In the Music Spotlight: Paul Butterfield

Mar. 10, 1965 - A musical trend that might be described as the Beatles backlash is sending many American folk and pop musicians into the modern blues.

This movement has been gathering force in the last few months in the wake of the success of British rock groups. More than two dozen musicians of various backgrounds have performed some form of blues in nearly every Greenwich Village cabaret or coffeehouse this winter.

One of the best of the white American blues performers, Paul Butterfield (left), praised the Beatles for developing an original approach. He finds, however, that several other English groups, such as the Rolling Stones and the Animals, “are mainly imitating.”

Before this trend, Manhattan had rarely been a place to hear good blues singers in quantity. The centers for the best blues are such cities as Chicago and Detroit. Beginning with the appearance in October of Chicago’s Muddy Waters at the Café Au Go Go, however, and culminating with the excitement over the current debut of the Paul Butterfield Band at the Village Gate, New York has become something of a blues town.

Butterfield, a former University of Chicago student and classical flute player, is being hailed as the best white blues singer and harmonica player in the country. He has steeped himself for the last several years, since he was 15, in the musical environment of such Negro Chicago performers as Little Walter, Howling Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Little Smoky.

The recurring controversy over whether a white performer can or should work in the Negro blues idiom continues to rage. But Butterfield offers a persuasive answer that even a young Northern city boy of Irish descent can absorb and master the idiom and become a compelling blues artist.

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