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School of blues: Scott Ainslie at Vic’s Music Corner

Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Photo courtesy of Steve Whitsit Blues conduit: Scott Ainslie keeps the legends alive with a blues performance on Wednesday, Sept. 27, courtesy of Focus Inn presents Vic’s Music Corner.

‘‘I saw John Jackson,” the Virginia-raised, Vermont-based blues musician explains. ‘‘He was a grave digger and blues performer who died four years ago — he was an unannounced guest at (old-time folk musician) Mike Seeger’s concert at Groveton High School.”

Ainslie was 15 then, a fan of the folk and pop music of the day — until ‘‘Jackson got up and played guitar in way I had never imagined.”

A month later Ainslie started playing guitar, too. And for nearly 40 years now, he has been studying and playing not just blues but traditional American folk-roots music and gospel, going to the source to visit and document old-time banjo and fiddle players, writing books and giving lectures on the origins of the music we call the blues. Next Wednesday, Sept. 27, he’ll perform in Rockville as part of Focus Inn presents Vic’s Music Corner.

‘‘I’m sort of an authority on Robert Johnson,” Ainslie explains. The Virginia blues icon died in 1938, but he inspired English rock and rollers from Robert Plant and Jimmy Paige to the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, who took Johnson’s ‘‘Crossroads” to the charts.

Why did the blues have to cross the pond to England before hitting it big at home in the states?

‘‘There was a great deal less segregation in the music business in England,” he says. ‘‘Our allegiance [as musicians] is to the sound, not the color. But in the music ‘business,’ there was segregation. There was such an effort being put into keeping black and white apart in this country.”

Before the Civil Rights movement brought reform, the founding fathers of the blues were reduced to playing what Ainslie calls the chitlin’ circuit. Now they are celebrated — especially when Ainslie’s the one with the guitar and the microphone.

Heritage

Once the blues bug bit, Ainslie was hooked. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Washington & Lee University with an independent degree in music theory. On the way, he spent time with all the elderly West Virginia musicians his banjo-picking geology professor Odell McGuire could drum up.

‘‘Here were these huge chunks of American musical tradition in the bodies of these 80-year-old banjo and fiddle players,” Ainslie marvels. ‘‘When one of those [men)] dies, we lose a part of our musical heritage.”

Not on his watch. Ainslie has parlayed his wide-ranging musical background into a career that pays homage to the past. There are four CDs, a teaching DVD on Johnson’s guitar techniques and a book called ‘‘Robert Johnson⁄At The Crossroads” (Hal Leonard, 1992).

‘‘I do talk about the history of the music, the African traditions embedded in American popular music that we almost don’t notice,” he says.

Without lecturing — he promises — Ainslie’s objective is to trace the blues to its musical origins in Africa, through the American experience that shaped it and into the future.

That’s why he teaches as well as tours: in schools near his Brattleboro home, at the Kennedy Center, at the University of North Carolina and in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Ever true to his own Civil Rights roots, Ainslie’s biggest hit so far is single about Ghandi, nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, big — really — in Serbia and Israel.

Most important are his performances. Ainslie promises ‘‘a marvelously entertaining and pain-free introduction to the blues.”

It’s an eclectic career for a student of the blues who wants to pass along the lessons he has learned.

‘‘I don’t look on education as a sort of penance one does to walk away with a five- or six-figure income,” says Ainslie. ‘‘I’ve never been a ‘money person,’” he adds — and laughs. ‘‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be a blues guitarist.”

Scott Ainslie will perform at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 27, at 8 p.m. at Focus Inn presents Vic’s Music Corner at O’Brien’s Barbecue, 387 East Gude Drive, Rockville. Tickets are $15, $12 for Focus members. Call 301-275-7459 or visit www.focusmusic.org.