Deep Blues Chapter 3

I was most struck by two things from the third installment of Palmer's "Deep Blues."

The first was that the concept of creating a unique image as an artist was a foreign concept, with only one exception during the time: Peetie Wheatsraw, the Devil's son in-law, the High Sheriff from Hell. Beyond just having an extremely cool name, he also sang about raunchy subjects and the devil. The song that the book mentions, the "Peetie Wheatstraw Stomp," also appears on the blues CD I checked out from the library.

The second topic that fascinated me involved the "borrowing" of styles from one artist to another. While we would consider this an impossibility today with modern copyright laws, it in fact happens on a large scale in the rap world. Not in just "sampling" or borrowing a beat from an older rock or even blue song (the artists or record companies pay for these rights), but in an illegal sense. A few nights ago I was reading an article by one of my favorite writers, Pete Scholtes, in the online version of Minneapolis/St. Paul's The City Pages. The article involved mixtapes, where local groups do a little bit of their own borrowing from national artists to promote their own work. A link for the story: http://citypages.com/databank/27/1339/article14586.asp

Maybe all of the second paragraph was way off topic, but I just found it interesting, especially considering the fact that there were two coincidences in my life this week that related directly to the reading in Deep Blues.