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Interview with Rollie Tussing III Master of the Country Blues Guitar
Dexter, Michigan, February 2, 2001
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I
first met Rollie Tussing III when he played at the Gypsy Café on Fourth
Street in Ann Arbor back in early 1999. I asked him right
away if I could interview him, and he agreed, but somehow we didn’t
connect. I bumped into him again, two years later, at the
Crazy Wisdom Bookstore, on Main Street, entering near the end of his
performance. It was around ten o’clock on a Friday evening
in late January. Rollie was seated in a corner with an
electric guitar and a small amplifier set on a chair next to
him.
I
arrived just in time to hear him give a traditional rendition of
‘Frankie and Johnnie,’ followed by some Mississippi John Hurt, Robert
Johnson, and Sylvester Weaver. Even with the amp set low for
the small audience, the guitar overwhelmed his voice, but the
instrumental work was so spectacular that it didn’t
matter. The atmosphere was intense, intimate, and the
audience response exceeded enjoyment, ascending the realm of
gratitude.
After the set, I reminded him of our previous meeting, and set up
another date for an interview. In the meantime, I listened
to Rollie’s CD, Blow Whistle Blow, with renewed
appreciation. A week later, I arrived at Rollie’s house in
Dexter. As I entered, I practically stumbled over a mass of
old LPs stacked on the floor of the foyer. That didn’t
surprise me. It stood to reason that he would collect
recordings.
“I’ve been doing interviews, myself,” he said, as we sat down in his
living room. “I’ve been going around and talking to old guys
who play blues guitar. I’m recording them, getting them to
tell about their lives, and then splicing the conversations together
with their music.”
“You seem to be into a lot of
different things” I commented, curious about the extent of his
activities.
“Well, by day I’m a
bartender,” he replied. “I also do a radio program at WCBN,
the University of Michigan music station—a show called ‘Yazoo City
Calling.’ It’s an hour of pure acoustic
blues. I’ve been doing that for four years.”
“Well, I’ll just say, right
off,” I jumped in, “that I know nothing about country blues at all,
except that that I like it better than any other kind of music.”
“It’s the most passionate.”
“I agree. Tell me
a little about your style of playing, and how you became a master of
that style.”
“I started playing guitar
when I was fourteen,” Rollie replied. “My friend Shane
Ritter lived down the street. We started guitar playing at
the same time, and we were both kind of competitive with each
other. We had the same teacher for about three
months. The teacher would show us something, and we’d
instantly go home and practice, just so one of us could be the first to
have it down. We were learning ‘70s music. We
both wanted to be Jimmy Paige and Pete Townshend.”
“And when was this?”
“This was around ’84 or ’85,
when I was fourteen. Then, in high school I played in
various rock bands, Led Zeppelin-type stuff. About my first
year of college, I went to a video store. Videos were kind
of new at that time, at least to me. And they had this
video, ‘The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins.’ I brought
it home and played it, and it was just amazing. I had heard
the Robert Johnson recordings prior to that, but they were just so
esoteric and weird to me. Hearing that sound come out of the
speakers was great, but it was something that I would have put away and
never listened to again. It was only after I saw this video
of Lightnin’ Hopkins, and was able to see visually how he did these
things. That was it.”
“When you say that the Robert
Johnson recordings were esoteric, do you mean that his music is
something that one would need a deep background in the blues to
understand or appreciate?”
“Yes, exactly,” Rollie
replied. “When I say esoteric, I mean ‘knowledge of the
few,’ something that few people have knowledge of.”
“Is country blues the same as Delta blues?” I asked.
“That’s a regional
distinction,” he replied. There’s acoustic blues of the ‘20s
and ‘30s. Within that, you’ve got the Piedmont, Ragtime,
Delta, and Texas blues. Delta is just a very distinct form
of acoustic blues, and only acoustic because they didn’t have electric
instruments at the time. Muddy Waters is considered a
Chicago blues artist, but he actually just played electrified Delta
blues. He came from that area of the Mississippi River Delta
that, in the ‘20s and ‘30s was one of the harshest places in the
country, from what I’ve read.”
“Ever been down there?”
“Yeah,” Rollie
said. “I took a trip down there, and stayed about three
months.”
“Have you looked up any of these old blues players?”
 “Not
that much. I looked up a guy named Eugene Powell when I was
in Clarksdale. I think he had one or two recordings in the
‘20s and ‘30s, but that’s about it. He wasn’t famous at all.”
“So, when you say you got a
song from Robert Johnson, you just mean that you took it from a
recording.”
“Exactly,” Rollie replied. “Most of the guys I listen to are long gone.”
“Are some still around?”
“No one really famous,” he
said. “But there are a lot of great old blues guys still out
there. They range from fifty to a hundred years old.”
“I’d like to ask you about
the relationship between the blues and spirituality. “Is
there a direct relationship between the blues—particularly Delta
blues—and Gospel music?”
“Oh, without a doubt,” Rollie
responded. “They had traditional songs that they knew from
both the black culture and the white culture, and they would mix these
in with their own style of singing, which consisted of the field
hollers and blues. Instead of ‘I woke up this morning and
shot my woman,’ it was ‘I woke up this morning and prayed to
God.’ It’s the exact same music, though. The
guitar player is doing the same thing. On Saturday night the
guitar player is singing about drinking, and gambling, and women, and
on Sunday morning, he’s singing about God.”
“So it’s just the subject matter that’s different.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, OK. The
subject matter is different, but IS the subject matter
different? That’s what I’d like to know. Last
week, when you were playing at the bookstore, you mentioned that most
of the songs you were playing were either about Jesus or
murder. What’s the difference?”
“I know what you
mean. When I do a murder ballad about a pair of lovers—a guy
killed his only true love, for whatever reason—or a song about Jesus, I
can say that one is a murder ballad and the other is Gospel music, but
I really get the same feeling from both. That may be overly
simplistic, but it’s hard for me to verbalize about the
feeling. People ask why I do murder songs. I just
think they’re great songs. There’s a deeper level, however,
that I can’t really talk about. In both cases, extremes of
human emotions are involved.”
“You sang ‘Frankie and
Johnnie’ at the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and you did it in a style that,
to me, sounded a lot like Bob Dylan’s, when he does ‘Frankie and
Albert’ on As Good As I Been to You. He was interpreting
traditional material, which you do also, and I couldn’t help noticing
the similarity. Most of those songs were murder songs, too.”
“Yeah,” Rollie answered.
“So, if we’re talking about
the spiritual aspect of country blues—you said that it was the most
passionate genre of music, and I agree with you—passionate, to me,
means true. If the most passionate is the truest, there must
be something very true about murder.”
“I would agree,” he replied. We both laughed.
“I was born in Ann Arbor,” he
continued, “and was raised more or less a fundamentalist
Christian. Now I’m a Buddhist. I still do the
fundamentalist Christian songs, though. That’s something
that I don’t have a problem with, but I sometimes I feel a need to
justify it. People say: ‘Well, if you’re not Christian, why
are you doing these songs?’ I reply: “Well, they’re great
songs. And I do murder ballads, too!”
“I feel the same way,” I
commented. “I was raised without any religious
background. Nevertheless, I really relate to Gospel
music.
“Yeah,” he
said. “There’s a truth in that type of
music. It’s just the human condition. But I, for
one, wouldn’t be able to say what that truth is.”
“I think you just said it best,” I replied. “There’s truth in the human condition.”
“Even if you can’t understand the lyrics, truth is transmitted in the written word of the songs,” he added.
“Or just instrumentally,” I suggested.
“Oh, yeah,” he agreed.
“The feeling that I got from
your CD is that you’re much more of an instrumentalist than a
vocalist. Is that fair to say?” I asked him.
“Sure. Not by choice, though.”
“You’d like to be more of a vocalist?”
“Oh, yeah,” Rollie said
passionately. “I’d be insane with joy if I could be.”
“Well, for me, listening to
your CD was a completely different experience from hearing you perform
live. There’s a greater formality about a CD, obviously,
compared with a live performance. On the CD, your voice is
amplified more. It’s much clearer. Probably it’s
just easier to play around with when you’re recording. You
can separate it out from the instrumental track. In your
stage performance, however, your playing overshadows your
voice. That’s not necessarily bad, because the guitar is
your REAL voice. There are cuts on the CD, however, where I
would have liked to hear more of a ‘blues’ voice.”
“I’m going to push it, but I’m not going to force it,” Rollie replied, dryly.
“But you’d really like to have that—that ‘blues’ voice.”
“Heck, yeah,” he exclaimed. “That would be great.”
“Well, it’s very cool what
you’re doing. Regardless of where the voice is at, I’m in
completely in awe of the guitar work you’re doing. It’s just
totally awesome.”
“Thanks.”
“So what do you think it takes to develop a distinctive voice, as a blues artist?”
“You mean a singing voice?”
“No. I mean a voice, in general, a style of your own.”
“I’ve had similar
conversations with a lot of musicians. To me, anybody can
learn how to do something verbatim. You put on a record, no
matter what it is, and if you’ve got the right instruments, at some
point you’ll be able to do it perfectly. For me, I learned a
long time ago that it would take way too much energy for me to do it
perfectly. For a time, I wanted to do the acoustic blues
stuff to perfection. I wanted to do a player-piano type of
rendition. Then, after a while, I found that I had a lot
more fun when I was just completely myself. I had the
framework of the song in mind, but I was able to do whatever I wanted
within that framework. Filtering what you know through your
own personality and background is the only way.”
“It sounds very Buddhist.”
“Does it? That’s a
constant fight for me to get rid of all that ‘I should be this’ and
relax into what I am.”
“I’ve been told that the
blues is not a complicated form, that it’s a matter of certain basic
chord changes. If that’s true about the chord structure,
it’s certainly true of the lyrics, as well. The lyrics, for
the most part, seem to be a minimal part of it. I don’t know
if there’s much experimentation to be done with them.”
“If we’re talking
specifically about what people call blues, then I would say you’re
right.”
“OK. So, if the
musical structure is not complex, and the lyrics aren’t either, then
what’s left for you as a blues artist is to give the blues song a
character of its own, or of your own. That seems to be what
it’s all about.”
“Yeah,” Rollie
said. “I would agree with that. A lot of people
have missed that point. I try not to.”
“So, it’s all about finding your own voice.”
“Exactly,” he nodded.
“The liner notes on the CD
say that your songs convey the ‘presentness’ of the moment, and I felt
this was true, particularly on some of the slower cuts, like ‘Yonder
Come The Blues.’ That’s a slow one, isn’t it?
“They’re all pretty slow.”
“And also ‘M & O Blues,’” I inquired.
“Yeah,” Rollie said. “That’s the last one.”
“Those two are both slow,
particularly the way they open up. I got the feeling that
you really achieved something there. Again, I’m just a
novice, but I felt that time stopped, that there was no schedule as far
as when you had to get to the end of the song. As a
listener, I almost forget that the song was going to have an end at
all, or that that was part of the agenda. Does that make any
sense?”
“Yeah,” he said appreciatively. “That rocks. Thanks.”
“That’s what impressed
me. I don’t know if that’s what you were aiming for.”
 “I
don’t know either. If I hit that, though, then it’s good
enough. The CD took forever to make. I started
maybe a year and half before it actually came out, and spent eight
months doing songs, spending way too much money. I had maybe
fifteen songs at the end. I sat down, listened to them all,
and I threw them all away. After that, I went in, and in two
days, I recorded this album. There were going to be bands,
and everything else, but I just fired everybody, sat down in front of
the microphone, and played the songs. They weren’t perfect
by any means. I had perfect versions that I couldn’t stand,
and so I just said, ‘Hopefully, it’s going to sound like it’s just me
sitting down and playing these songs.’“
“So, one of your struggles has been getting past your own perfectionism?”
“Oh yeah,” he stated forcefully.
“Is that just you, or is that
a problem that a lot of blues artists have, or just certain blues
artists?”
“I think it’s a problem with
people, in general, but especially with artists. I’ve been
trying to realize that it’s never going to be perfect. What
is the perfection of it, anyway? Take my voice, for
instance. At some point, I hope I’ll be able to relax into
the way I sound. Right now, I’m still thinking, “This is the
way I sound,” but I don’t really like it. I still want to
try to sound like something else. Dylan’s approach was
exactly that: ‘This is the way I sound, and this is how I’m going to
use it.’“
“Well, if you go to the early
Dylan albums, the first one or two, you can see that he was still
struggling with being imitative. What was phenomenal about
him, however, was how quickly he found a voice of his own,” I
replied. “What about the theme of traveling, wandering,
being rootless, being on the road?” I asked. “Has that been
overplayed as being part of the blues?”
“Yes, that’s definitely been
overplayed. On the plantation, they’d sing songs like ‘Gonna
get up in the morning, B’lieve I’ll dust my broom.’ It was
code, so that everybody in the field would know what they were talking
about. That’s like ‘I’m gonna get up in the morning and
leave the plantation, or run away from slavery.’ That
carried over into the popular blues. Then there was the
actual travel, which is a dream of a lot of people. That
fits into the genre of the boasting blues man: ‘Got 700 dollars, travel
from coast to coast, got women in every state.’ That
occurred, but it wasn’t all that prevalent. Mississippi John
Hurt didn’t leave his farm until the late ‘60s, when he was
rediscovered and they took him to New York. Robert Johnson
traveled a lot. He did songs like ‘Ramblin’ on My
Mind.’ He was one of the few who were just on the go all the
time. It wasn’t as romantic as people
suppose. Many blues men never saw the other side of the
river.”
Rollie Tussing had made me thirsty for the blues. He went
out on the porch to smoke a cigarette, and I joined him, our breaths
visible in the cold under the porch light. I experienced the
same timeless sense that I had when I listened to his CD, and left his
house feeling restless, as if somewhere in the distance, someone was
calling my name. |
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Date Submitted:
3/14/04 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
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