For nobody else...

Blues is the only genre of music that takes its name from the range of emotions it seeks to express. Blues artists are supposed to be depressed about something, and that dissatisfaction can take on a variety of shadings within the music: wounded, plaintive, grave, resigned, wistful, desperate, angry, defiant, or even threatening. But we can already hear in some of the earliest blues recordings the emergence of an attitude that draws from all these feelings to create a kind of armor to protect against feeling any of them too harshly. It was a pose of exaggerated indifference, provocative and entertaining for the way it could make a performer seem to be floating above life, rather than being mired down in it like the rest of us. The desirability of this attitude is proven by the way it has managed to infect every form of popular music that’s development can be traced back to the blues, from rock ‘n roll, to reggae and rap (soul to a lesser extent, because of its tendency toward unabashed emoting). Then, as now, performers adopting this pose of indifference were most likely to earn the respect of an audience if they could imply that it was the result of having experienced more than their fair share of life’s ups and downs simply through their vocal, instrumental, or bodily presence, without needing to spell it out.

Robert Nighthawk (sometimes credited as “Robert Night Hawk“) embodies that approach as well as anyone in his singing and lead guitar playing--though few today can testify to his stage presence, as he succumbed to congestive heart failure in 1967. His chosen name, itself, gives the impression of a restless spirit, difficult to contain, and possessing a larger-than-life confidence or swagger. Born Robert Lee McCollum in Helena, Arkansas, 1909, he would earn his more poetic, adopted name the long and hard way. McCollum picked up guitar from Houston Stackhouse (who was possibly his cousin) in Mississippi, and went on to perform and record during the 30s and early ‘40s under a variety of names, before settling on Robert Nighthawk because of the continuing popularity of his debut record, 1937‘s “Prowling Night Hawk”. He would travel to Chicago periodically to record songs--and learn his famed slide guitar technique from the great Tampa Red--but he never stayed there for very long, preferring his home-town in Arkansas and, most of all, the open road to the big city. Because of his rambling nature and the infrequency of his recording dates, he never established a recording career or any amount of notoriety outside of blues circles, although during the course of his extensive travels he played with most of the famous blues musicians in the South and Midwest, and influenced a younger generation of more commercially successful Chicago blues performers, including Muddy Waters and Earl Hooker.

Like many bluesmen, Nighthawk’s style is best showcased live, and that’s why the “Maxwell Street” recordings conducted by Mike Shea for his documentary And This Is Free are an absolute goldmine. These recordings were first released in 1980 as Live On Maxwell Street, again, under the same title, on CD in the ‘90s, and in ’99, in extended form as a CD box-set called And This Is Maxwell Street (causing a bit of a controversy among Chicago blues enthusiasts, because it revealed the recordings as originally released to be incorrectly credited, and, in parts, surreptitiously edited). Either release demonstrates Nighthawk’s singular style of jagged, but hypnotic lead guitar--often dwelling on the same string for long runs in order to emphasize rhythm over melody. Not as celebrated--but just as unique--are his serene vocals, nowhere better employed than on the jaw-dropping medley of “Annie Lee” and “Sweet Black Angel”, recounting twin tales of sexual obsession with a lightness that contrasts brilliantly with the edgy guitar work, expressing satisfaction, compulsion, and desperation without ever resolving the three states--or breaking the majestic surface of the performance. It is a buoyant, seemingly effortless creative moment that was a whole life-time in the making, and it stands as the chief legacy of a man who refused to be pinned down.

Robert Nighthawk--Annie Lee/Sweet Black Angel