Robert Crumb was "underground comix" in the 1960s, as far as I knew anyhow. So popular that I recognize his work without ever having read any of his comics: curvy, bulbous, strutting caricatures exploding with color. His "Keep On Truckin'" image was a near ubiquitous symbol of the time. Only slightly less to the 1960s than what the smiley face icon was to the '70s. Although, haven't seen any R. Crumb emojis yet. But maybe Crumb was too "underground," too countercultural, druggy, and sexual.
One might come to this watching Terry Zwigoff's (who writes the introduction to this book, by the way) fascinating and dark movie documentary, Crumb ('94), where we learn, amongst many curious things, of Crumb's fetish for women with large round bottoms, a kind of pear-shaped feminine ideal that he celebrates in his art and to remarkably precise dimensions manifests in his personal relationships.
At any rate, I was drawn to Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz, & Country, a project he completed in 2006, because of its focus on the music of the 1920s and 1930s, a subject I'd been turned onto again reading books like David Wondrich's Stomp and Swerve ('03), Amanda Petrusich's Do Not Sell at Any Price ('14), Louis Armstrong's memoir about his early life in New Orleans, Satchmo ('57), and listening to records, especially and above all others, Harry Smith's seemingly bottomless rawboned treasure trove Anthology of American Folk Music ('52).
Crumb's book began as sets of trading cards released in the 1980s. Basically, Crumb a long time collector of rare pre-WW2 78 rpm records was cajoled by collector friends (including Zwigoff) to create illustrations of these lost artists in exchange for some particular choice 78 record he wanted bad enough, say, Mumford Band & His Itawambians, etc. This turned into separate trading card sets (36 Blues, 36 Jazz, and 40 Country artists) that were eventually compiled into this book.
The Blues and Country illustrations are done in a detailed etched style (maybe more characteristic of Crumb) and the Jazz subjects painted in simple watercolors, a difference Zwigoff speculates attributable to timing: the Blues and Country pieces were completed first by a painstakingly time-consuming process and that by the time he got to the the jazz stuff Crumb was looking for a shortcut. I like the illustrations fine. They're appealingly rustic mythologizing Americana without looking like the Sunday Comics or uber-Superhero comics, which is good by me and more than enough from me about comic art.
Another striking variation is the relative lengths of the texts, written by Stephen Calt, David Jasen, and Richard Nevins (Yazzo/Shanachie Records). All the Blues and Jazz entries are a concise paragraph, little more than you might find on a typical baseball trading card. But the Country write-ups are at least twice if not longer in length. And, correspondingly, it's curious that while many of the Blues and Jazz artists I had at least heard of, after say Jimmie Rodgers or Charlie Poole and a few others, the vast majority of the Country stuff were obscure string bands with crazy fun names, Cid Tanner & His Skillett Lickers, Paul Miles & His Red Fox Chasers, but entirely new to me.
You might expect these differences to show up in the quality of the material. Maybe Crumb was more into the White country stuff than the Black blues and jazz stuff? Maybe but shuffling for weeks a 100 plus song playlist I made of Crumb's Heroic pantheon, more or less equally Blues, Jazz, & Country songs, I can't hear much of one. The vigor and variety of the music Crumb spotlights is uniformly exhilarating. All this stuff grew out of 19th century minstrel music popularity, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and vague homespun racist allusions pop up; see "Where's your mammy?" below.
I see this unholy multicultural, miscegenated marriage as the source of nearly all my favorite music, as Nick Tosches reminds people in every book he wrote or at least all the ones I've read. My position: I'm for reparations, mixing (the more the better), and universal human rights; and opposed to segregation and discrimination in all the stupid bigot forms popular with MAGA people. Could some of R. Crumb's heroes be redneck racists? Very likely. The curious part is how much these haters get together musically; how much they influenced each other despite their bigotry. The emphasis in the Heroes' texts is on the inter-ethnic, polyglot influences in all these roots music styles:
"Melodically, many blues bear a notable resemblance to early white-fundamentalist religious music. The limited scales are almost identical and they share a common modality. If the speed of an archaic primitive Baptist hymn is doubled, the striking similarity to blues is apparent."
The authors marvel at the evolution of five or six fiddle styles from Scotland or Ireland exploding into hundreds of local, regional styles, Black and White, Christian, secular, Latin, all mixed together, after only three or four generations in America:
"The single most fascinating aspect of traditional American music is the endless variety of styles rural musicians could generate....The considerable isolation of the early American countryside was a major factor in creating this bountiful panorama of styles."
This is about as close to the central thesis of the Harry Smith collection as you'll find. For Smith 1926-1933 specifically, and the heyday of most of Crumb's musical Heroes, was a magic window into a lost Old, Weird America, capturing on record a final glimpse of oral traditions of American music before they were swallowed up by the homogenizing effects of electricity and radio.
There is overlap here with the Smith box (Blind Willie Johnson, "Dock" Boggs, etc) but a bounty of new to me, razor-edged and jumpy, howlin' at the moon laments and wood-floor barn dance stomping music jams with fiddles and banjos and forgotten voices that sound on records and CD transfers and now streaming uncannily unforgettable.
Hot Heroes Samples:
Blues--
"New Orleans Stomp," by Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Roy Palmer, Earl Hines, Lil Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr, Bud Scott, and Baby Dodds (1926-27). (Or the Hot Jazz All-Stars!!!)
Country--
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