Just What Is The Blues?
One of the most entertaining, ongoing and endless debates available on the Internets today is not about health care reform, financial meltdowns and bailouts, Michael Jackson’s doctor, or even Kate and Jon’s divorce (and I know they’re getting divorced, even though I don’t have the first clue who they are or what they do – such is the power of media today). No, for my money, the most controversial subject on the Internets today is this one: just what, exactly, is the blues?
On various blues discussion boards, this topic goes on night and day. People weigh in on the subject as though each and every one of them had a PhD in the subject. It’s almost alarming how much raw emotion goes into the topic. Because, ultimately, and here comes a spoiler folks — to me the blues is a feeling that you have when you play a particular song, or hear a particular song, that just resonates to your toes. Elicits tears, chills, laughter, takes you directly to a life experience you had that was vivid and extreme, one that let you know in no uncertain terms you were alive. The blues always takes me to that place. For me, that’s the power of the genre. The genius of it. The mojo of it, it you will.
Others, however, will tell you otherwise. Wikipedia, for example, helpfully points out that the phrase “blues” comes from the term “Blue Devils,” which means melancholy and sadness, and was commonly used at the end of the 18th century. The first copyrighted song with the term “blues” in it was 1919′s “Dallas Blues.” I’ve never heard the song, but I’ll bet it doesn’t sound anything like the blues I’ve come to know and love.
We all know (or should) that blues as a genre comes out of the cotton fields of Mississippi. I won’t say the plantation owners at the time acted stupidly in using slaves to build their fortune, because apparently it would hurt some feelings. But let’s just say that the life of a southern slave was harsh beyond any experience we can muster in today’s America. And the response to that cruelty was song. Think about that. To ease the almost unbearable pain of hardship, loss and constant backbreaking work, the response wasn’t organized resistance, which would seem the reasonable response. Slaves outnumbered masters by hundreds to one. No, it was, instead, to sing. Singing broke out in the fields of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, etc. It spread like wildfire, and it evidently helped ease the pain a little. But it did so much more than that. It spread to the churches, it spread to the juke joints and road houses. It spread to into the very cellular meat of the American bloodstream and grew into its bones, its brain, its heart. The singing continued over years and wars, in brothels, bars and bedrooms. The voices, the verses, the horrors and the sorrows, the moments of joy and delight, the music letting us see the world, like a tear in the window shade.
The blues is Bessie Smith, and Mamie Smith, sure. It’s Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell, and W.C. Handy and Pinetop Perkins and Sunnyland Slim. It’s Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. It’s Buddy Guy and Robert Cray, but. . . ah. Is it, say, Eric Clapton? Is it early Rolling Stones? Is it John Mayall, or Mike Bloomfield, or Stevie Ray Vaughn? Is it John Mayer? Can a guy like Tony Bennett sing the blues? How about Patsy Cline? Or k.d. lang? Or (here’s where it gets fun) Elvis (Presley, not Costello)? Or are these folks, who have all recorded blues songs, rendered a (pun intended) pale imitation of the form? Can, in other words, white folks really sing the blues, or is it just, at best, a tribute? An homage? Or, at worst, a savage ripping off of a cultural heritage?
Fun, huh? These are topics that bear discussion, and they certainly are being discussed in various places. When all the talking is through, let’s hope some light and love and understanding wind up the end result. If so, all this talk will have been worthwhile.
