Long after a certain historic birth, far away from the Mississippi delta, two musicians in Bangalore, Gurudarshan Somayaji and Vinoo Mathew, are gripped with an intuitive certainty that it’s a somewhat significant year for the blues. Their intuition derives from a monochrome memory of a young roving musician born on May 8, 1911. Dressed in a black suit and crowned with a slanted pork pie hat. He moseyed from town to town in and around Mississippi, pausing at street corners, juke joints and Saturday night dances, to strum out a potent refrain that would never cease to be remembered, revered and covered.

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And so it is that musicians from across India will come together to revel in ‘An Ode to the Blues’ in Bangalore next week, with music concerts and movie screenings at CounterCulture on 7 May. While Johnson died at 27 having recorded merely 30 songs in 1936 and 1937, blues and rock musicians maintain that you ‘cannot not’ be influenced by him. Eric Clapton released Me and Mr Johnson in 2004, while Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin said: “Robert Johnson, to whom we all owed our existence, in some way.”

What’s it about Mr Johnson?Ravi  Khanolkar tries to put his finger on what made Johnson tick. “In his early teens, Johnson heard the music of Son House, Willy Brown and Charlie Patton. He soaked in the sounds of all three, fused them into one and created his own style.” It’s Johnson’s style of playing slide guitar and his vocal delivery that set him apart. For Srish Chander, who plays the rhythm guitar for Blues Before Sunrise, a young Bangalore band, ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ and ‘Crossroad Blues’ are his best songs.

Borrowing from the blues Next week’s concert will also try to resurrect the image of the blues, a genre that’s often typecast as music for an older audience. In fact, today’s more popular forms of music can trace their roots to the blues. “Many big rock acts were influenced by the blues,” says Rudy Wallang of Soulmate. Chander points out that “heavy metal has been influenced by Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and so on, while these guys were in turn influenced by the blues.”

Khandolar pitches in with more detail of borrowed blues: “The entire debut album of The Rolling Stones was made up of blues covers. Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was a reworked song, ‘Gallows Pole’ a blues cover.”

Back to blues Wallang sees a blues revival underway, with younger audiences being drawn to the genre. He remembers a gig a few years ago, when the band’s blues-heavy music was received “rather enthusiastically”, in a line-up that included heavy metal acts. Some popular blues bands include The Beet Root Blues Band, Chronic Blues Circus, HFT, Saturday Night Blues, Ministry of Blues and Blues Conscience. 

  Owen Roncon, director of the Mahindra Blues Festival in Mumbai earlier this year, which included names such as Buddy Guy, Jonny Lang, Shemekia Copeland, and Matt Schofiel, was wary of doing a blues-only festival. But Roncon never expected the young crowds that turned up. Somayaji points out that South East Asia is now one of the biggest consumers of blues and jazz, with major festivals in Thailand and Malaysia. “Blues has lived on for a hundred years and will survive”. And that’s reason enough to break into the blues.