dr harp's medicine band
Music is the most powerful mind-altering substance generally available. The Blues has been the single most influential musical form across the world since the last century. It has shaped jazz, given birth to rock and roll and without it, there would have been no Presley, Beatles, Rolling Stones. Popular music would look very different. The Blues is the most powerful form of the most powerful form of mind-altering substance there is. Surely then, it should be prescribed by health services?
listenStarring
Dr Johnny
Doctor Johnny aka, ‘the Doctor’ and called Doctor John’ by musicians in Southampton and the people of Sandwell * because that is what he is.
* Not to be confused with the one and only, Dr John, Mac Rebennack, of New Orleans.
* Not to be confused with the one and only, Dr John, Mac Rebennack, of New Orleans.
Patsy Fuller
Patsy Fuller is well known to the jazz circuit in Birmingham and the Midlands. She has also performed in London, at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery and at the St Lucia Jazz Festival 2004, with the Emerson Nurse Quartet.
Steve Clayton
Born in Birmingham, England, 1962, He began to show an interest in music about the age of 10. He appeared on Otis Grand’s ‘He knows the blues’ CD. He subsequently added singing to his repertoire which gave him his breaks as a band
Ronnie Taylor
Ronnie Taylor is an outstanding alto sax player from Southampton. His musical career started in the early sixties with the soul band The Globe Show, backing top artists like Ben. E King, with whom he played 350 gigs, Patti La Belle, Joe Tex and Jimmy Ruffin.
Bob Boucher
Along with Howard Smith the rhythm section for the ‘44s’ and latterly the Steve Gibbons Band. Bob and Howard started out in the mid sixties in the Harry’s Blues House in Birmingham started by Jim Simpson. For many years they have been the backbone of the44s, backing Steve ‘Big Man’ Clayton.
John Mckinley
John is the Birmingham musician’s musician- a perfectionist of the electric and acoustic guitar, a real student and a master of all the musical forms he takes on.
Greg Chandler
Greg Chandler, principal engineer for Dr Harp is himself and accomplished musician and is committed to sonic quality.
Matt Foundling
Matt is by far the youngest and most promising of the Dr Harp line up. He has played toured and recorded with some of the biggest Blues, R 'n' B and Swing bands in Europe.
King Pleasure
King Pleasure is a giant of the contemporary international blues scene. A native of Birmingham and a soul mate of Kansas City. With his many incarnations of the ‘Biscuit Boys’ he has wowed audiences across the UK, Europe and North America.
John F. Wands
John has one of the finest blues voices ever to come out of the British Isles. His life has been an embodiment of the trouble and pain of the blues. He met up with Dr Johnny in 1977 and through the eighties they produced four albums.
Reviews
'Ring the stylistic changes….. generally high level of musical proficiency throughout….. ‘Dr John Middleton denies that the blues is wrist slitting music'
Terry Grimley, Birmingham Post
‘In one of the most engaging albums in some time, the Blues find a new home on the prescription pad. Music, far more than entertainment, is performed here as an alternative to the palliatives of contemporary medicine…….Dr J and Hatman turn the daemons that haunt us into a choir of counsel. Listen to what happens when this Medicine Show comes to town: music chases the montebanks away.’
Eric Kuhne, Civicart on iTunes
‘I think this is amazing. I think this is great….so many top musicians’
Ed Doolan, Radio WM
The Blues doctors including Dr Ross, Dr Feelgood, Dr John, Dr Clayton claim a title evoking the mystical belief in the musician as healer. The Blues is both state of mind and musical idiom - ‘about of depression; melancholic music of black American folk origin, often in the twelve bar sequence’.
Any music can be therapeutic, inducing well-being. Only the Blues has, as its defining feature, catharsis: ‘a release of repressed emotion by association with the cause and elimination by abreaction: purgation; confessional’. A cathartic drug is a purgative. ‘The basic attitude of the blues is that joyful music can come out of real pain.’
The Blues history is one of the unrelenting suffering of black Americans, set against their spirit of resilience and hope. The first Blues doctors were slaves with musical talent travelling with the patent medicine show bands in 19th century southern United States. The power of music sold potions when orthodox medicine was largely ineffective.
The Blues draws on voodoo, herbal remedy and ritual from Africa and the Caribbean. Intricately linking, love, fertility, power, and well-being. The Black Cat Bone and John the Conqueror Root ‘Mojo’ are some of the potions available. The Classic Blues Race recordings of the 1920s marketed Blues catharsis. Cathartic Blues is psychoanalytical- the performer working through experiences to achieve personal understanding. Cognitive-behavioural therapy is more effective. The Blues CBT performer turns self-analysis to positive behavioural change, recognition and avoidance of risk situations, trying to find a healthier way of life. Cathartic Blues covered illness and death.
Memphis Minnie battled with meningitis. Victoria Spivey, Dr Ross, Champion Jack Dupree, all fought TB. Bukka White described his sister’s death from hepatitis. Blues doctors criticised well-intentioned public health programs, misplaced amidst overwhelming economic inequality. Champion Jack Dupree’s Warehouseman said give us jobs and money not grapefruit juice to protect us from scurvy.
Pellagra killed 7000 poor blacks (and whites) in the southern states in the early 1900s. The song, ‘Cornbread, peas and black molasses’ evoked a prison ‘holler’ alluding to Dr Joseph Goldberger’s experiments on prisoners, determining the dietary deficiency causing pellagra. Poor blacks felt stigmatised by handouts to protect them from diseases like scurvy and pellagra. They also found worse- press gangs dragging them into slave labour when they queued at Red Cross stations. Leadbelly sang about that. Goldberger was eventually vindicated when fortifying cornbread flour with yeast extract eradicated pellagra. The vitamin B3 niacin is there in your cornflakes every morning to this day.
Blues medicine became metaphor, the Blues an illness, Blues music, the treatment. For Charles Brown ‘the Blues is a virus’, Professor Longhair had the rockin’ pneumonia. Clara Smith gave us the full treatment. What should health services learn from the Blues experience? Ray Charles appealed for more sensitive recognition and diagnosis of mental ill health and for appropriate treatment. How often is the patient still receiving the medicated potion that don’t improve emotion? The social narrative and protest Blues tell us that health services must advocate better social and economic policies to achieve better health and reduce inequalities.
The Medicine Showmen used their powers of persuasion to make people feel better. In health services today we have not developed our arts into effective communication, we have not managed placebo, or exercised enough empathy. The Blues is a complementary therapy. But seeing the art as treatment devalues the art. Blues therapy must be protected from the deadening influence of health service control and medicalisation. Keep paying the private prescription. Health workers need to value the health enhancing qualities of non-health service human activities. The Blues has been a voice for Black America giving comfort, welfare and dignity to disenfranchised and downtrodden people. It has infected people across the globe. Medicine can only restore, or maintain, it cannot uplift, strengthen, fortify. Only the arts, music, culture can give us meaning and enable us to achieve a higher quality of life. The Blues shows us how a single artistic form has helped people to achieve a higher state of well-being.
So doctor, write me a prescription for the Blues.
Any music can be therapeutic, inducing well-being. Only the Blues has, as its defining feature, catharsis: ‘a release of repressed emotion by association with the cause and elimination by abreaction: purgation; confessional’. A cathartic drug is a purgative. ‘The basic attitude of the blues is that joyful music can come out of real pain.’
Articulate your pain and you are not overpowered by it.
The Blues history is one of the unrelenting suffering of black Americans, set against their spirit of resilience and hope. The first Blues doctors were slaves with musical talent travelling with the patent medicine show bands in 19th century southern United States. The power of music sold potions when orthodox medicine was largely ineffective.
The Blues draws on voodoo, herbal remedy and ritual from Africa and the Caribbean. Intricately linking, love, fertility, power, and well-being. The Black Cat Bone and John the Conqueror Root ‘Mojo’ are some of the potions available. The Classic Blues Race recordings of the 1920s marketed Blues catharsis. Cathartic Blues is psychoanalytical- the performer working through experiences to achieve personal understanding. Cognitive-behavioural therapy is more effective. The Blues CBT performer turns self-analysis to positive behavioural change, recognition and avoidance of risk situations, trying to find a healthier way of life. Cathartic Blues covered illness and death.
Memphis Minnie battled with meningitis. Victoria Spivey, Dr Ross, Champion Jack Dupree, all fought TB. Bukka White described his sister’s death from hepatitis. Blues doctors criticised well-intentioned public health programs, misplaced amidst overwhelming economic inequality. Champion Jack Dupree’s Warehouseman said give us jobs and money not grapefruit juice to protect us from scurvy.
Pellagra killed 7000 poor blacks (and whites) in the southern states in the early 1900s. The song, ‘Cornbread, peas and black molasses’ evoked a prison ‘holler’ alluding to Dr Joseph Goldberger’s experiments on prisoners, determining the dietary deficiency causing pellagra. Poor blacks felt stigmatised by handouts to protect them from diseases like scurvy and pellagra. They also found worse- press gangs dragging them into slave labour when they queued at Red Cross stations. Leadbelly sang about that. Goldberger was eventually vindicated when fortifying cornbread flour with yeast extract eradicated pellagra. The vitamin B3 niacin is there in your cornflakes every morning to this day.
Blues medicine became metaphor, the Blues an illness, Blues music, the treatment. For Charles Brown ‘the Blues is a virus’, Professor Longhair had the rockin’ pneumonia. Clara Smith gave us the full treatment. What should health services learn from the Blues experience? Ray Charles appealed for more sensitive recognition and diagnosis of mental ill health and for appropriate treatment. How often is the patient still receiving the medicated potion that don’t improve emotion? The social narrative and protest Blues tell us that health services must advocate better social and economic policies to achieve better health and reduce inequalities.
The Medicine Showmen used their powers of persuasion to make people feel better. In health services today we have not developed our arts into effective communication, we have not managed placebo, or exercised enough empathy. The Blues is a complementary therapy. But seeing the art as treatment devalues the art. Blues therapy must be protected from the deadening influence of health service control and medicalisation. Keep paying the private prescription. Health workers need to value the health enhancing qualities of non-health service human activities. The Blues has been a voice for Black America giving comfort, welfare and dignity to disenfranchised and downtrodden people. It has infected people across the globe. Medicine can only restore, or maintain, it cannot uplift, strengthen, fortify. Only the arts, music, culture can give us meaning and enable us to achieve a higher quality of life. The Blues shows us how a single artistic form has helped people to achieve a higher state of well-being.
So doctor, write me a prescription for the Blues.