Singin' the Cecil Barfield mp3 Blues...

Apropos of the ongoing discussion elsewhere on-site, I have a little anecdote to recount that deals indirectly with Damon’s described dilemma. On safari at a local Half Price Books location, I stumbled across a disc by Cecil Barfield (aka “William Robertson”) for a couple bucks. Barfield was an Atlanta based bluesman who made a series of recordings for roving musicologist George Mitchell. Over the years, Mitchell’s voluminous field recordings have filtered out in commercial form through a variety of label conduits including Flyright and Arhoolie. A few years ago, Fat Possum acquired the rights to much of the material and started releasing it under the “George Mitchell Collection” banner. The bulk of titles are available in 7” form, but a few cd collections have also surfaced, the aforementioned Barfield among them. I recall an announcement for the series on the FP website, but as is so often the case initial curiosity quickly dissipated in the wake of another volley of announced new releases.

Spinning the disc on the drive home, I was immediately transfixed by Barfield’s sound. He’s got one of those eccentric voices that’s so endemic to the blues, in this case a pinched nasally whine coupled to a lisp that sounds as if he’s missing a few teeth from his upper palate. In a conventional sense it’s an ugly sound, but yoked to Barfield’s peculiar way of enunciating a lyric it works like magic in monopolizing the ear. His fretwork on acoustic and electric is similarly understated, adequate at delineating dark cyclic riffs, but nothing spectacular in the way of dexterity or drive. Despite his Atlanta residency, his songbook and style exhibits greater kinship to the Mississippi hill country traditions formerly so prevalent on Fat Possum.

By turns, I hear snatches of Sleepy John Estes and Furry Lewis in his performance mien, but mostly a more obscure corollary, that of Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis. Davis was a fixture on the thoroughfare of his moniker, busking in the market stalls for coins and switching to the clubs after sundown. He recorded a number of sides for Fahey’s Takoma imprint and an LP’s worth of material for Elektra in the Sixties before sliding off the radar. A session cut decades later and released on the German Wolf label found him slightly mellowed, but still a respectable talent. It’s those Sixties sides on Takoma that are the mother lode though, just Jimmy and his acoustic belting out percussive dolorous blues that borrows from John Lee Hooker, but also spikes a far older vein. It’s a haunted sound brimming with all the tropes of the idiom, yet none of them seem the least bit trite or counterfeit in his hands. In other words, if you aren’t familiar, do check his stuff out. Barfield strikes me on similar grounds with an inherently contradictory articulation that can sound at once wounded and aggressive, lustful and reticent, regretful and righteous. Both men take the familiar and make it strange while retaining an underlying individualized veracity, which in my book, is what the blues is all about. I don’t know what sort of set up Mitchell used in capturing the music, but the intimacy comes through with uncompromised clarity on the disc.

So here I am with this great ‘new’ blues find and the natural impulse to hear more as soon as possible. The packaging on the disc carries next to nil in terms of information, not much more than a track list and the FP logo. A search online reveals a Barfield discography, but the comparable set listed contains not the 19 of my edition, but 47(!), basically another ninety-odd minutes of music. A few more clicks leads to the discovery that this material is available ONLY as a downloadable release through emusic. Much of the Mitchell Collection, which is now spread across several dozen 7” releases, was available in similar omnibus form back in 2005. So I’m a day late, if not a dollar short, and in order to hear the music now need to accept the mp3 format it comes in. Fortunately, there’s the promotional emusic offer of 25 gratis downloads w/ a subscription, so that should just about cover the difference. But it’s still a slightly disheartening situation considering how great what I have so far sounds in disc format. The wheels of progress will not be diverted by minority dissenting preference, so I’m opting to shut up, suck it up, and shell out for my intangible Barfield fix.