“I was fascinated to learn how enamoured he was of the blues, and I mean gut-bucket blues… I’d go to his house and he’d talk about Muddy Waters and stuff like that, not just Basie and Lunceford.”As a young man, Bibb hung out in Greenwich Village, plunging into the vortex of a newly vibrant Sixties folk scene presided over by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez “It was more than music,” he recalls “It was ideas, it was lifestyle, it was everything. Growing up at that particular time, it was all happening for me in those circles. It was a magnet, really.” Bibb’s father, a trained musician like Eric himself, led him through “work songs, spirituals, folk music from the British Isles, as well as the whole African-American canon of folk material. Then there was jazz influences, but he listened to opera and symphonic music and sent me to music school as a teenager.”This eclecticism became the fundamental driving force in Bibb’s own developing portfolio.
“I never really understood the really hardcore pigeonholing of music and musicians: it wasn’t a reflection of anything I’d experienced; all the musicians I knew had wide musical palates.”Today I make a point of letting people know that there are a whole load of interrelated genres that influence my writing and performing. I find it a little frustrating when people talk about me ’straying’ from a folk-blues core Nothing is pure like that. I think it’s really important for musicians and music-lovers to resist the tendency of either reviewers or marketing people to pigeonhole their music and their tastes and their expression above all. Because the American music I bring forth is already a hybrid, a m?nge of different cultures, different continents, and it’s always going to be that.”Musicians have always crossed the tracks, and always will.
They’ve always been in the vanguard of the breaking down of socio-political barriers and accommodated the various musical cultures they’ve come into contact with. Look at Leadbelly, at what he drew together in his repertoire – he was possibly the greatest of them all.”Bibb is in a good position to judge, having lived a settled existence on both sides of the Atlantic. He recently moved to London after living in Sweden for 10 fruitful years and is aware of the positive aspects of each country’s indigenous culture. “Touring the UK in the last five years I felt very much at home. I was also very impressed by the way British society in recent years has been dealing with the whole issue of multi-culturalism.” This is something that may not even today be the case in the United States, a thrillingly diverse country but also one that has often undervalued its home-grown cultural output.Yet the Americas remain central to his music, partly because the cross-winds of influence are so tangled and rich, especially when it comes to the refreshing influence the Caribbean brought to more traditional blues and folk practise since the Sixties. Bibb is quick to recognise the towering importance of Taj Mahal in this respect (“Taj is such a trailblazer – his phrasing was so innovative in a blues context”, he says admiringly of the musician who appeared on one of his recent albums.
