White men sing the blues

The modern blues musicians showcased on a new album are a long way from the music's dirt-poor roots. Nick Hasted gets the story from those behind the project

Blues was born in the Mississippi Delta a century back, the memory of slavery still keenly felt, in an age and place so poor you might have had to eat dirt. Times may have changed since then, but the music is back. A new compilation, Balling the Jack: the birth of the nu-blues, brings together artists as diverse as Moby, Captain Beefheart, Nick Cave and North Mississippi Allstars and claims a new place for the blues in the 21st century. With the raw, blues-adoring White Stripes, P J Harvey, Beck, Bob Dylan and Kelly Joe Phelps also placing this primal sound at the heart of their new work, music that seemed to die 30 years ago is in the air again.

So why is it back? And did it ever really expire, or just change shape, like a phantom virus in America's blood? The answers are still half-covered in that old Mississippi mud. "Its sound haunted me," says Joe Cushley, compiler of Balling the Jack, who first heard the blues at English boarding-school in the early Seventies. "A big echo, and distorted, bent notes, the blue notes – they had a physical effect, of claustrophobia and encroaching vastness."

Gary Lucas, who played guitar for Captain Beefheart, was nine when he made the discovery. "My guitar teacher played a bent note; I felt a chill of recognition," he says. "That slurred sound is an imitation of human suffering, of wailing and crying. I'd heard it from cantors in the temple."

The novelist Walter Mosley simply calls blues "the definitive articulation of the tragedy of existence in the 20th century. Almost any black person's story in the 20th century in America is a blues story."

It's a story starkly preserved in recordings of country blues from the 1920s and 1930s, in the unfettered expression of indentured sharecroppers letting rip in the gin joints of Mississippi. You can hear it in the implacably cool voice of Robert Johnson, whose stories of impotence and sold souls tell how close musicians once thought they walked to God and Satan. And the rumour that he offered his soul to the Devil in return for being able to play guitar places him firmly at the mythic beginning of rock'n'roll darkness.

But when blues moved, with its makers, from its almost supernatural roots to more integrated, post-war northern US cities, especially Chicago, it flourished only briefly. The big electric blues that Cushley remembers, the suddenly confident force and sexuality of Howlin' Wolf and the rest, aimed only at other migrant blacks, was swallowed whole by its upstart offspring: rock'n'roll. The Rolling Stones-led British blues boom of the Sixties provided a few final pay days for the music's veterans. But in a climate of Civil Rights aspiration, the blues were dismissed by younger blacks as relics of an unmissed lost world.

Thirty years on, Balling the Jack still has only a sprinkling of black artists, as Cushley ruefully admits: "It was tainted, slave music. Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf tried to take on board soul and funk. But that was all about being uptown and sophisticated, a way out of the shackles of the old music."

Lucas agrees: "I think there's a shock of recognition, and embarrassment," he says. "I think many black people think it's all a lot of wailing and crying, and that we've moved away from that now. We're proud. The younger black musicians who place themselves in that tradition, such as Keb Mo and Robert Cray, sound like replications. I don't know if the conditions that produced those old records will ever come back. Not that you'd want them to."

Walter Mosley's great blues novel RL's Dream (1995), about a cancer-ravaged companion of Robert Johnson in today's New York City, has the musician playing his raw songs in a rough, backstreet black bar. But the truth is that, although hard times are back in black America, it's hip hop that now takes the weight. A record such as Scarface's "I Seen a Man Die" (1995) is a typical lament. Even R Kelly has found it in himself to write a blues number for millionaire black men, in the street-haunted "I Wish" (2000). So who needs the sound of a plantation guitar?

Cushley points to the black writer Terry McMillan's novel Disappearing Acts (1989) and its anger at modern black Americans for treating the days described by the blues as, he says, "some kind of forgettable interlude in their history. They either want to go straight back to Africa or only think about now. But Fat Possum Records is bringing Southern rap crews and old, bad bluesmen together, and Chris Thomas King disses his listeners for smoking crack and not knowing who Johnson is. Alicia Keys, too, just put a chain gang in a video. Knowing that past is important."

The feeling persists, though, that blues, as necessary as ever in black America, has vanished into other forms of black music. It's the white musicians who seem to need those old shapes more. Cushley lays the credit for the switch from post-blues-boom pub bores to the squalls of PJ Harvey and the White Stripes squarely at the door of LPs such as Safe as Milk (1967) and Trout Mask Replica (1969), made by the legendary, Howlin' Wolf-inspired Californian avant-gardist Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart.

"He was profoundly influential in many ways," Lucas says of his one-time employer. "He said his intention was to turn himself inside out, to tear himself down to his core. He wanted to break up what he called the mama heartbeat in people, that 4/4 pulse. He wanted to recreate the beats he breathed and thought with, instead. He borrowed techniques from free jazz, put beautiful surrealistic poetry against flashing slide-guitar, exploded the form of the blues and added such levels of information. He was a force of nature."

You can hear Beefheart directly in Tom Waits, the great British bluesman Kevin Coyne and Harvey. And the blues spirit has spread to stranger places. Pulp's This Is Hardcore (1998) is a "Woke up this morning, watched porn on the internet again" blues for our modern age of medicated despair, as is Nirvana's "Something in the Way" (1992), an update of Robert Johnson's impotence blues "Stones in my Passway" (1937). And Leadbelly was Cobain's favourite performer.

But the musician who most clearly shows how the music created in those hard Southern times still resonates is Bob Dylan. In Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), he revisited pre-war folk and blues in a time-ravaged voice, refiring his own art in the process. Then, in Time Out of Mind (1997) and Love & Theft (2001), he revivified and repopulated the arcane, rustic, fallen world that those songs describe. In the ghost art of old blues, he found a way of resisting what America had become by imagining what it once was, "before the insane world of entertainment exploded in our faces," as he explained; "learning to go forward by turning back the clock."

From Johnson to Beefheart to Cobain, it's perhaps this sense of a truer, more elemental emotional world behind our media-surfeited lives that means blues still has something to tell us.

"It has a preoccupation with mortal issues and how to conduct ourselves while on this planet," says Lucas. Billy Childish, a contributor to Balling the Jack and English underground figure, agrees: "I heard Muddy Waters say one time, 'You can't do this stuff without God.' That makes for a bigger picture. We've got this obsession with running around being entertained by things, but we're not facing the big issues. And blues music made a pretty good attempt to. Because it had a background in gospel and hard living, in a way it tried to join Heaven and Hell. It's about expressing who you really are."