'HOLY BLUES' PERFORMANCE SCHEDULED FOR SATURDAY

For blues and gospel music lovers who don't like each other's music, Rick Ulman is here to say a whole lot of cross-pollination has been going on.

Ulman is an ethnomusicolgist from the St. Louis area who presents a program called "The Holy Blues." In it, he shows how blues and gospel music and black and white music have influenced each other.

"The idea is that the world isn't divided into neat little boxes," Ulman said in a telephone interview. "They're really affected by each other and linked to each other."

"The Holy Blues" will be presented at 3 p.m. Saturday at Old McKendree Log Church on County Road 306 near Jackson.

Free refreshments will be served in the church's picnic pavilion. The program is part of the Mississippi River Valley Scenic Drive.

The free program is hosted by the SEMO Wesley Foundation and St. James AME Church and is funded by the Missouri Humanities Council, the state of Missouri and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ulman, who plays 40 instruments, usually performs a few pieces on a 12-string guitar during the program. He also plays old recordings that illustrate his points.

His primary point is that the music intended to the "devil's ears" and the music intended for "God's ears" aren't that dissimilar.

In the 1930s, a man named Josh White recorded both blues and gospel music. As a blues singer he recorded under the name Blind Sammy. His gospel persona was the Rev. Washington White.

A modern example of the blues-gospel link is Al Green, who began his music career as a soul singer but decided he wasn't doing the Lord's work. Now performing as the Rev. Al Green, "He's using the same techniques, the same vocal techniques," Ulman said.

Earlier in the century, street preachers who played guitar imitated the human voice by applying a bottle neck to the fretboard, a technique brought from Africa and now associated with the blues. "But the message was a religious message," he says.

Though long associated with lost or bartered souls, the blues cannot be contained so easily, Ulman said.

There are down and out blues and joyful blues.

"The blues has enough room in it for almost every subject and every emotion," Ulman said.

Bluegrass music, generally considered the music of rural whites, has been influenced by blacks as well, Ulman says. The Carter Family is known for collecting songs but employed a black fiddler to write down the music. He instilled the music with his own techniques, Ulman said.

Ulman grew up in a small New Jersey town populated by immigrants who all had separate churches and folk music. He received his doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

He presents the program for many different kinds of groups, including chambers of commerce, VFW groups, men's clubs and churches. Many churches use "The Holy Blues" as a sermon because of its message of cultural diversity, he said.