, scholasticism and power. In general, we were collectors of people."

The novice managers and handlers often took advantage of their naïve, uneducated clients, whom they worshiped on record but little understood. Even Mississippi John Hurt's final years were marred by legal squabbles that dragged on for decades after his death in 1966. It was the fledgling musicians of the revival scene who proved most able to engage the bluesmen on their own terms—as creative and inspirational artists. One such musician was Alan Wilson, a roommate of Phil Spiro and a fellow blues fanatic.

A shy, intellectual Boston University dropout, Wilson was a gifted bottleneck guitarist and harmonica player who brought a monastic dedication to his craft. The 62-year-old Son House had quit music for drink, so the student helped the teacher relearn his signature slide-guitar technique. "Al [Wilson] sat down with Son in our apartment," says Mr. Spiro. "He played Son his old recordings and also played [songs] for him on guitar. He was reminding Son of what he had done in the past." Wilson ended up backing up House on guitar and blues harp for his 1965 comeback album and, soon after, moving to California and co-founding Canned Heat.

The bond of the blues cemented many such master-apprentice relationships, and "Crossroads" is a fascinating compendium of major blues gurus and their disciples. Along the way, Mr. Milward illuminates the careers of unheralded, crucial figures such as Rev. Gary Davis, the blind singing preacher who mentored a generation of guitarists, including future greats like Ry Cooder.

Born in 1896, Davis made a handful of classic blues and gospel records in the 1930s. He later settled in New York City, where he eked out a living by playing street corners and storefront churches and giving lessons on his Gibson guitar to anyone "lucky enough to study within the smoky haze of the Reverend's White Owl cigars," as Mr. Milward writes.

In the early 1960s, Peter, Paul & Mary's hit debut album included a cover of Davis's "If I Had My Way," his version of a traditional spiritual, and the trio wanted to ensure that Davis got some royalties. One of his pupils was in the lawyer's office when Davis was asked whether he had indeed written the song, and he flatly answered no. "There was silence," the pupil remembers, "and then the Reverend said, 'The Lord gave it to me in 1927.' Coincidentally, that was when Blind Willie Johnson recorded it. So he had loopholes." Adds Mr. Milward: "He also now had the money to buy a house in Queens."

Mr. Milward reminds us how much vital, enduring music the revival and its aftermath left behind, from the "fathers" as well as their "sons": "Blues at Newport: Recorded Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1959-1964"; B.B. King's "Live at the Regal" (1965); Junior Wells and Buddy Guy's "Hoodoo Man Blues" (1965); the self-titled debut album of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (1965) and the group's "East-West" (1966); the late 1960s albums of Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac; John Lee Hooker with Canned Heat, "Hooker 'n' Heat" (1971); and Muddy Waters's Johnny Winter-produced comeback, "Hard Again" (1977), among many others.

Some of the sons, especially a trio of guitarists endowed with the most "blues feeling," seemed haunted by their success. Of Michael Bloomfield, the virtuoso guitarist in the Butterfield band, B.B. King said: "He was a Jewish boy from a wealthy family with a father who didn't appreciate his son's appreciation of black blues. I believe Mike suffered from that conflict." Bloomfield died of a heroin overdose in 1981. Fleetwood Mac's leader, Peter Green, whom Chicago pianist Eddie Boyd called "a great bluesman," "a negro turned inside out," repeatedly gave away his earnings and struggled with mental illness. Alan Wilson overdosed at 27 in 1970 after recording with Hooker, who said of Wilson: "He had my music down like you know your ABCs. He could follow me."

As it tells its multigenerational story, "Crossroads" follows the music with subtlety and shrewd appreciation. As for the current moment, Mr. Milward cites the popularity of "blues cruises" and "blues safaris" for baby boomers like himself but misses some better signs of rekindled interest. There is no mention, for instance, of a die-hard enthusiast like Jack White, whose blues-inspired work with the White Stripes (the band's debut album in 1999 bore a dedication to Son House) is equal to the best of the earlier blues revival. In the spirit of the collectors who first unearthed this music from premature burial in its native soil, Mr. White's record label recently launched a vinyl reissue series featuring Charley Patton and other greats from the past, bringing the real-deal blues to a new generation.

— Mr. Dean is co-author of Ricky Skaggs's "Kentucky Traveler: My Life in Music," to be published this month by It Books.

A version of this article appeared August 10, 2013, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Elgin Marbles of Music.