It’s ironic that the American blues was often more appreciated in Europe than in the country that gave it birth. By the 1960s, interest in the blues was in full swing in Europe, in part spurred on by strong interest among English and German youths. One catalyst was the American Folk Blues Festival, which brought rotating ensembles of American blues players to tour Europe as an annual event beginning in 1962. Two young German promoters, Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, brought the musicians to Europe after having established a relationship with Chess Records bassist and songwriter Willie Dixon. The first festival was held in 1962 and continued until 1972. After an eight-year break the concerts were revived in 1980 and ran until 1985. The tour brought some of the best American blues players to France, West Germany, Scandinavia, England, even bringing the blues to Eastern Europe behind the “Iron Curtain”.
Between 1962 and 1970, the American Folk Blues Festival concerts were televised by Südwestfunk, a major German broadcast network, exposing the music to broad audiences. Europeans were treated to an amazing array of musicians: Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker, Sippie Wallace, T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Eddie Boyd, Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton, Big Joe Williams, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Otis Spann, and many more.
The tours were hugely successful as interest in the blues was peaking in Europe, and the touring musicians were treated as musical royalty, celebrated, respected and adored often more so than at home in America. As Lippmann and Rau embarked on the second leg of the AFBF series in 1980, they also founded a record label, L+R Records, in 1979. It was around that time that Lippmann was approached by the German two blues fans: promoter and sound engineer Siegfried A. Christmann and photographer/researcher Axel Küstner. They sought to find previously unknown country blues musicians and collect “field recordings,” musicians in their natural surroundings, much like Alan Lomax, George Mitchell, David Evans or Chris Strachwitz had done a generation earlier, and they suggested funding for a field trip to the USA. The pair packed up an Audiorecord Mobile Unit with Sennheiser microphones and over ten weeks they traveled 10,000 miles all over the States to record some old-time blues. The duo reported using 180,000 feet of audiotape, which culminated in issuing 14 LPs under the series Original Field Recordings- Living Country Blues USA. Photographer Axel Küstner took hundreds of photos and they interviewed many dozens of musicians. In 1980, they came up to Washington, D.C., where they recorded Flora Molton and her Truth Band, Archie Edwards, and John Cephas & Phil Wiggins.
These young guys made an indelible and powerful mark on the country blues, not just with these important sound recordings, but with the photographs that documented the era and put the spotlight on deserving musicians, some of whom had been previously underserved by the American blues. Their “field trip” documented an important part of the American country blues, and the Washington, D.C., blues scene in particular, and they were among the first to recognize the importance of the local blues scene.
Read more about Axel Küstner.
