BRATTLEBORO — Nationally acclaimed musician Scott Ainslie - a singer, songwriter, and master of the acoustic guitar, National slide guitar, fretless gourd banjo, and diddley bow - will perform “The Land Where the Blues Began: Music and Images of Mississippi Delta,” a benefit concert for the Friends of the Brooks Memorial Library.
Ainslie, also a master storyteller, describes this event as a “teaching concert” and will accompany his music with archival photos, historical anecdotes, and personal stories about the Mississippi Delta region.
In the concert, which takes place Friday, March 21, at 7:30 p.m. at the Brooks Memorial Library, Ainslie will give the regional history of his music and feature songs from Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Muddy Waters, and Lonnie Johnson.
Ainslie will be explaining this complex interrelationship of music, culture and history in 75 minutes in between performing 11 songs on his 1930 metal body guitar that he found in a pawn shop in Columbus, Ga.
“It definitely is no lecture,” he says. “Rather, I introduce each piece I do with some of the background of the music and history. I spent several days in the Library of Congress getting information and images that illustrate what I will be playing, for what I hope will be an evening that should be informative, if not moving.”
A benefit for the library
A Brattleboro resident for many years, Ainslie lives on Washington Street, which he calls the “music ghetto” of southern Vermont.
“My next-door neighbors include musicians of the like of Julian McBride and Lisa McCormick and others,” he says. “They are nice to have as neighbors, and music is everywhere. It's the kind of neighborhood when someone knocks at your door, it is not for a cup of sugar, but for a large digital-condenser-stereo microphone.”
Ainslie says that he tries to “devote a substantial amount of my time for local benefits when I am not on the road touring. I usually end up doing two or more year, supporting issues that I am most concerned about, like health or human rights - or the library.”
“Actually, I would say that most of what I do is for our progressive community, but that is because time is limited and you have to choose your battles,” Ainslie says. “And I strongly believe in the work done by the Friends of Brooks Memorial Library.”
The mission of the Friends of the Library is to support the library through advocacy, public relations, and fundraising. Funds raised through concerts and book sales help support the library's First Wednesday lecture series from the Vermont Humanities Council, technology updates, children's room activities, and purchase of library materials.
Ainslie took up guitar at age 15, “about five weeks after hearing Virginia Bluesman John Jackson play a couple of songs in the middle of one of Mike Seeger's concerts in Alexandria, Va., in 1967.”
Ainslie wryly claims that his misspent youth was with elderly musicians, some not famous, but some highly respected “on both sides of the color line” from whom he learned the old-time Southern Appalachian fiddle and banjo traditions. He says he also learned much about gospel music and the blues from black musicians.
Because he was not raised in the cultural context that made music a way of life for these musicians, Ainslie felt he had to study the history of the music and the region to learn its heritage, which he did as a Phi Beta Kappa and honors graduate of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.
“I was drawn in by the sound, and informed by its history,” says Ainslie.
Ainslie has five solo CDs, including Thunder's Mouth (2008), The Feral Crow (2004), and You Better Lie Down (2002). He has received numerous awards and grants for his work documenting and presenting traditional music from organizations that include the National Endowment for the Arts, Independent Weekly Triangle Arts, and the National Slide Guitar Festival.
Ainslie has also transcribed the original recordings of Robert Johnson and published them in his book about Delta Blues legend, Robert Johnson: At The Crossroads (Hal Leonard, 1992). He also has an instructional DVD on Johnson's guitar work, Robert Johnson: Guitar Signature Tricks (Hal Leonard, 1997).
Anslie describes the book and DVD as “very detailed, not only in the presentation of tablature and notation, but also in the introductory biography and the text and lyric transcriptions that accompany each song.”
He often performs and presents programs on the African roots of American Blues music. He writes on his website that he has “developed a healthy respect and working expertise for the many musical and cultural African retentions that have deep roots in African traditions and yet remain vital and active in America's culture today.”
Studying the blues
In his book Cattail Music: BluesRoots Teacher's Study Guide, Ainslie explains that “the name of Delta Blues comes from the Mississippi Delta […] a leaf shaped plain that stretches from Memphis in the North to Vicksburg in the South and is bounded by the hill country of Mississippi to the East and Arkansas to the West.”
Delta Blues stayed very close to slaves and their ancestors' African roots, retaining many African musical values. Ainslie sees the development of this music in distinctly political terms.
“Towns in the Delta were far apart and, after the Civil War, plantation owners set up the sharecropping system, whereby former slaves would remain on their plantations in the Delta and work,” he writes in his study guide.
“In exchange for their labor, their former owners continued to provide food, supplies, and shelter, and at the end of the planting season they would theoretically 'share' the crop.
“Land owners generally charged outrageous prices for the goods in the commissary - even taking out rent for the sharecropper's shacks (built by their forbearers) - leaving many sharecropping families heavily in debt at the end of a year working the fields.
“These circumstances in the Delta worked to isolate Delta sharecroppers and musicians - economically, geographically, socially, politically, and musically - leaving them very much to their own devices for survival, and for their entertainments. Delta Blues grew in this dark soil, retaining much of its African character.”
Ainslie describes these sharecroppers as an oppressed people who had “no legal rights, no government protection.” They were unable to complain about their conditions, because if they did they might be killed.
“Where does the lamentation go?” Ainslie asks. “It comes out in the blues. These people transferred their sufferings to stories about the crazy things men and women do to each other. The song may be about a girl but, through the use of allegory, it could be hiding another social meaning.”