the hum / By Bob Doran

Natural

Taj Mahal on food and music, plus clean-cut folk and a couple of new CDs

(Sept. 25, 2008)  Natch’l bluesman Taj Mahal released his first album in 1968, which means that he’s now been in the blues business for 40 years.

“I’ve outlived the former music business,” he told me when I asked what had changed for him over that time. “I started out playing music that I liked, music I thought needed to be heard, that needed to have someone play it. Young African Americans of my generation needed to be responding to the traditional music that had been passed to them. Somehow or other it had been passing people by. A bunch of other folks picked up on the music and did real well with it. I didn’t see that I should be left out, especially when it comes to my culture. I wasn’t mad at nobody, because I don’t talk that way — I just put my energy out there. If you want things to change you gotta do something about it. So, that’s what I’ve been doing, doing something about it ever since.”

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When he said “other folks” picked up on the blues, he basically meant young whites were embracing the blues, in part via British blues players. I wondered, wasn’t the blues pretty much considered old folks music in the black community? The question struck a chord.

“That was the urban audience. They saw themselves as being connected to what was new and what was more hip. If you were country, there was something wrong with you. OK. Now Mr. Urban Know-It-All, whoever you are, eating food that’s being genetically altered by Archer-Daniels-Midland, poisoned by Dow Chemical insecticides and Monsanto fertilizer, you tell me what was wrong with being country and knowing how to handle your food? Now we’re all in the same boat and you’re better off if you have that knowledge.

“My interests as a youngster were two: music and agriculture. I figured there was no way a culture was going to get away without those things. So I learned about the older style of agriculture. It doesn’t change. I don’t buy the modern way that says I’ll just walk in my kitchen and be totally serviced and I’ll be fed and washed and put out the door and I’ll never have to lift a finger. What kind of foolishness is that? There are people who want that, but I think that’s the reason we have the drain on our resources we have today. Everybody’s waiting for someone else to do it, for someone else to carry the load. The guys at the top figure the consumer will be the one to pay for it, all of it. And look where that brought us.

“But for me, music has been the highway to stick to. When I connect with the music of my people in Africa, we’re talking about 149 generations. It’s not, ‘I didn’t get a hit so I quit and drove tractor for awhile, then they convinced me to come back and now I’ve got a big hit and everything’s great.’ No, this is a real serious commitment, man. It’s like what are you doing here on this planet?

“What makes me able to do what I’m doing is, I know when I wake up in the morning and think about the music, or music comes to visit me in my sleep, I know I’m on the right path. And I’m lucky because I get to do what I love. That’s what this 40th is all about, to say, ‘Here I am, and thank you guys for supporting me all these years. And I’m still here, still lovin’ it, just like I was in the beginning.’”

Feeling natural? The Taj Mahal Trio plays Saturday night at the Van Duzer.

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