“Soul and honesty”: the artists who changed Jack White’s world
One of the busiest men in rock and roll, it is difficult to encapsulate just what an impact Jack White has had on the musical landscape since the garage revivalist sounds of The White Stripes first commanded the airwaves of the early 2000s.
Whether in his own output, spanning the spectrum from those early White Stripes records to his far more recent solo projects, or in his leadership of the legendary Third Man Records, the Detroit native has been constantly paying homage to his expansive range of musical influences. After all, White is a self-professed music nerd and life-long record collector, with a deep-rooted adoration for everything from country heroine Loretta Lynn to sweating lunatic Iggy Pop.
Consistently, though, Jack White has always been drawn back to the ground zero for all rock and roll expression: the blues. There are, after all, exceedingly few rock songwriters and even fewer guitarists who do not owe a core part of their output and inspiration to the landscape of overlooked and forgotten figures who carved out the golden age of the blues during the 1920s and beyond.
Particularly through Third Man, White has been able to pay near-constant homage to figures like Robert Johnson, and a selection of other blues pioneers, reissuing vast swathes of their discography and releasing a fair few cover versions and reinterpretations, too. According to White himself, though, the blues plays a much larger role in his everyday existence than merely being a means of giving his record label a steady stream of material to press onto wax.
It was the blues, after all, that truly set White down the path of rock and roll expression during his younger years, thus changing his world forevermore. “I didn’t get into [the blues] deep until around eighteen,” he told Rolling Stone in 2003. “I dabbled in things like Howlin’ Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind.”
“It was something I’d been missing my whole life,” the songwriter continued. “That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.” Seemingly, the hard rock heroes of Cream and Led Zeppelin acted as a kind of gateway into the world of influence that first inspired them, immersing Jack White’s young world in the retro, lo-fi, and world-changing sounds of early blues.
While admittedly, the realms of Son House and Robert Johnson do seem worlds apart from the adrenaline-fueled discography of the White Stripes, those blues pioneers have nonetheless been stuck in White’s head on an apparently continuous basis since that fateful time in his teens when he was exposed to them for the very first time.
He is not, of course, the only rock and roll hero with a career indebted to those age-old sounds, but he has remained particularly faithful to his influences over the decades.
Unlike some of those aforementioned gateway artists, like Led Zeppelin, for instance, White has never really stolen from those blues pioneers without proper credit; instead preferring to honour their once-forgotten output and constantly remind the musical realm of just how important they were for the advancement of rock and roll.
