Charley Patton makes an appearance at UMM's open mic night!

In and amongst all the cool performances last night (and I saw quite a few of you there, which was excellent!), there was a pair of (new?) students that did a fine guitar and bass blues jam. The fact that two college students would choose that format for a public performance is a nice testament to the power of the blues as a form. As the pedantic old-fart teacher, though, my bells all started to go off when they introduced their improvisation as being based on "Spoonful" which they said was written by Cream. (Cream was a short lived but highly influential British "super-group" in the 60's which, among other things, led to Eric Clapton becoming a major international star.) of

But wait, hadn't we just listened in class to Charley Patton doing "A spoonful blues"? A relationship, perhaps? Yes, but indirectly. It turns out that Cream never claimed to write "Spoonful"; they recorded it, and definitely gave it their own twist, but gave the writing credit to Willie Dixon. Dixon was a major figure of the Chicago blues scene in the 50's and 60's, and comes up quite a bit in Palmer's Deep blues. While an accomplished singer and bassist, he's probably best known as a song writer, having penned all manner of Chicago classics, many of which went on to be major British Invasion hits. This included "Spoonful", which Dixon clearly based on Patton's much earlier version, but made major revisions to both the lyrics and the musical structure, creating a song that was arguably much more amenable to covers and jamming. Dixon's "Spoonful" was first recorded by, and become a signature song for, Howlin' Wolf, and it was that version that was heard (and covered) by numerous rock bands, particularly in the UK.

So we have an old blues from Patton being transformed into an electric blues by Dixon and Howlin' Wolf, picked up by Cream as part of the British Invasion, to be covered by a pair of UMM students at open mic night in 2006. Pretty cool, eh?

BTW, I'm definitely not trying to bash the students who played it last night. They were there to perform, not give a history lesson. They did a really nice job, and I definitely hope to hear them again.