The artist that was a “milestone” for Martin Scorsese
If Martin Scorsese hadn’t become one of the greatest film directors of all time, he probably would have become a musician. That’s not just our guess: the man himself believes it too. Growing up in New York City, Scorsese was exposed to all kinds of different styles and genres, but it was the early days of blues that made him seriously start to pay attention to music.
“One day, around 1958, I remember hearing something that was unlike anything I’d ever heard before,” Scorsese explained in his PBS docuseries The Blues. “I’ll never forget the first time I heard the sound of that guitar. The music was demanding, ‘Listen to me!’ I ran to get a pencil and paper and wrote down the name. The song was called ‘See See Rider’, which I already knew from the Chuck Willis cover version. The name of the singer was Lead Belly.”
“I got up to Sam Goody’s on Forty-ninth Street as fast as I could, and I found an old Folkways record by Lead Belly, which had ‘See See Rider’, ‘Roberta’, ‘Black Snake Moan’, and a few other songs. And I listened to it obsessively. Lead Belly’s music opened something up for me. If I could have played guitar, really played it, I never would have become a filmmaker.”
It wasn’t just Lead Belly who kickstarted Scorsese’s fascination with music. Known predominantly for his love of classic rock, Scorsese was exposed to some of the earliest waves of rock and roll music in the late 1950s. The rock artist that opened the door for Scorsese wasn’t Elvis Presley or Jerry Lee Lewis, but rather one of the true originators of the genre, Bo Diddley.
“At around the same time, my friends and I went to see Bo Diddley. That was another milestone for me,” Scorsese added. “He was playing at the Brooklyn Paramount in one of the rock and roll package shows. He always had great stage moves, and he was a mesmerising performer. I remember Jerome Green, on the maracas, dancing out from one side of the stage and Bo Diddley dancing out from the other, and they kept meeting in the middle and passing each other by.”
“But Bo Diddley also did something unusual — he explained the different drumbeats and which parts of Africa they came from,” Scorsese claimed. “It gave us a sense of the history behind the music, the roots of the music. We all found this very exciting, and it gave us a thirst for more knowledge. We wanted to dig deeper.”
Check out ‘Bo Diddley’ down below.
