He’s written songs for six different members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and he’s authored books on the history of the blues—so it’s safe to say that few people are as embedded in blues music as Terry Abrahamson.
His new book, In the Belly of the Blues: Chicago to Boston to L.A. 1969 to 1983: A Memoir, chronicles his musical adventures, explaining how he went from a bright-eyed blues admirer to a Grammy Award-winning songwriter by collaborating with Muddy Waters. Abrahamson will provide an author talk on Monday, March 2, at the Palm Desert Library.
During a recent interview, the author described how the blues can unify any two places—like Chicago and the Coachella Valley, places where he has homes.
“I grew up in Chicago, so I didn’t see a mountain other than on Bonanza until I was 18 and came out here—but the stories that comprise the blues and the history of the blues, they’re pretty universal,” he said. “The blues grows out of the need to have your voice heard and to be someone who is appreciated as a human being who can bring something unique and positive and of value to the world around them. … Out here in the West, we see a lot of people who would like to have their voices and their experience appreciated and given value, and the way to do that is to catch people’s ears, to speak in engaging hyperbole: ‘I’m the baddest’; ‘I’m the most fun’; ‘I can cook the hottest chili.’ Just like Bo Diddley singing, ‘I use a cobra snake for a necktie / I got a brand-new house on the roadside / Made from rattlesnake hide,’ it’s what you can do to catch people’s ears to let them know that you are cool and you are interesting, and your presence in their world can make their world more fun and a better place.”
The power of music made itself known to Abrahamson very early in his life, thanks to record stores and … cowboy television?
“I grew up in the mid ’50s/early ’60s, and every TV show, which at that time was mostly cowboy shows, had theme songs,” he said. “I associated TV and movies and a lot of different forms of communication with songs, so when I would be watching a movie or a TV show, even if I didn’t hear a song coming at me, one would arise in my head. I always thought that music was very important and a natural part of everything that was going around me when I was growing up on the West Side of Chicago.
“Across the street from our school was a record store, and it was one of these old record stores where they had the transom over the door, and they put the speaker on the transom so they’d be blowing out Howlin’ Wolf or Jackie Wilson through that speaker, through that transom, and you heard it on the street. It became part of the fabric of the life around me, just as sure as smelling the cooking smells.”
Abrahamson often talks about growing up in the right place at the right time.
“I was in a changing neighborhood,” he said. “It had been white, immigrant working class at the time. My parents were growing up there, and they were part of one migration of people from Europe, but then there was another migration going on, which was all these people coming up from the South who were trying to escape the horrible memories of slavery. You had all these people with the blood of slaves in them coming up into Chicago, and they wanted to be entertained by the music they were hearing down South, so this was the rise of Chicago blues. The blues was born in Mississippi, but hit puberty in Chicago.”
During this “puberty,” Chicago forced the blues to become electric.
“You’re Muddy Waters, and you’re 25, and it’s 1938, and you’re playing in juke joints with dirt floors, and half the people are barefoot, so nobody with leather shoes walking on a wood floor is going to interfere with your music,” he said. “There are not going to be sirens outside going down these dirt roads like there are in Chicago, with the fire engines and the ambulances, and you’re not going to hear the elevated city trains going by overhead. You add all that together, and you can’t be heard with a wood guitar. You’ve got to throw some electricity behind it, so that’s how the blues got electrified, and I was a beneficiary of all that.”
Thanks to an invite from a friend, Abrahamson was introduced to blues legends at an intimate Chicago gig.
“I’m like 17, 18, and my buddy calls me up and he says, ‘Let’s go see this band; they’re playing down by Wrigley Field, and they’re doing the Rolling Stones’ “Little Red Rooster,”’” he said. “I said, ‘What’s the name of the band?’ and he said, ‘The Howlin’ Wolf band.’ We thought this was a band where everybody’s going to look like us—young, white, skinny, with long hair. These old Black guys came out—some of them were probably close to 50—and they did the Stones ‘Little Red Rooster,’ and they did The Doors’ ‘Back Door Man’ and they did Cream’s ‘Sitting on Top of the World,’ but they didn’t look like any of these bands. We discovered, looking at our liner notes, that it was Cream and (Morrison) and the Stones that were doing songs by these old Black guys who had come up from Mississippi, and these songs, some of them were as old as my parents … and you could see these guys every night in Chicago.
“There’s an assault on Black history in America and the validity of all those lessons, and I think it’s very important that the Blues exists as a vessel that carries all that Black history all around the world, and it has for over 100 years.”
Terry Abrahamson
Abrahamson not only enjoyed the blues; he valued the significance of the ways in which these musicians dealt with oppression.
“My dad was a pretty aware guy, and he made sure that we were very aware of people like Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, so when I see these guys who had come up from Mississippi and brought me their music, I’m thinking about what was going on in Mississippi with the dogs and the fire hoses and the lynchings,” he said. “It gave the music, and it gave these performers, Muddy and Wolf and Otis Rush, their presence and their words so much more weight.”
These days, Abrahamson finds that it’s more important than ever to educate others regarding the power of the genre.
“There’s an assault on Black history in America and the validity of all those lessons, and I think it’s very important that the Blues exists as a vessel that carries all that Black history all around the world, and it has for over 100 years,” he said. “I’m really proud and humbled to have been able to be a part of the blues community and to have lived at a time when I was amazingly, amazingly lucky to have grown up in Chicago and known Muddy Waters, written songs with him, and seen guys like Howlin’ Wolf and Chuck Berry and all that.”
Abrahamson described the process of writing for Muddy Waters as natural.
“People say, ‘What was it like to give Muddy Waters these songs and to write these songs?’—and you are what you eat,” he said. “I had devoured the Chicago blues for several years, and it was in me. … It’s not like he (Waters) was singing about DNA or the formula for rocket fuel; he’s singing about what he goes through every day just to keep his sanity, and he’s coming up with ways to talk to people, mostly women, that had never been articulated in any kind of circles that I grew up in. Your mind naturally sparks to that zing, sparks to that whimsy.”
Terry Abrahamson will host an author talk for In the Belly of the Blues: Chicago to Boston to L.A. 1969 to 1983: A Memoir, at 3 p.m., Monday, March 2, at the Palm Desert Library, at 73300 Fred Waring Drive. The event is free, but you must register online. For more information, and to register, click here.