Blues Intro

What We Talk about when We Talk about the Blues

Approaching the Blues

Scan me!

...a crucial starting point

What is the Blues (various artists)

Son House

Lightnin' Hopkins

Howlin' Wolf

What is the Blues (various artists)

Terry "Harmonica" Bean

Robert Johnson, "Cross Road Blues" (1936)

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees Asked the Lord above, "Have mercy, save poor Bob if you please" Mmmm, standin' at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride Standin' at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride Didn't nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by Mmmm, the sun goin' down boy, dark goin' catch me here Oooo ooee eeee, boy dark goin' catch me here I haven't got no lovin' sweet woman that love and feel my care You can run, you can run, tell my friend boy Willie Brown You can run, tell my friend boy Willie Brown Lord that I'm standing at the crossroad, babe I believe I'm sinkin' down

Standard twelve-bar blues structure

Blues Conditions

Blues Feelings

Blues Ethos

Blues Expressiveness

Adam Gussow, "Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos"

Blues Expressiveness

• AAB form (repetition-with-variation)
• Call and response
• Vocalization ("vocal" playing)
• Idiomatic language
• Signifyin'

Adam Gussow, "Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos"

Work Songs & Spirituals

I Be so Glad (When the Sun Goes Down)

Wade in the Water

The blues ethos

Black southern blues people, given the economic and social challenges arrayed against them, figured out pretty quickly that wallowing in despair—whining—just wasn’t an effective long-term strategy. They complain, to be sure, but they do so in a context that facilitates a spirit of creative resistance. The blues ethos acknowledges the power generated when emotional pain is annealed with a self-mockery that wards off descent into outright, immobilizing depression. The sadness of the blues, according to Langston Hughes, “is not softened with tears but hardened with laughter,” and that word “hardened” is important. Spiritual toughness is part of the blues ethos. Never, ever, ever, ever give up. Even when you give up, do so only as long as you need to. Then pick yourself up and get cracking. [...]The blues ethos knows all this. Those who embody the blues ethos have the wisdom and resilience, the strength of character, to respond to bad luck by setting transformative possibilities in motion. [...] Blues songs traffic in suffering. Ralph Ellison memorably called the blues “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” But the blues ethos, the philosophy of life that sustains blues musicians and other blues people, prefers to acknowledge pain in order to evade suffering, whenever possible. See it, say it, sing it, share it. Get it out, by all means. Don’t deny the pain, or hide from it. But don’t wallow in it, either. Use harsh humor—near-tragic, near-comic–to kick it away. Use stoic persistence to get past it. With luck, you’ll leave it in your rearview mirror. Or not. But it’s worth a try.

Adam Gussow, "Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos"

The blues according to Richard Wright

"[Blues] vocabulary [is] terser than Basic English, shorn of all hyperbole, purged of metaphysical implications, wedded to a frankly atheistic vision of life, and excluding almost all references to nature and her various moods." "Though constant reference is made to loved ones, little or no mention is made of the family as such. [...] The locale of these songs shifts continuously and very seldom is a home site hymned or celebrated. Instead, the environmental items extolled are saw-mills, cotton-gins, lumber-camps, levee-banks, floods, swamps, jails, highways, trains, buses, tools, depressed states of mind, voyages, accidents, and various forms of violence. Yet the most astonishing aspect of the blues is that, though replete with a sense of defeat and down-heartedness, they are not intrinsically pessimistic; their burden of woe and melancholy is dialectically redeemed through sheer force of sensuality, into an almost exultant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope. No matter how repressive was the American environment, the Negro never lost faith in or doubted his deeply endemic capacity to live"

Richard Wright, "Foreword", in Paul Oliver, Blues Fell this Morning

The blues trope/The blues matrix

"The material conditions of slavery in the United States and the rhythms of Afro-American blues combined and emerged [...] as an ancestral matrix that has produced a forceful and indigenous American creativity." "Afro-American culture is a complex, reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrix. [...] The matrix is a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting impulses always in productive transit." "To suggest a trope for the blues as a forceful matrix in cultural understanding is to summon an image of the black blues singer at the railway junction lustily transforming experiences of a durative (unceasingly oppressive) landscape into the energies of a rhythmic song. [...] The singer's product [...] constitutes a lively scene, a robust matrix where endless antinomies are mediated and understanding and explanation find conditions of possibility."

Houston Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature

Bukka White "New 'Frisco Train" (1931)