James Cotton Blues Documentary Is Pitch Perfect » PopMatters

A crucial component of examining any given genre is understanding its musical vocabulary: how artists utilize motifs, themes, or instruments to convey the message of a given piece, and how that fits in with a greater community of like-minded artists. A guitarist in a rock band, for instance, plays the instrument with a vernacular and style that is entirely different from that of a blues guitarist or a harmonica player like James Cotton. These distinctions in playing and singing are what define the very framework of how genres develop and come to be understood, accentuating the greatest strengths of the instruments at play.

In the context of the blues, the use of instruments that characterize the genre revolves around tapping into feelings within the realm of longing and vulnerability. It is a genre that aims to resonate with the emotional edge of the audience through the use of instruments such as the guitar, drums, piano, and, perhaps most notably, the harmonica. The wailing vocalizations of the harp make it a natural fit for the blues music format as a means of emotional release. To that end, no player was able to utilize the instrument to its fullest extent in blues quite like the iconic James Cotton.

Bonnie Blue: James Cotton’s Life in the Blues, a documentary whose title speaks for itself, is a comprehensive look at the life, career, and eventual death of the iconic harmonicist. In broad brush strokes, documentarian Bestor Cram tackles each period of Cotton’s life incrementally, from his impoverished childhood of learning his instrument between picking cotton, his breakthrough into the industry through his various partnerships (most notably with Muddy Waters), his continued success directing the James Cotton Blues Band, and eventually concluding by covering the final years of his life and beyond.

Through accounts from his peers, students, and loved ones, Bonnie Blue fundamentally succeeds at outlining what made James Cotton such a prolific musician in his field. It was not merely that he was proficient at playing the harp; it was that he was so pronounced and articulate while using it. His uniqueness shines through in the recordings of his performances, where Cotton is an explosive force of raw, harmonic emotion over every track he is a part of. Be it his collaborations with blues legends like Muddy Waters or his connection to 1970s rock staples like the Steve Miller Band and the Who, Cotton knew how to excite the crowds he would perform to.

Bonnie Blue is at its highest points when relaying his utterly electric performances, both as a harmonicist and vocalist. Watching him effortlessly claim the crowd’sattention whenever he is on stage only further cements his significant role in cultivating Chicago’s music scene in the most successful decades of his career, an ironic twist of fate given his Mississippi origins. James Cotton was nothing short of a powerhouse performer, and the film captures his essence with great admiration. However, this admiration never wholly turns into flagrant fanboyism, but rather a balanced understanding of his rock star lifestyle.

James Cotton was, like a countless number of his peers and contemporaries, a musician whose sharply refined skills had garnered him a great deal of success, inundating him with the newly born rockstar lifestyle. Cram and company do not shy away from this, as Cotton’s periods of drug abuse and sexual promiscuity were fundamental to his way of living during the 1960s and ’70s, as well as highly informant for the relationship he would develop with his long-term wife, Jacklyn Hairston Cotton, who would be profoundly influential on his later life.

In covering this enormous span of time, Bonnie Blue also effectively provides a timeline of blues music as a broad cultural movement. Through James Cotton’s career, we see its flirtations with the global spotlight, its relationship with the genres and movements that followed it, and its overall longevity in American music culture. The film even opens with a glimpse of a tribute concert organized in honor of Cotton, who passed away in March 2017.

Harpist James Montgomery, a student of James Cotton’s and producer of Bonnie Blue, states that the concert had effectively assembled some of the greatest living harp players on the planet into one room. Even if the blues does not hold the same cultural capital as it once did, the genre and its community can and will never truly disappear.

What Bestor Cram and his crew achieved through this work, while not structurally distinct from documentaries that cover other artists in the same vein, is nevertheless interesting in casting the spotlight on a significant and essential piece of American music history that would otherwise go unrecognized in the broader musical zeitgeist. On those grounds, Bonnie Blue: James Cotton’s Life in the Blues is as comprehensive as it can get, particularly for viewers not already familiar with Cotton’s work and his life. The tried and true biographical format of documentaries such as this would otherwise be unremarkable, but the film is subtextually interested in blues as a movement, just as it is interested in James Cotton himself.

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