“The blues also tells deeply human stories of love and loss, hope and struggle. The eleven songs recorded on the American Songbag include lyrics that are about hopes and dreams, lost love, mourning the dead, dreams of escape from jail, heaven and hell and the singers’ hopes and fears for the future.”

Doc Bowling: American Songbag Legacy

Doc Bowling and his Blues Professors have been pleasing audiences in small and large venues across the UK, Ireland and Germany for more than 15 years. Inspired by the heroes of blues, jazz and country from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Their original songs bring new life to some old country blues tunes with contemporary political commentary. On their new album, Doc Bowling and his Blues Professors Sing The American Songbag (Volume 1), Doc Bowling leads his hand-picked crew across 11 songs that have come to define early 20th Century American music. Whether you view these selections as blues, folk, roots or any other handy genre, they are all iconic and important in the history of American popular music. Inspired by the title of Carl Sandburg's 1927 book of the same name, Bowling's work as a musical archaeologist, sets the album up as a coalescence of his long-term musical vision. While many of these songs pre-date recording technology, making it impossible to hear the true original versions, Bowling and company deliver soul-stirring performances that are definitive in their own way. Expanding the traditional acoustic trio/quartet lineup to include violin, six-string banjo, sax, accordion, cajon and other assorted percussion instruments, the band imparts a modern sensibility while maintaining a reverence for tradition.

(Photo: Ben ‘Doc’ Bowling)

“It's a return to the roots of the blues. I'm a retired criminology professor, and I think about these things. I've done research that traces some of these songs back to the 19th century and maybe a bit earlier than that; I've spent a lot of time thinking about the oral tradition of where they came from. I didn't have to arrange them because the arrangements have emerged organically over 15 yrs of playing together. We've played them hundreds of times, they've arranged themselves." And Volume 1 is only the beginning, as Ben ‘Doc’ Bowling promises "we recorded 22 songs. This volume covers country blues, and even pre-blues. Volume 2 is when we get to Chicago and post-war. It's a whole other animal from so many perspectives but our approach remains the same, which is very grounding and helps us stay dialed in."

Interview by Michael Limnios                Special Thanks: Larry Kay (Night Train PR)

What do you learn about yourself from the blues and what does the blues mean to you? 

Blues music was the soundtrack to my childhood, throughout my teenage years when I started playing the guitar, and it’s been with me my entire adult life. The early acoustic blues songs – Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White – that I listened to as a child were in my mother’s record collection and she also had records by artists like Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson and Bob Dylan, artists whose music was rooted in the blues.

Then as a teenager, I made weekly visits to the local library which had an incredible vinyl record collection and I made tape recordings of the likes of Elmore James and people whose names were as romantic as their music – Kokomo Arnold, Casey Bill Weldon, Lighting Hopkins and Whispering Smith. And of course I was listening to British artists like John Mayall and the Blues Breakers, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac as well as bands the Rolling Stones, Beatles and Led Zeppelin, whose early records were built from the blues.

The first blues record I ever heard – I can’t have been more than five or six years old – on my mum’s red and cream Bush record player, had Josh White on one side and Big Bill Broonzy on the other. It was a 7-inch EP in a blue sleeve on Pye records in a series called “Pieces of Eight” which had on the sleeve a cartoon drawing of a pirate, guarding a treasure chest, no doubt with gold inside. Big Bill starts singing “In the evening, in the evening, when the sun goes down…” and it is just the most beautiful, haunting song, filled with longing, loss, the aching pain you feel “when your lover can’t be found”. I still feel entranced when I put this on the record player, surface noise, scratches and all.

It’s a live recording, and the end of the first song Big Bill responds to someone in the crowd, and says “…my favourite, you want to hear my favourite…” and with barely a pause for breath he starts singing Going Down the Road (Feeling Bad). It’s such a great song, and I’m sure it’s true that it was Big Bill’s favourite and he sings joyfully despite delivering lyrics which are all about how he feels so-low-and-bad because of how he’s been mistreated by his woman. She shouldn’t treat him this way – tired of eating cornbread and beans, his two-dollar shoes killing his feet and now he’s off down the road feeling bad – so he says – but he sounds anything but miserable; quite the opposite, he sounds liberated, free and happy out on the open road.

So, coming back to your question, maybe that’s what the blues means to me. Songs about sadness and longing, misery even, yet delivered with character, resolve and optimism, even if that optimism comes from the possibility of joy in the afterlife. I’ve been singing along with Big Bill and Josh White since I was a child and playing the twelve-bar blues since I was a teenager, so I guess the blues is just part of me. It’s a funny thing, you know, I grew up in a very small village in Worcestershire, in the midlands of England, on the edge of a region called the Black Country, so when I hear people say that they think that my records sound authentic, I do wonder what that authenticity means – it surely can’t be that my voice emulates the blues singers from the Mississippi Delta, or Chicago, Memphis or wherever. Maybe it’s just that I’m singing from the heart, doing my best to do justice to my love of these beautiful songs.

“I’d like to go back to October 1955 to be a guest at a cocktail party at Cassell, the London publishing house, at the launch of Big Bill Blues, the autobiography of Big Bill Broonzy (as told to Yannick Bruynoghe) listening to the great man playing the guitar and singing songs from the Deep South, talking about his music, and reminiscing about his long career, the people he’d met and to hear his musings about the origins of the blues.” (Photo: Doc Bowling)

How do you describe your sound and songbook? Where does your creative drive come from?

 Well, let’s start with the songs, which is the easier part of your question, I describe the collection on this record as the “American Songbag,” and I’ve gone for that title partly because I’m trying to sing these songs as how they might have been sung before they were ever in a book. When they were just a bag of songs that singers carried around their heads, and were passed from father to son, mother to daughter, just in their singing voice, what you’d call the oral tradition of country blues.

I have to admit that the title is borrowed – the author Carl Sandburg called his 1927 selection of “country and city blues” the American Songbag – I guess for the same reasons as me. The words were first written down in the early twentieth century, but the writers of the 1920s and 30s were clear in their research that these were songs first heard in the cotton fields, bars, medicine shows, fetes and dance parties of the late nineteenth century, or earlier, some going back before the American Civil War. Some – like Saint James Infirmary, which happens to be my favourite track on the album – have been traced back further to English, Irish and Scottish folk tunes from the late 1700s.

As for the sound? I must admit that I’ve never worked with a producer or tried to have a particular sound. The songs on the album were never deliberately arranged; it’s just how they turned out after playing them live for the past fifteen years with my band – the Blues Professors – and for some of the songs these are just how they’ve turned out after being played for the last forty-odd years just me and my guitar.

I’ve always loved to play and sing, for my own pleasure but also to entertain other people. When I was still at school in the late 1970s and early 80s, I spent a few summers busking around France and Germany hitchhiking with guitar and harmonica, wearing a corduroy Dylan hat, earning just enough to buy bread and cheese and wine. Then it was about subsistence and the honest exchange of entertainment for a few coins. So, maybe that’s the creative urge, to take the raw material of the guitar and voice and turn them into something that makes people happy, or even better to see I could get the crowd to sing along to or dance and clap and stomp their feet.

This project – recording traditional country blues songs – has its own challenges. I’m singing the songs in my own way, and the other musicians on the album – there’s acoustic bass and cajon, sax, and fiddle, accordion, banjo and piano – are bringing their own musicianship to the songs, but the lyrics and tunes and chord progressions were already settled, so it’s not like writing and recording your own songs where you obviously have more creative freedom.

I’m pleased about the way that the American Songbag has worked out. We started out the recording by playing the songs live in the studio as a four piece – with me and Donnie Burke on acoustic guitars, Simon Minney on acoustic bass and Roger Chapman on cajon – and I think that the record recreates how we sound playing live at our best. I’m proud of the vocals, especially the four-piece harmonies on songs like Midnight Special and Irene Goodnight. I sometimes joke that the Blues Professors are a ‘boy band’ – or rather an ‘old boy band’, average age around 65 – and the foundation for that is that we’ve all been singing throughout our lives, and for some of us that goes back to our time as church choirboys.

I’ve recorded three albums of my own material with the Blues Professors – Down Home Blues, Black Country Boy, and Cosmopolitan Soul – mostly transmogrifying old blues tunes with my own original lyrics. So, while they might be delivered in a blues style, in terms of content, they are about my own experience, or things that I find intriguing or quirky. Like discovering that Martin Luther King was a Star Trek fan, or that Adolf Hitler was inspired by cowboy novels, or the scandal of hopelessly dangerous pedestrian crossings in London, or the housing crisis, or stop-and-frisk and so on and on. I think of our music as being about bringing contemporary social and political concerns to life through the blues.

For me, songwriting is a thing that just happens, kind of like dreaming, and I can’t really control it or do it on demand. I’ll start to play a tune on the guitar, or maybe a lyrical line comes into my head, usually unbidden, and it just starts to suggest itself and it just becomes something, so that’s really hard to pinpoint where the creative drive comes from. It’s just there or it’s not there.

“Blues music is, at its core, American folk music. It has deep traditions musically and is a wonderfully hybrid mix of musical styles and influences from Africa and Europe that come together in the USA. So, it’s all about culture and society. The blues, perhaps more than any other musical form, has lyrics that record important historical moments like flood, disease and war, so in that sense the blues is a kind earwitness to the twentieth century.” (Photo: Doc Bowling)

What do you miss most nowadays from the blues of past? What are your hopes and fears for the future of the blues?

In my imagination of the blues past, it wasn’t a big deal to get to see talented performing artists – you could just turn up to your local corner bar in any city across the land and find a decent guitar or piano player or singer and just sit there and have a few beers and enjoy a night of great music. Whereas I feel that today getting to gigs is a mission. Maybe it’s just me getting older and busy with my day job, and just not finding the time or being clued in, but I hear the same thing from other people – both audiences and musicians – that the opportunities to hear live music of all genres, but especially the blues, are fewer today than in the past.

My hope for my own musical journey is that now that the Blues Professors have recorded four albums, three of original songs and one of traditional pre-war, blues tunes, and now that we’ve worked so hard to hone our music and our stagecraft, that we can find some more gigs with a decent sound set up, where the venue owner has a real feel for the music and looks after the artists, and we can just play our music without having to hassle with lugging backline and so on. We’ve found something like that in Germany where we’ve toured six or seven times, and where small venues are still alive and well and they really know how to look after their artists and have appreciative audiences who put folding money into the tip bucket.

What moment changed your music life the most? What´s been the highlights in your life and career so far?

I had been in bands since I was a teenager, but I started taking the whole thing more seriously about twenty years ago and I got a few solo gigs – just me singing along with guitar and harmonica – as a support act for local bands. One night I was doing my usual half dozen songs by folks like Big Bill and Mississippi John Hurt, and as I walked off the stage a man called Donnie Burke – the lead singer and frontman of The Roadhouse Dogs, the band I was opening for – came up to me, pointed his index finger in my direction and said “I want to be in that band”. I said, “I don’t have a band” and he replied, “you do now!” Over the next few weeks and months, Donnie and I started to play guitar and sing together and with Simon Minney on bass, and we talked about the music we loved and our mutual appreciation of Robert Crumb’s cartoon drawings of the Heroes of Blues, Jazz and Country, which kind of defined our aesthetic as a recording band. That was the start of Doc Bowling and his Blues Professors and Donnie and has been my musical mentor and guide ever since.

The highlight of my musical career so far has to be playing at Tate Britain in 2019 at the opening of my father’s art exhibition there – he’s a 91 year old abstract painter called Frank Bowling – and we also did a ‘Late at Tate’ in the 1840s room surrounded by paintings by the likes of Turner, Millais and the pre-Raphaelites. Hardly a great music venue, but the combination of art, music and family makes it a personal highlight.

“In my imagination of the blues past, it wasn’t a big deal to get to see talented performing artists – you could just turn up to your local corner bar in any city across the land and find a decent guitar or piano player or singer and just sit there and have a few beers and enjoy a night of great music.” (Photo: Doc Bowling and his Blues Professors)

What is the impact of Blues on the socio-cultural implications? How do you want the music to affect people?

Blues music is, at its core, American folk music. It has deep traditions musically and is a wonderfully hybrid mix of musical styles and influences from Africa and Europe that come together in the USA. So, it’s all about culture and society. The blues, perhaps more than any other musical form, has lyrics that record important historical moments like flood, disease and war, so in that sense the blues is a kind earwitness to the twentieth century. The blues also tells deeply human stories of love and loss, hope and struggle. The eleven songs recorded on the American Songbag include lyrics that are about hopes and dreams, lost love, mourning the dead, dreams of escape from jail, heaven and hell and the singers’ hopes and fears for the future.

Music has to move people – and that could be through the lyrics, melody, chord changes or the voice of a particular instrument like a fiddle or saxophone. For me, the best songs on the album are when that whole thing comes together into a harmony that expresses or evokes an emotion – happiness or sadness, rage or regret or rejoicing – and the brilliance of the blues is that it has the capacity to summon many different feelings at the same time – like Big Bill singing joyously about going down the road feeling sad – and you really do feel the mixed emotions of the singer walking away from an unkind lover.

Why is it important to we preserve and spread the blues? What’s the balance in music between technique (skills) and soul/emotions?

It’s important that we preserve and spread the blues because it’s musical history, the origin of much of our contemporary music from rock and roll, rhythm and blues to bluegrass, country, salsa and jazz and reggae and on and on through the myriad forms of popular music that draw, as a starting point, on the twelve-bar blues tradition. So, I feel that going back to the source, back to the origin, acknowledging the artists many of whom never got their due, is vital and integral to everything to do with contemporary music.

I learned to play classical guitar for about five years from the age of eleven and then had a guitar teacher who was a Roy Orbison lookalike, with a quiff and sideburns like mutton-chops who taught me to play the guitar-driven tunes of Burt Weedon and bands like The Shadows and introduced me the rock and roll canon, all of which really sprung from the twelve bar blues. Speaking personally, I can’t claim to be any great technical blues guitarist, but I’ve got enough chops based on the fingerpicking arpeggios and guitar instrumentals that I learned as kid.

I find it’s hard to focus on technique and at the same time connect emotionally with your audience, which in my view without doubt about soul, or feel or vibe. I have to admit that I struggled with this in recording the American Songbag, not so much with the instrumentation which is kind of in me and I can play what I need to on the guitar without thinking about it too much, or even at all, but much more with the voice which I had to record over and over and over again until I felt I had it right – you know, satisfyingly sonorous and tuneful, but also telling a story in way that feels natural and expresses the feeling that comes from the song.

“Blues music was the soundtrack to my childhood, throughout my teenage years when I started playing the guitar, and it’s been with me my entire adult life. The early acoustic blues songs – Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White – that I listened to as a child were in my mother’s record collection and she also had records by artists like Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Oscar Peterson and Bob Dylan, artists whose music was rooted in the blues.“ (Photo: Doc Bowling and his Blues Professors)

How can a musician truly turn the blues into a commercial and popular genre of music for the today's audience?

I have absolutely no idea how a musician can turn the blues into a commercially popular genre. Truly. I was hoping you might be able to tell me! What I’ve learned from recording four records independently is that you have to love making music – whether that is writing songs, playing an instrument, performing on stage in pubs and clubs or whatever – you have to love music for its own sake and not because it’s going to bring you fame and fortune, or even modest commercial success. In my world, the blues is a thing that you do for love not money.

Let’s take a trip with a time machine, so where and why would you really want to go for a whole day?

What a great question. I’d like to go back to October 1955 to be a guest at a cocktail party at Cassell, the London publishing house, at the launch of Big Bill Blues, the autobiography of Big Bill Broonzy (as told to Yannick Bruynoghe) listening to the great man playing the guitar and singing songs from the Deep South, talking about his music, and reminiscing about his long career, the people he’d met and to hear his musings about the origins of the blues.

Aside from the fact that it sounds like a great party with musicians, critics and writers, 1955 was the moment that the blues arrived in England and soon afterward a host of other blues performers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Muddy Waters would be bringing their music to London, Manchester and Nottingham. That old EP in my late mother’s record collection takes me back to that night when Big Bill sang his favourite song, “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” a song he’d learned from a fieldhand who he used to walk with to the cotton gin. It’s not only the first blues tune I ever heard in rural England far from the Deep South but it also captures the essence of the blues: a mournful song sung with joy.

Doc Bowling and his Blues Professors - Home

(Photo: Ben ‘Doc’ Bowling)