Farther on up the road, when you’re all alone and blue….
The first time I heard Farther on up the Road was almost certainly when Eric Clapton and The Band played it on The Last Waltz and I thought it was pretty good. Later I heard a really stinging version by Don Preston on a cracking wee album called Sacre Blues (which I heard on an old Alexis Korner show sometime in the very early 1980s) and thought that it was really good. It wasn’t until a lot later that I heard a version by Bobby Bland recorded in 1957 and was completely bowled over.
In comparison to the straight ahead 12-bar with extended guitar solo which we have come to associate with electric blues – and especially that of the British “blues boom” and it’s progeny – the Bobby Bland release is a very different beast and the main thing you notice, aside from the piano and saxes having equal ranking with the guitar, is the loping rhythmic complexity which the British bluesers – with the honourable exception of Van Morrison – very rarely “got”.
I was put in mind of this when I finished Elijah Wald’s “How the Beatles Destroyed Rock’n’Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music” which I mentioned a couple of posts ago. One of the key threads running through that book is the convergence – and then sharp divergence – of black and white styles in popular music. No-one could mistake Bobby Bland’s version as anything other than black, and once you’ve heard Bland’s, you cannot possibly mistake Clapton’s version as being anything other than white.
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