Stuck Outside The Forum With The Hendrix Blues Again... Slight Return

For reasons unknown to me, my post "Stuck Outside The Forum With The Hendrix Blues Again" attracted more readers than anything else on "Words And Music".

In short, it was a complaint about a Facebook group called The Real Blues Forum refusing to allow discussion about Jimi Hendrix being a blues guitarist.

Well, it's happened again. But this time the guitarist whose name cannot be mentioned is Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The latest trouble started when a hapless member of the forum posted a video of Albert King performing with Vaughan. A small discussion started about the playing styles of the two men, but was cut short by a right-thinking member of the forum pointing out that this discussion transgressed the rules. Something like: old black players ok to talk about, but modern white players (or Hendrix) not ok to talk about.

Someone then asked how on earth this video had even been posted in the first place.

When I responded by asking: "Can blue men play the whites?" - a light-hearted reference to the Bonzo Dog Band's classic enquiry - my contribution was almost immediately moderated, ie removed.

So now I've removed myself from The Real Blues Forum. It's funny that Albert King was able to bring himself to play with the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Rory Gallagher, and that BB King could sing the praises of Eric Clapton and Peter Green, but (predominantly white) blues purists don't seem to even want to talk about them.

Shirt Shrift

It seems that anyone wearing a Pepsi T-shirt to the Olympics might get the same treatment as someone mentioning Jimi Hendrix on The Real Blues Forum (see previous post).

Although the organisers now appear to have back-pedalled a bit on this.

However, the Olympics is a Coca-Cola event and you'd be wise to keep that in mind. And don't even suggest that the tie-up between Coca-Cola and fitness is kind of odd.

You think Coke might be bad for you? Coca-Cola reassures you that it's "safe for consumption as part of a balanced and varied diet". So that's all right, then.

Stuck Outside The Forum With The Hendrix Blues Again

Was Jimi Hendrix a blues musician? There are some who will think this question in the same league as 'Is the pope a Catholic?' etc...

But for others, it seems, the very idea of Hendrix being thought of as a blues musician is akin to heresy.

A Facebook group called The Real Blues Forum hosts intricate and erudite discussion on the blues, but someone (not me) recently had the temerity to put up some pictures of Hendrix for discussion, because Jimi was seen to be holding actual blues albums in the photos.

When the subsequent discussion (all right, I did play a part in this bit) turned to Jimi being a great blues player, the originator of the strand made it clear that if there was another mention of Jimi's music (rather than the blues albums in the photos), he would remove, i.e. censor, the whole discussion.

A forum is a 'meeting place for open discussion'... but not The Real Blues Forum, it seems.

When I posted a quote from BB King — 'Jimi to me was one of the great explorers of the so-called Delta blues' — toys were thrown out of the pram and the discussion was closed down.

What is so terrible about suggesting that Jimi was part of the great blues tradition? BB hit on something with his reference to the Delta blues... for surely Hendrix was little more than the Robert Johnson of his time.

If Johnson had lived into the electric blues era, there is no telling where he and his playing might have gone. His music might even have been banned from being discussed on The Real Blues Forum.