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A 100%-natural blues legend By Ben Shalev Tags: The Blues, James Cotton During a concert tour in the southern United States in the 1950s, the great blues musician Muddy Waters was left without a harmonica player. His regular guy, Junior Wells, abruptly left the group and left Waters looking for a replacement. Several top harmonica players were floating around the Memphis area, but Waters wanted the best among them: James Cotton, who was then less than 20. Waters went to the club Cotton was playing and after his show went up to him and said: "Hello, I'm Muddy Waters." Cotton didn't believe it. His reply: "I looked at him and said, 'Yes, and I'm Jesus Christ.'" Advertisement Cotton recalls the moment during a telephone interview from his home in Texas. The next day he was already performing with Waters in Memphis, and two days later headed north with him to Chicago. Cotton stayed in Waters' band for 10 years, just one stop along the way in his illustrious career. It started with another blues giant, Sonny Boy Williamson. Cotton worked with him when he was still a young boy. He continued at Memphis' legendary Sun Studios, where Cotton recorded two years before Elvis Presley was discovered. Cotton earned peak recognition and praise in the late 1960s, when a whole generation of rock musicians and white fans deemed Cotton and his colleagues revered pioneers of the rock 'n' roll revolution. "Man, I really dig that James Cotton, he makes me work!" Janis Joplin said of Cotton, who opened for her act. This weekend (Thursday, Friday and Saturday) he will perform at the Zappa Club in Tel Aviv and in Herzliya. It will be a rare opportunity to see a real blues legend in Israel. Cotton was born in Mississippi in 1936. His parents worked in the fields under conditions that did not differ much from slavery. "It was essentially modern slavery," says Cotton's wife, Rebecca. Because Cotton's vocal chords were affected by illness several years ago (since then he does not sing), his wife acts as an interpreter of sorts during the interview. Occasionally she even encourages her husband by saying, "Tell us about it, Cotton!" Chicken and train sounds He was seven when he started playing the harmonica. His mother had one and she would play chicken or train sounds to amuse her kids. As a boy, Cotton thought those were the only sounds a harmonica could produce, but one day he heard Sonny Boy Williamson's show on the radio, which was broadcast from Arkansas, "and I was amazed to hear that the harmonica could do a lot more things," he recalls. "From that time on, I listened to his show every day, on radio station KFFA." The program at noon lasted almost an hour. "After a little while, I could already play the theme song that opened every show," says Cotton. Cotton's parents died young. "People did not live a long time then, not in those places," sighs Rebecca. "The local doctor had one medicine, some kind of red liquid, and he would give it to everyone, no matter what he was suffering from." When Cotton was nine, his uncle took him to Sonny Boy Williamson's home. "I was so excited that I immediately started playing the theme song from his radio show, I didn't even say hello to him," says Cotton. Williamson took the boy under his wing. What did Cotton learn from him? "To play good music and to be a bandleader," he says. In 1951, after six years during which Cotton lived and played with Williamson, the older jazz singer left Arkansas for Milwaukee, where his wife lived. "He left me his band, but I was 15 and didn't know what to do with it," says Cotton. "I didn't think that I could tell my musician brothers, who were older than me, what to do." When he was 17, he was already recording his first album at Sun Studios in Memphis, where at the time, two years before the discovery of Elvis, mostly blues musicians were recording. Today it is the most famous studio in the history of rock 'n' roll, but Cotton just remembers "two microphones, drums, a piano and problems with the bass and treble." At that same time, he also played with one of the great blues singer, Howlin' Wolf. Why did Howlin' Wolf, who himself played the harmonica, need another harmonica player? "Because I was better than him," says Cotton. His start with Muddy Waters' band was not easy. The blues of the South, where Cotton grew up, and the blues of Chicago, where Waters played, differed from each other. Cotton calls the southern blues "Country Blues" and the northern blues, "Modern Swingin Blues.'" "The blues of the South were more earthy. The Chicago Blues was slicker. We didn't go to school, so we said it differently. They knew how to express themselves mo' better." Waters wanted Cotton to learn to play exactly like his lead harmonica player, Little Walter (through the end of the 1950s Little Walter played on Waters' recordings and Cotton only played in his concerts; later on, Cotton also played on the recordings). "Muddy wanted his performances to sound exactly like the recordings," says Cotton, "that every night it should sound exactly the same way. At first I didn't know how a boy from the country like me could play like the best harmonica player in the world. One day I went up to him and said 'Hey man, I never will be Little Walter but I can do your music." Says Rebecca: "And that, if I may add, was the moment when Cotton moved to the front." In the 1950s, Waters' band performed mainly in juke houses. What is a juke house"? "It's a little club where the moment you enter you start to celebrate. You don't have to dress up and you certainly don't have to behave nicely," says Cotton. Did whites also come to such places? "A few, and because they weren't used to hearing blues, they probably thought we were crazy," says Cotton. Don't hit the mule The white audience did not understand the language the blues people (that is how Cotton calls the musicians) used. Many things were said using code words. "If they sang, 'O captain, don't hit this mule even though she's lazy,' they weren't really referring to a mule," explains Rebecca Cotton. "They were talking about themselves, their friends, who would absorb blows from their bosses." In the early 1960s, something dramatic happened: White audiences began discovering the blues. "Our audience got larger and whiter," says Cotton. "The whites wanted to understand where the music of Eric Clapton and the Beatles came from, and they looked into it and discovered the blues people," adds Rebecca. Did Cotton and his colleagues bear a grudge against the white, rock musicians, who drew from their tradition and became millionaires? "I never was angry," he says. "On the contrary, they raised my price. They made me famous. Without them, the white audience would not know who I am." When did he hear a white blues musician for the first time? "Elvis," he answers immediately. "I would see him a lot in the black clubs before he became famous." "Is it true that he would sit next to the window so that he could escape if he had to?" interrupts Rebecca. Cotton neither confirm nor dispels this. What did he think of Elvis? " That was it. That was the blues. 'It's all right now, Mama.' Nothing but the blues." What would Cotton say to people who think blues is a limited musical style? "The blues have many faces," he answers. "There are happy blues, sad blues, uptown blues and downtown blues. It doesn't matter what your budget is, there is blues that will suit you. There are blues for everyone." Do the blues have a future, or will they disappear after Cotton and his generation, the real "blues people" leave this world? "I think the blues will remain, even if they call it something else. As long as men and women fall in love, as long as they get divorced, as long as you don't find a job, as long as we get bad presidents, the blues will always be there." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Saddam in Tel Aviv Israel's Igal Naor 'never wanted to play Hamlet, only Saddam.' The preacher Archbishop Tutu to UN: Israel may have committed war crime.

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