Blues for the weekend: Rishell & Raines (plus interview), Keb Mo, Candye Kane

I know it's only Wednesday, but there are some good blues coming our way this week, starting tomorrow night, so I want to get started talking about them.

Songstress Candye Kane brings her large voice to the intimate Club Cafe on the South Side Thursday night (10/29), and on Friday night (10/30), we're blessed, or cursed, with the simultaneous riches of Keb Mo at the Palace Theater in Greensburg and Paul Rishell and Annie Raines at the Thunderbird in Lawrenceville.

Many weeks ago, as this lineup unfolded, BlueNotes made Rishell & Raines a must-see. I've enjoyed their traditional blues stylings for years, and the combination of Paul's splendid acoustic guitar and Annie's soaring harp is just too good to resist. They both stir the best kind of blues emotions. I've never seen them, and they don't seem to get here that often, so I don't want to miss them this time. I've seen Keb Mo several times, and I've read good things about his ongoing solo tour, so that's hard to pass up. I'm sure those of you who wind up there will come away more than satisfied.

So with all that in mind, I decided that I wanted to focus on Paul and Annie this week. Paul is one of the country's premier acoustic bluesmen, carrying on a tradition that he began early in life, and learned from playing in in the 1970s in Cambridge, Mass., with artists like  Son House, Johnny Shines, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Howlin’ Wolf. Annie is flat out one of the best blues harp players around, and like Paul, seems especially moved by the spirit of of great old blues.

They are not just a couple of capable musicians who like to play the blues, they are a couple of artists who have absorbed the passion of country blues, and through their performances, deliver it to their audiences. They're touring on the release of their latest and very excellent album, "A Night in Woodstock," released late last year. So this show gets two BlueNotes' thumbs-up, even before it happens.

Not only are they fine musicians, but Paul and Annie are also nice enough people to humor my request to answer some questions by e-mail. Here they are:

BlueNotes: You both have been passionately playing passionate blues music for many years. What is it about this music that speaks to you?

Paul: If I hadn't heard blues, I would have missed a big part of myself. I've been recording, teaching and performing this music for over 40 years, and my desire to learn more about it has not abated since I was 13 years old and first heard Son House's recording of "County Farm Blues." For those of us who didn't grow up in the South, blues is the music we didn't know we needed.  

BN: Why have you focused on these older blues forms, and not, say, more contemporary electric blues or blues-rock?

Annie: It's not as though we think older is necessarily better.  There are lots of awful songs out there, old and new.  But we're drawn to great musicians whose work has have stood the test of time - from Mozart to Charley Patton to Jimi Hendrix.

BN: How do you try to communicate your feelings for the music to your audiences?

Paul: first of all, by playing it accurately.  But not in a stilted fashion.  You have to find your own voice in the music as you study it.

Annie: I'm reminded of when our daughter was doing her college admission essays and trying to convince the reader - and herself - of her great passion for writing.  She was so self-conscious that it negated her real feelings and made her writing sound stilted.   If you're relaxed and you're sincere, the music itself will carry your emotions and your story to the listener.

BN: Audiences seem to still love this old music. Why do you think that is? Unless you disagree. What do your audiences want to hear?

Annie: I've met country blues fans from all walks of life.  There does seem to be particular interest from educators.  I think the elements of teaching are so strong in blues and jazz, it naturally attracts people who love to learn.

BN: You have had a close personal relationship with each other for years. How does that affect your music? Or to put it another way, how do you keep making such beautiful music together?

Paul: It's hard to put certain aspects of music or personal relationships into words without making either sound trivial.

BN: Annie, you said this somewhere on your web site: "First of all, there are only two kinds of financial transactions in the music business: Robbery and Charity."  It sounds like you've experienced both. Please elaborate.

Annie: I must have said that when I was younger and more idealistic.  It's more like this: think of music as a shore bird in Alaska, covered in buoyant feathers and natural oils that allow it to float and stay warm all winter.  Think of money as the oil carried on the Exxon Valdez.  Now watch as the profit-driven barge careens out of control, spilling crude oil all over the birds, imperiling them until a team of volunteers arrives to scrub them off by hand using toothbrushes and Arm & Hammer.   Some of the birds (music) survive to be returned to the wild, the volunteers (musicians and music lovers) go home exhausted but fulfilled, and the oil company still declares a profit.

BN: You advertise a lot of music lessons on your web site, including the unusual-sounding lessons by phone. Do you have many students learning the blues? How encouraging -- or discouraging -- is that?

Annie: I give harp lessons by phone to a guy in Nebraska.  It's great if the student knows what he or she wants, but a lot still gets lost in translation.  Now Paul and I can both give video lessons using Skype.  There are so many resources online now, especially on Youtube, that make this music more accessible to people and connect students and teachers to each other from opposite points of the globe.  I think it's fantastic.

BN: How tough is it for young musicians to make a living playing the blues? How tough is it for yor you?

Paul: You can't pander to public tastes.  You just have to keep seeking out the people who are sympathetic to the music.  It's a grass-roots thing, one person at a time.

BN: Annie, judging from the enjoyable blog posts and diaries on your web site, you seem to enjoy expressing yourself that way. Do you ever think of expanding those thoughts by  publishing a journal/novel/play of your blues life? 

Annie: I have; I just worry that the parts that could actually be printed would only take up a couple of pages.

BN: What music would you recommend to blues beginners -- besides your own?

Annie: the first blues music I heard was Muddy Waters with the Legendary Blues Band.  That lit a fire under me that's still burning.  But it's just like love; it has more to do with what you're experiencing at the moment of discovery than the person or the music itself.  I can recommend Little Walter, Blind Boy Fuller, or Jimmy Reed, for example, but it's much more important to make a personal connection with someone who will share their knowledge and their love of music with you.

BN: What beverage goes best with the blues? Beer? Wine? Whiskey? Iced tea? You can speak from personal experience if you like. Noboby is reading this but me.  

Paul: The famous drink in blues lyrics is gin.  Whiskey is too expensive and only men like to drink it.  Of course there was lots of homemade corn liquor during Prohibition and everyone drank that. Good Cognac is what I like.

Thanks to both of you. For me, the most striking sentence in those answers is: "For those of us who didn't grow up in the South, blues is the music we didn't know we needed." If anything sums up my own attraction to the music, as a young white kid growing up in Pittsburgh many, many, many years ago, that would be it. I suspect that same thought might apply to a lot of us who follow the blues today. It's the music, the passion, the experience, the voice that we didn't know we needed -- until we heard it.

And how you can you possibly question the taste of someone who likes good Cognac with his blues?

Just to get you started, here's a video of Paul and Annie at work:

By the way, BeerNotes suggests that if you do go to Greensburg, you stop by the Red Star Agave Grill and brewery before or after the Mo show for some of their special homemade beers. He's very fond of the brown ale he had there a couple weeks ago.