THE GEORGIA BLUES singer Blind Willie McTell (right) has become known – but only recently – as one of Leadbelly’s few equals as a self-accompanying player of the 12-string guitar. One reason for this belated fame was the posthumous release, in 1961, of tapes made five years earlier and left in the attic of the Atlanta music-store owner who had set up the sessions.
Another is the refrain of a 1983 song that goes: “Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.” Since the song is by Bob Dylan, it is a career-making quote in anyone’s book, but particularly so in the book, or books, of Britain’s leading Zimmermane, Michael Gray. His previous work, The Bob Dylan Encyclopaedia, was an exhaustive analysis of the work, the associates, the family, the lot. For obsessives, great, but for the rest, a worrying case of Anoraksia Verbosa.
But Gray’s fitness over a long distance enables him to set his present subject deep in the complexities of the society that engendered him, just as his Dylan books do. With McTell, this entails untangling his ancestors and their various destinies during and after the American Civil War, and anatomising the effects of the Depression on the communities in which he performed.
Why is McTell important? First, because he was a sublime singer with a beautiful, slightly bruised natural tenor voice and a guitar style that gave a peculiar intricacy to his instrument’s mighty chime. He had a unique position between the feral sound of Delta blues and the more house-trained manner of the East Coast. Secondly, his best-known songs, such as Statesboro’ Blues and Broke Down Engine Blues have been recorded by artists from the Allman Brothers to Taj Mahal.
“What he exposes with a smile,” Gray writes, “is the meanness of the ‘yellow man’, by which he means James Baldwin’s “well-to-do Negro”, that shaky Atlanta black middle class. McTell sings: ‘Black man gives you a dollar/ He won’t think it nothing strange/ Yellow man give you a dollar / He’ll want ninety-five cents change’.”
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This is the fullest account yet of McTell’s 59-year life, a hybrid of social history and travelogue – Gray’s as much as his subject’s, reminiscent of Samuel Charters’ 1981 study The Roots of the Blues. McTell emerges as a beleaguered, courteous, resourceful individual – blind from childhood, a quick learner of Braille and almost as adept as John Lee Hooker at coining multiple pseudonyms for himself.
Gray comes up with a poignant reconstruction of his final days, wandering among the shark-finned Chevvies in an Atlanta car park, strumming his guitar, moving slowly but hopefully from car to car. There is a sense of desperation; an absence of recognition. He is not playing his own music but My Blue Heaven, a huge hit for Fats Domino. McTell would have been astounded by what has happened to him since he died.
HAND ME MY TRAVELIN’ SHOES: In Search of Blind Willie McTell by Michael Gray
Bloomsbury, £25; 433pp
Buy the book here at the offer price of £22.50 (inc p&p)