How to Play Deep South Blues Again

Dejection Expressiveness and the Dejection Ethos

Past Adam Gussow

Published: January 24, 2018

1The Stanzaic Aggregating of Disaster

In classroom settings, I brainstorm my survey of the blues literary tradition with a sequence entitled "Origins, Definitions, and Myths," offering students non just my own take on the dejection, but relevant writings by Steven C. Tracy, Kalamu ya Salaam, Barry Lee Pearson, and W. C. Handy. Fifty-fifty as I do and so, I'm aware that some of my students, like many blues fans and musicians, would rather engage the dejection on the level of groove-sponsored bodily pleasure, vocal prowess, instrumental virtuosity, and the epiphenomena of blues fandom: kicking back or boogying downwardly, as it were, with a shot of bourbon in hand. Those, too, are valid means of apprehending the blues, just disquisitional reflection in an academic context demands that nosotros bracket such participatory pleasures, holding them in tension with a willingness to formally explore the inner workings of the course.

Distilled to its essence, my schema goes like this: blues conditions pb to blues feelings, which observe issue in blues music (or blues expressiveness more broadly); the conditions, feelings, and music are encompassed by the dejection ethos. Even every bit we interruption the dejection down into component parts, it is important to admit that all four things—conditions, feelings, music, and ethos—are interpenetrant, meaning they are leap up with each other; they are in dialogue; they work in concert. This is one reason why some people look askance at the sort of analytic moves I am making here: they think of the blues as a continuum in which the music, the feelings, the problems beingness sung about, and the swaggering (or stoic, or hyper-emotive) persona all flow together. They are not wrong to view the blues that way, but that flow-zone is not the final word. We can dig a fiddling deeper and effigy out how the dejection practise their work.

What the dejection expresses, of course, is not merely feelings: most blues songs, from "Back Water Blues" and "Sweetness Home Chicago" to "Sweet Rough Man" and "Mean Sometime Earth," spend considerable lyric energy representing the weather—the challenging, despair-and/or-euphoria-inducing situations—that requite rise to the feelings. Blues songs often state a trouble, let it simmer and intensify, then pose a provisional solution. What generates the solution, as often every bit not, is the blues ethos: the blues philosophy of life. The blues ethos, as a concept, is multipronged, not unitary. It is a handful of attitudes and strategies for coping gracefully with the worst that life can throw at you. I definition of the blues ethos, and a brilliant one, is offered in the course of a rhetorical question by African American philosopher and social critic Cornell West: "How practise you generate an elegance of earned self-togetherness, so that you have a stick-to-it-ness in the face of the catastrophic and the baleful and the horrendous and the scandalous and the monstrous?"^one

Blues poetry finds surprising means of staging all 4 elements of my schema—as in "Bad Luck Card" by Langston Hughes:

Crusade you don't honey me
Is awful, awful hard.
Gypsy washed showed me
My bad luck card.

There ain't no skilful left
In this earth for me.
Gypsy done tole me—
Unlucky as can be.

I don't know what
Po' weary me can practise.
Gypsy says I'd impale my cocky
If I was y'all.²

The dejection condition undergirding the poem is failed or unrequited love: the "you" in the first line who does not, or no longer continues to, love the poem's speaker. Superadded to that condition and reinforcing it in the speaker's mind is a more general condition of unluckiness, one affirmed by the gypsy's fortune telling. Blues feelings hither begin every bit the speaker'southward desolation in the confront of doomed love, merely they quickly enlarge themselves, in the second stanza, into a comprehensive sense of doom, in which the speaker, convinced that all "skilful" has vanished from the world, seems headed toward suicide. Blues expressiveness shows upward in a range of ways, including the black vernacular language deployed past the speaker and the "autobiographical relate of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically" evoked in Ralph Ellison'southward famous definition.^three Repetitions—the stanzaic aggregating of disaster through "me" and the gypsy—are one formal means through which that chronicle does its work. Finally, the blues ethos is visible hither not as West'south elegance of self-togetherness, only rather as the poem's unexpected final couplet: a summary insult to the speaker's collapsing ego, one that wards off pain by precipitating harsh laughter. What might at start seem similar egregious tactlessness on the gypsy'south part can also exist seen every bit a healer's shrewd endeavor, with a wink and a nod, to puncture the speaker's maudlin and maladaptive response to bad news. Or peradventure the speaker, telling us his story of woe, is extrapolating from the fortune-telling state of affairs, inventing the gypsy'south final comment in an act of creative exaggeration. We cannot know, but the poem offers us a moment of enlightenment regardless; it lifts our spirits with a chuckle by conjuring up a blues figure who says, in effect, "You think you've got troubles? Ha!"

The fact that Hughes'south poem consists of three stanzas might remind united states of the debt that blues poesy owes to the tripartite, AAB structure that is blues music'due south best-known and virtually ubiquitous formal characteristic. The emergence of dejection literature, in fact, is partly the story of how poets like Hughes and Sterling Brown, novelists like Claude McKay, songwriters like W. C. Handy, and folklorists similar Howard Odum rendered the "humble dejection lyric" (Ellison's term) on the written folio, translating and transforming information technology in the procedure. It would behoove any blues scholar in grooming to go intimately familiar with the AAB verse form. That grade happens to exist lingua franca at blues jams effectually the world, merely it is also one of African American literature's signal contributions to American literature.

West. C. Handy, 1941. - Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.

One of the things that characterizes early blues music is an unusual corporeality of repetition and a distinctive song form. American music in the first ii decades of the twentieth century, whether the pop music of Tin Pan Aisle or the religious music of the mainline blackness churches, gravitated towards a sixteen-bar poetry format, with popular music often adding a sixteen-bar span. Blues, by contrast, offered itself in a iii-line, twelve-bar format, and without a bridge—except for Handy's "St. Louis Dejection" (1914), a bridge-begetting blues and the exception that proves the dominion. By the mid-1920s, with the appearance of recording and peculiarly with the popularity of Blind Lemon Jefferson as a recording star, the AAB verse grade had become the accepted norm, as in Jefferson's "Black Snake Moan" (1926):

I . . . I ain't got no mama now
I . . . I ain't got no mama now
She told me late last nighttime, "Y'all don't need no mama no how"

Mmm, mmm, black ophidian crawlin' in my room
Mmm, mmm, black ophidian crawlin' in my room
Some pretty mama better come up and get this black ophidian soon.

The AAB verse form, when performed past blues singers, is characterized past a specific sort of repetition-with-variation: the A line, when repeated, is sung over a different chord (the subdominant or IV chord) than the first time around, and singers frequently embroider or "worry" the repeated line in a series of microtonal adjustments, sometimes with lyric elisions or embellishments, that highlight this chord change in subtle but important ways. The difference between the two iterations of the A line is just substantial enough that scholars sometimes refer to the second A line as the A-prime line. The B line, by contrast, is an answering line rather than an echoing line; it nigh always rhymes with the A line (although centre-rhymes and non-rhymes occasionally show up), and information technology sometimes puts an unexpected spin on the theme or emotion or question that was set in motion by the AA pair. In a philosophical sense, it is nearly as though what blues song does is try out a statement, i that proposes an emotional or stylistic orientation towards life'south bad news, so reprises or repeats that statement in a way that suggests either a possible variant on the initial stance or, by contrast, an intensification of the initial stance. The B line, in any case, puts a cap on it—or in it—and sends y'all hurtling into the next verse.

The repetition-with-variation-every bit-intensification dynamic, then crucial to the language and formal structure of the blues, is one that feels uncannily familiar to those who accept suffered on the field of battle that is failed love:

I hate yous
I hate yous
Take the damn firm, and your little domestic dog, likewise.

The rage that fuels a divorce, rendered this nakedly, is not dejection lyricism, but it may have something to teach us about where the music's magic is sourced: in an urgently felt demand to unburden an aching heart, and in the way that a certain kind of immediately repeated complaint may facilitate that unburdening. Repeating their indictments in this mode, blues songs harden romantic rage with metaphors that exaggerate to produce bitter laughter. New Orleans blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson ended his 7-yr mutual-law marriage to blues singer Mary Smith in 1932—she had borne him six children during that period—and the acrimony that powered that breakup is audible in "She's Making Whoopee in Hell Tonight" (1930):

Baby, you've been gone all twenty-four hours baby . . . prepare to make whoopee tonight
Y'all've been gone all twenty-four hour period . . . set to make whoopee this evening
I'grand gonna accept my razor and cut your late hours . . . I will exist serving you right

The undertaker's been here and gone, I give him your tiptop and size
Undertaker's been here and gone, I requite him your acme and size
Y'all'll exist making whoopee with the devil in hell tomorrow night

Y'all made me beloved you . . . just got me for your slave
You fabricated me dear you . . . simply got me for your slave
And from now on y'all'll exist making whoopee in your lonesome grave

The AAB class is at present and so ubiquitous as to seem both natural and inevitable, but blues scholars are withal not precisely sure where information technology came from. In his study of Skip James entitled I'd Rather Be the Devil, Stephen Calt argues that the AAB pattern ultimately derives from "Ringlet Hashemite kingdom of jordan," a spiritual penned by Charles Wesley (1707–88) that showed up at campsite meetings in the 1820s and became an anthem of the 2nd Great Revival, the religious movement that made Christian converts of many black southern slaves.^iv In Africa and the Blues, Gerhard Kubik argues for possible Yoruba origins of the AAB stanza, while Harriet Ottenheimer argues for East African origins in the Comoros, an island chain betwixt Mozambique and Madagascar.⁵ Even as we chase downwards such distant sourcing, information technology is worth remembering that early on blues songs manifested a range of stanzaic forms. When Handy encountered a "lean, loose-jointed Negro" playing slide guitar with a knife and singing at the Tutwiler, Mississippi, train station in 1903 or 1904, a historic moment of first contact evoked in Father of the Blues, the man repeated the line "Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog" iii times—an AAA poetry, and a form that still raises its caput from time to time.⁶

2Victory Over the Bad Things

The AAB stanza, so broadly and variously utilized by blues poets and worked into the tissue of prose works, including Handy's autobiography, is just one of the formal elements that institute what I am calling dejection expressiveness. A 2nd element is phone call and response or antiphony: the idea that a given blues text, like a blues functioning involving a musician and an audition (or a musician who is his own audience), stages a sort of dialogue or conversation betwixt ii voices or ideas or energies. Ii things are calling dorsum and along to each other—reinforcing, versioning, outdoing, and/or signifying on each other. Each is dynamically adjusting itself to the other, so that each response in turn becomes a call that provokes further response. Call and response, as an organizational principle, shows up non simply in the blues tradition but in jazz, soul, work songs, slave seculars, and the black religious tradition: church choirs, quartets, anywhere that gospel and the spirituals are sung. It is ane of the givens of African American music. Its deep origins arguably lie with the drum-and-trip the light fantastic toe dialogue that animates many kinds of West African music—an inheritance from slavery, once again—and it has deep philosophical implications for the dejection.

Early blues is distinguished from slave music, amid other things, by the fact that it is individualistic rather than collective: information technology features a lone guitarist singing as he picks and strums (Handy'southward Tutwiler musician), or a alone female vocalist backed upwardly past a jazz orchestra. It is not choral music. It is very different in that respect from the raised hymns that one finds in the Gullah churches of coastal Georgia, where a serial of voices chime in, double each other, and toss the ball back and forth between a leader and followers. And yet, if one listens closely to the lone bluesman with his guitar, or the blues queen and her orchestra, one realizes that the call-and-response conversation, the antiphony, has been preserved. In the example of the lonely guitarist, the song lines are the calls; the then-chosen "fills," piddling two-bar snatches of slide guitar riffs between the vocal lines, are the responses. If the guitarist is playing duo manner with a harmonica actor, the harmonica responds to the vocal "calls" in similar style. In the case of the blues queen, the orchestra provides not but rhythmic and harmonic background to her vocals, only solo instruments that surface in the spaces betwixt her vocal lines; their instrumental commentary becomes the response to her calls.

Call and response knits the blues community together. In philosophical terms, phone call and response says, "Yeah, you lot are suffering and I am suffering. Nosotros are suffering. And you hear my suffering, and respond to it, as I hear your suffering and respond to it. We become the feeling out, we requite it a ritual public airing. We give it form—a powerful, elegant, shapely expressive form. And in so doing, we earn ourselves a victory over the bad things that have happened to us. The music we brand together is more powerful than the matter they're trying to make of us." This philosophical victory takes a slightly dissimilar shape when a blues queen like Bessie Smith is fronting her orchestra earlier a packed firm than it takes when Belton Sutherland, a little-known Mississippi guitarist, is communing with his guitar alone at home, but the underlying principle is the aforementioned. Rather than i person suffering quietly and alone, there's a chat going on, one that manifests dialectical energy and human creativity. A deep cultural course tracing back to Africa is beingness worked with, animated, put in service. I am dealing with the loneliness that I feel by creating a call and response dialogue between me and my guitar, or my orchestra. If I've got an audience, the dialogue I'grand staging may in plough provoke a second-order conversation in which you lot, my congregation, respond to what I'm offering you with your own running commentary, your shouts of approval and affirmation. Then, as they say, nosotros are really cooking with gas.

Bessie Smith, 1939. - Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.

Call and response procedure, in short, bodies forth a core value of the blues: the thought that pain needs to exist externalized and shared rather than suffered lone, along with the idea that there is something ennobling and healing virtually this procedure. As with many elements of the blues, this value showtime takes shape during the slavery era. In Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Report (1982), historian Orlando Patterson explores the style in which slavery was, in fact, a kind of comprehensive social decease, i that left the enslaved person not only powerless and without honor, but alienated from his natal rights—i.e., shorn of all familial connections and ancestral claims, including his own name.⁷ The Dred Scott decision (1857) affirmed social decease when information technology argued that all blacks were "beings of an inferior order" and, equally such, "had no rights which the white human was jump to respect." The African American response to this situation in the antebellum South was the then-called "invisible institution" of the black church: hush harbor meetings out of sight and hearing of whites within which wounded spirits could exist salved by a shared unburdening that was sustained by mutual recognition and respect. In the decades subsequently Emancipation, blackness churches were a visible and proliferating source of pride for the communities they served. Titles, honorifics, and a loftier sense of ritual purpose helped heal the comprehensive disrespect that enforced social death. During those same mail service-Emancipation decades, as Katrina Hazzard-Gordon reminds u.s. in her study Jookin', juke joints were beginning to sally across the Due south, offering similar kind of healing to the dejection communities that circulated through and within them.^eight In The Spirituals and the Blues (1972), black theologian James Cone calls the blues "a secular spiritual" as a way of getting at this dynamic.^ix The juke joint is the place where performers and their congregations stage a sacred ritual of unburdening. The most skilled and powerful performers, those who fulfill the call and response mission in the most cathartic way, literally create names for themselves in this way.

Along with AAB construction and call-and-response procedure, nosotros might add together a 3rd item to our survey of blues expressiveness: vocalizations. What makes dejection music instantly identifiable—non the lyrics, but the music itself—is non just the twelve-bar harmonic structure, or the instruments (slide guitar, harmonica), or even the microtonality of the and then-chosen "blues calibration" that finds useful pitches between the white and black keys of the piano. It is also, and more specifically, the way in which blues players—especially guitar and harmonica, but also saxes, trumpets, and other brass—model elements of their playing on what blues singers do. They make their instruments yelp, hoot, curse, scream, and weep. Talk, in a word. Salty Holmes's "I Want My Mama" (1950) and Sonny Terry's "Talking Harmonica Dejection" (1959) offer vivid examples of harmonica players doing this; Albert Collins and Luther Allison were masters of the talking-guitar technique, sliding their fingers up and down the strings to create the illusion of utterances like "No, I won't!" or "Ohhh, noooo!" In "Luther's Dejection" (1974), Allison stages an agitated dialogue between himself and his adult female—the guitar "talks" her role—so that telephone call-and-response procedure and vocalizations work synergistically, simply the idea of talking through an instrument has a deeper meaning, I believe, than just signifying on human speech.

The talking drums were a significant element of musical life in the office of West Africa preyed upon by the Atlantic slave trade. My intuition tells me that the deep historical origins of the virtuosic vocalizations of musicians like Holmes, Terry, Collins, and Allison, prevarication in the pitch-tone language existence instrumentally mimicked by the talking drum of Africa. That language, and that conception of drumming, was a part of the cultural textile that slavery ended up depositing in the southern United States. After drums were banned in South Carolina and then beyond the South in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion of 1741—a slave rebellion orchestrated, whites insisted, by talking drums—drum language and rhythmic fluency were preserved for more than a century as the slapping-the-body practice known equally patting juba. Blackness people in the South found ways of keeping the drum alive, despite white proscriptions. Drums flourished in the postal service-Emancipation world of black minstrelsy, brass bands, and jazz, of grade, only the blues was i of the places where the broader drum-office created by the earlier ban remained in play: in Charley Patton's habit of beating rhythms on the wooden body of his guitar, in the style Bukka White snaps and pops his bass strings, in the heavy front-porch foot of Belton Sutherland and other solo guitarists looking to entertain a trip the light fantastic crowd, in phrases like "[South]pank that ole pe-anner" shouted by Zora Neale Hurston's Florida juke joint informants in Mules and Men.^ten

Drummer in orchestra in Memphis, Tennessee, juke joint, 1939. - Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott.

3Signifying, Subterfuge, and Sexuality

So vocalizations are an of import element of blues expressiveness, along with AAB structure and call-and-response process. A 4th aspect of blues expressiveness is something I will call blues idiomatic language. By this I mean the rich linguistic stew in which members of the blues subculture—musicians, audiences, and assorted hangers-on—comport their daily lives, on and off the bandstand. There are two superb books about this subject: Debra DeSalvo's The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (2006) and Stephen Calt'due south Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Lexicon (2009). African retentions show up in blues linguistic communication, equally DeSalvo notes—the words "hip" and "cat" both have Wolof origins—but fifty-fifty more than important is the "freewheeling all-American lingo" of the underground economy that helped folks on the receiving end of Jim Crow survive and occasionally prosper. "Blues artists," she writes, "—looking to steal from the best, similar all songwriters—nicked words and phrases from the numbers runners, hookers, drag queens, thieves, junkies, pimps, moonshiners, hoodoo doctors, dealers, rounders, and con artists who made up the street set."^xi

The language of dejection expressiveness is a rowdy, street-level American colloquial rooted in the language of the blackness southern folk. Anybody who has read Hurston's Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God, anybody familiar with her evocations of Sop de Bottom, Big Sweet, and Tea Cake, knows how much boastful, playful, threatening, cocky-annunciating energy the language of blues people contains. The blues underworld that generated that linguistic communication was, among other things, a place where flesh—sexual attractions, sexual authorization—was an important currency. The prominence of sexuality within blues soapbox is what academics call overdetermined: it has multiple sources, not i source. The scarlet-light-commune environs within which early blues performances ofttimes took identify were a breeding ground for such language; the harsh, labor-centered daylight lives of black dejection audience members fabricated actual pleasures an enticing theme. Commercial considerations, too, incentivized titillating blues songs. Once Can Pan alley jumped on the blues bandwagon in the 1920s, the "clean and racy . . . folk speech" of early dejection singers, according to Harlem Renaissance spokesman Alain Locke, was transformed into "the mawkish sentimentality and concocted lascivity of the contemporary cabaret songs and dances"¹²:

The one is primitively erotic; the other, decadently neurotic. Gradually the Negro singers and musicians succumbed to the vogue of the artificial and corrupt variety of song, music, dance which their folk-stuff started, and spawned a plague, profitable only profligate, that has done more moral harm than creative good.

The stardom between skillful-sexy ("racy," folk-originated) and bad-sexy ("decadent," commercial, modern) blues songs is a difficult to uphold. In 1910, a decade earlier Tin can Pan Aisle began to pay much attention the dejection, pioneering folklorist and Howard Odum was recoiling with moral horror at the prominence of sexual practice in the "great mass of vulgar and indecent songs" that he had encountered in his travels amidst working-class African Americans in rural n Mississippi:

Often such songs are in the majority, and they are generally favorites among the negroes. . . . [These] songs tell of every phase of immorality and filth; they represent the superlative of the repulsive. . . . The prevailing theme of this course of songs is that of sexual relations, and there is no restraint in its expression. In comparison with similar songs of other peoples that accept been preserved, those of the Negro stand out in a class of their own. They are sung at the dance and other mixed gatherings. They are sung by groups of boys and girls, of men and women, and they are sung by individuals who revel in their suggestiveness. Hither the vivid imagination of the Negro makes his constant thought a putrid bed of rottenness and intensifies his already depraved nature. Openly descriptive of the grossest immorality and susceptible of unspeakable thoughts and actions, rotten with filth, they are yet sung to the time-honored melodies.¹³

We are savvy enough, I trust, to recognize Odum's moral revulsion every bit the fusty, racially retrograde Puritanism of a man from the pre–Great War era, a cultural sensibility that H. L. Mencken and the Jazz Age managed successfully to rout. But of course recorded and commercialized blues vocal, along with the beast-themed dance crazes that accompanied them—the Turkey Trot, Bunny Hug, and Grizzly Behave—was itself a key instrument for effecting this civilization-wide loosening-up. And one familiar rhetorical move through which the rout was conducted is, as information technology happens, still live and well in our ain 24-hour interval: signifying.

Jitterbugging in a juke joint on a Sabbatum afternoon, Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939. - Photograph past Marion Post Wolcott.

Signifying plays a key part within African American expressive civilisation; it is as much a church affair as a blues affair, and it is actually a range of related things, non i thing. At heart, signifying is maxim 1 thing but meaning another, where the thing that is said ofttimes takes on a figural energy of its own, even as the interest and importance of the "meant" thing, by being partly or wholly masked, is highlighted for an audition hip enough to become the word-play. Signifying, in folklorist Roger Abrahams'south words, is a "fashion-focused message" in which "styling . . . is foregrounded by the devices of making a point past indirection and wit." In a church context, signifying shows upwards in the spirituals, where a phrase similar "crossing over" may gesture towards a range of real-globe referents, from fleeing slavery'southward clutches across the Mason-Dixon line to any yearned-for political development, such as the ballot of President Obama, that represents a prophetic realization of black liberty-dreams. In a blues context, the most familiar grade of signifying is sex-talk: finding a thousand and one ways of boasting, preening, and configuring a sexual come-on, or complaining about a lover's faithlessness.

Sexual signifying is a foundational element of blues expressiveness. The most familiar lyric of this sort might be, "If you don't desire my peaches . . . please don't shake my tree." That line first enters the tradition, surprisingly, in an unpublished 1914 composition by Irving Berlin, the dean of Tin Pan Aisle, but Berlin had nigh certainly taken it—as an overheard phrase—from blackness oral tradition, and it shows up, along with its many variants, in songs past everybody from Bessie and Trixie Smith to Elmore James and the Mississippi Sheiks. In "Peach Orchard Mama" (1929), Blind Lemon Jefferson sings of his errant lover's fondness for robbing the cradle: "you swore nobody'd option your fruit just me / I found three kid-men shaking down your peaches free." Sexual signifying in blues lyrics achieves several things. If we remember, every bit theater scholar Paige McGinley urges us to, that the great African American blues queens used every expressive technique at their disposal to dramatize their songs on the phase, so we can appreciate the way in which such lyrics open an enlivening participatory conversation between the statuesque female performer, gesturing at her own curves, and her beholden audience.^fourteen Men appreciate the curves; women appreciate the upstanding point, which in our ain colloquial might be voiced as: Don't play me. If you want all this—the glory of my womanhood—then don't simply agitate my interest long enough to steal my sex and hurt my feelings. Follow through. Bear witness me your love and make me your woman.

Sexual signifying offers blues vocal a way of creating pleasure through heavily freighted indirection: plays on words that gesture forcefully at sexualized bodies and the sex acts they engage in without actually using the 4-letter Anglo Saxon equivalents. In "Empty Bed Blues" (1928), composed by J. C. Johnson, Bessie Smith sings of existence deserted past a new lover, jubilant with vivid suggestiveness his hip-powered prowess and endurance:

Bought me a java grinder, got the best one I could find
Bought me a coffee grinder, got the all-time one I could find
Then he could grind my coffee cause he has a new grind.

He'south a deep body of water diver with a stroke that tin't go wrong
He's a deep sea diver with a stroke that tin't go wrong
He tin can touch on the lesser and his air current holds out so long.

The origins of signifying lie in the antebellum South, when enslaved African Americans had a pressing need to communicate sensitive information with each other in public spaces on the plantation—an impending escape attempt, for example—in a fashion that evaded detection by the master. Sexuality wasn't office of the signifying equation at that point, but it takes heart stage in the dejection during the post-Emancipation period because, according to Angela Y. Davis (Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 1998), sexuality, along with travel, "was one of the well-nigh tangible domains in which emancipation was acted upon and through which its meanings were expressed."¹⁵ In other words, sexual signifying plays such a central role in blues expressiveness considering the right to flirt with, chase, romance, couple with, and ravish the lover (or lovers) of one'south choosing was a key way in which freeborn black southerners lived out, knew, their freedom. No longer did the slavemaster have the right to select your mate and go along you down on the farm. It'due south all about me and you, baby: the crawling kingsnake and the fine dark-brown hen. The blues lyric tradition signifies endlessly on this indicate.

Jitterbugging in a juke joint on a Saturday evening, exterior Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939. - Photo by Marion Post Wolcott.

4A Brutally Honest Recognition of Reality

Thus far I take been talking nigh a range of topics that tin can be subsumed within the category of blues expressiveness‑—the AAB poesy form, phone call and response, vocalizations, dejection idiomatic linguistic communication, and signifying. The analytic proffer I'yard exploring, y'all may remember, goes like this: dejection conditions lead to dejection feelings, which find upshot in dejection music (or blues expressiveness more broadly); the atmospheric condition, feelings, and music are encompassed by the blues ethos. I'd like to turn at present to that fourth global concept. What is the dejection ethos and why does information technology thing?

Like blues expressiveness, the blues ethos is several related things, not but one thing. When about people offer definitions of the blues, they tend to neglect the blues ethos. Information technology is easier to invoke the distinctive three-line stanzas, or major/minor tonalities, or the multiple oppressions of black life in the rural Due south, and say "That is the blues." Yet the dejection ethos—an attitudinal orientation towards feel, a sustaining philosophy of life—may exist the most of import ingredient of all. I'd similar to utilize my own feel equally an case.

My first exposure to the blues ethos came long earlier I had encountered the concept by name. In 1986, soon after I began playing harmonica on the streets of Harlem with a Mississippi-born guitarist known as Mr. Satan, ane of his sidewalk fans told me that his real proper name was Sterling Magee. When I expressed marvel most the proper name-change, a story shortly emerged. I was told he'd had a very beautiful wife—curvy, sexy—and she'd gotten cancer. He stayed right past her bedside, nursing her. When she died, he fell off the deep end. He dragged himself back dwelling to Mississippi, boozer and inconsolable; months later, when he returned to Harlem, he was calling himself by the new name and demanding that everybody else do the same. That was 5 years before I had come along. The Mr. Satan I knew was the opposite of despairing: he was a band-tailed roarer animated by phenomenal talent and free energy, joyous and irrepressible. We would talk near women from time to fourth dimension, as musicians oft practice, and I'd confess my own fury at the live-in girlfriend who had cuckolded and deserted me a couple of years earlier. He'd respond by decrying the worthless temptation represented by women and their "smelly piddling behinds." When I would speak of my lingering pain, he'd vigorously push button back. "Hell," he would say with a harsh laugh, "I had then many women die on me, I was thinking of opening a funeral parlor." How could I non chuckle along with him? How—knowing what I knew of his own run into not just with romantic tragedy but with expiry—could I non put aside my self-pity and go back to the business of living?

That was my baptism into the blues ethos: that harsh laugh, and the exaggeration that accompanied it, transforming pain into life force. I had not yet encountered the writings of Albert Murray or Kalamu ya Salaam, only the feel helped me appreciate their insights when I finally did. "[Due west]hat is ultimately at stake," writes Murray of black dejection life in Stomping the Blues, "is morale, which is to say the volition to persevere, the disposition to persist and peradventure prevail; and what must exist avoided by all ways is a failure of nerve."¹⁶ Stoic persistence, a refusal to give up, lies at the core of the blues ethos. And a sure kind of reality-based, fantasy-assisted humour, according to Salaam, is a tool with which blues people take managed to enable such persistence. "[R]ather than an escape from reality," he argues in "The Dejection Artful,"

when we fantasize, it is based on a brutally honest recognition of reality, a reality albeit clothed in metaphorical grace. This grace includes, but is not overcome by, a profound recognition of the economic inequality and political racism of America. Thus, nosotros laugh loud and heartily when every rational expectation suggests we should be crying in despair. The combination of exaggeration and conscious recognition of the vicious facts of life is the basis for the sense of humour of blues people, which is existent black humour.¹⁷

Mr. Satan's joke about dead wives and funeral parlors, exaggerating and ridiculing heartbreak in society to swat it abroad, epitomizes the blues ethos. There'south a spiritual wisdom in it. How should you bargain with bad news? Black southern dejection people, given the economic and social challenges arrayed against them, figured out pretty quickly that wallowing in despair—whining—simply wasn't an effective long-term strategy. They complain, to exist sure, just they practise 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 office of the dejection ethos.^eighteen Never, ever, always, e'er requite up. Even when y'all requite up, do so merely equally long as you need to. And so option yourself up and get neat.

Don't, in other words, spend any more time in that land of given-up-ness than y'all need to. To do so bespeaks spiritual immaturity: an unwise insistence on reifying the miseries of the present moment. To say, like a pouting child, "Because I am downward now, I will always be downwardly," is to bullheaded oneself to the possibilities for escape and future triumph that are always present, at least potentially, in even the virtually unpromising of circumstances. This is the wisdom contained in the dejection standard "Problem in Heed":

Problem in listen . . . babe I'chiliad blue
Merely I won't exist blue always
Because the sun'south gonna shine in
. . . my back door someday.

"Problem in Mind" is sung from a condition of deep sadness, simply it demands that we reframe that sadness in a way that looks ahead, with prophetic wisdom, to the possibility of a meliorate life. The long arc of blackness history, bringing African slaves to Jamestown in 1619 and an African American President to the White House in 2008, energizes both poles of the dialectic. When all else fails, insists the blues ethos, look down that road. Take the long view. Stay loose. Keep things moving. Give your luck a chance to change.

When Bill "Howl-n-Madd" Perry, a Lafayette County bluesman, visited my undergraduate blues class at the University of Mississippi in 2012, he had to be helped to his seat by his daughter, Shy, who travels and plays keyboards with him. Several months earlier, Pecker had had a minor stroke and lost 90 pct of his vision. Still his spirits were undimmed, even ebullient. When I described the blues ethos, a concept we'd been working with, and asked him what he idea, he smiled and said, "I'll tell y'all a story about that."

Many years ago, he said, he'd played guitar in Little Richard'due south ring. They were based in Chicago—he'd migrated from Mississippi to Chicago every bit a young man—merely they traveled a lot, and on this particular trip they were in Los Angeles. That'south where Little Richard fired him. "When I came down in the morning time from my hotel room," he said, "they were gone."

"What do you lot . . . that'due south how they fired you lot?" I asked.

"They were gone." He chuckled. "They were just gone."

"What did you exercise?"

"Well," he said slowly, leaning back in his chair, "I didn't feel also good."

The course laughed.

"But what was your next step?"

"Well, the band was gone, and I had a dollar in my pocket."

"What did you do?"

"I spent ninety cents on some breakfast."

More laughter. He was grinning at present.

"What did you exercise afterwards that?"

"I got out on the road and started walking with my guitar. And somebody came along who knew me—nosotros'd been in town for a few days and somebody drove past and they knew me, and they picked me up and brought me to their place. I stayed in that location for a calendar week, played a few pickup gigs, and fabricated plenty money to get back to Chicago."

There's a kind of wisdom here that deserves our attention. Bill could have retreated his hotel room in shock. He could take drowned in his own fury and self-pity, flailing helplessly. But his response to the sudden advent of blues conditions—loss of a task and housing, incipient poverty, sudden stranding a long mode from home—was to remain loose and forward-looking rather than giving in to shame, fearfulness, and despair. He got out on the road and started walking. He gave the world a chance to rectify the situation. And it did. That sort of quick reversal rarely happens, of course. But it is guaranteed not to happen unless you put yourself in a position where it can happen. The dejection ethos knows all this. Those who embody the blues ethos have the wisdom and resilience, the strength of grapheme, to answer to bad luck by setting transformative possibilities in motion.

Bill "Howl-N-Madd" Perry visits Adam Gussow'southward English 324 class on the blues tradition in American literature. - Courtesy Adam Gussow

5Yous'll Alive Through It

I came to a deeper understanding of the blues ethos after Mr. Satan and I left the streets of Harlem in the early 1990s and began to tour, putting in some serious road-miles. He was a feelingful man, but an unsentimental one, disinclined to coddle or be coddled. He'd spent a off-white bit of time picking cotton in the Mississippi Delta as a boy; he was a difficult worker, not a complainer, and he expected the aforementioned from me. I night when I picked him upwards at his apartment for a downtown gig, he had a bloody bandage wrapped around his hand. "What happened?" I asked. "I cut myself on a piece of wood," he said, making a sour face up. "I'll live through it." The cut turned out to be a deep gash in one of the heavily callused fingers on his fretting hand. Any other guitar actor would have canceled the gig. That wasn't his way. He played the five-hour gig, wincing occasionally but never lament. Make the gig: that was his philosophy. The dejection ethos in action.

"You'll live through it" was Mr. Satan's all-purpose rejoinder whenever I'd complain about something. The phrase began to make sense when I thought about the sorts of challenges he'd encountered growing upwardly blackness and male in rural Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s. Living through it, whatever "it" was, couldn't be taken for granted—which was precisely why he'd evolved that saying. It put things in perspective. It reframed them in a useful manner. It didn't say, "Things are easy." It said, "They're bearable, compared with the worst-example scenario, and they'll go easier by and by." When disasters threatened out on the road, or even only modest inconveniences, Mr. Satan was prepare. "We'll live through information technology." And we always did.

Several summers ago I drew on the blues ethos in a way that showed me the practical efficacy of the concept. With the help of some friends, I had organized a weeklong ane-man-band tour that was going to take me from Oxford, Mississippi, up through Columbia, Missouri, to Mankato and St. Paul, Minnesota, back through Chicago, and so home. Two lodge dates, a festival, and a guest slot in a blues harmonica workshop. Decent money and some professional recognition on my own terms, not as office of a duo. Ii k miles, there and dorsum.

The night before I was supposed to take off, I came downwards with a fever. The road is hard enough when you're well, only a solo tour when you're sick is hard. It's not something I wanted to do. I woke the next morning—I hadn't yet packed the car—and the fever was even so in that location. Non merely was the car unpacked, but when I hobbled outside to do a quick walk-around, I discovered that the worn-out rear tires I'd been nursing for months had suddenly adult the sort of bubbled sidewalls that precedes a blow out. I sat there on the sofa at 7:30 in the morning, thoroughly demoralized, with the entire bout hanging on a thin cord. If I stayed put for a few hours, giving the fever a gamble to subside, I'd miss that evening's gig in Columbia, 450 miles away. If I blew off the Columbia gig and left for Mankato the next morning time, I'd have 900 miles to drive in i day. That wouldn't happen and the tour would collapse. I thought about the young harp guys who had helped prepare those two gigs, each of whom was opening for me, and asked myself whether my fever could justify disappointing them.

And then I thought dorsum, suddenly, to a tour that Mr. Satan and I had taken in 1997—a trip to Australia, our first. I'd developed a big, ugly fever blister on the way over, during the fourteen-hour flight from Los Angeles. Once we landed, nosotros'd exist playing two shows a day for seven straight days, starting the 24-hour interval we arrived. When I showed the cicatrice to Sterling, frustrated and depressed, he only shrugged and said, "Yous'll live through information technology." Then he added, "Nosotros're playing those gigs, mister." And nosotros did, and I did. It wasn't pretty—I'd wiped some claret off my oral fissure for the commencement couple of nights—merely the pain was endurable. I'd settled in afterwards a couple of days, I'd drunk a off-white bit of booze to smooth off the rough edges, and we'd made the gig. That's what blues players do. You desire to play this music? Toughen up.

I sat on the sofa, thinking well-nigh all this. And then, for no good reason, something inside me reached down and anchored itself in a layer of cussedness lurking just below the feverish negativity. "Hither's what y'all're going to do," I said to myself, every bit though I were lecturing somebody else. "You're going to take a shower and load up the car, you're going to drive over to Batesville and buy some tires, and you're going to head north. If the fever gets worse and you tin't make Columbia, you can pull off the route and crash for the night, and at least yous'll know y'all tried. If you accept to, you tin cancel the rest of the tour first affair tomorrow and drive dwelling. But if you don't go out abode now, if you don't take that commencement step, bad every bit yous feel, you'll blow the whole tour before information technology starts. You're not going to practise that. Too many people worked besides hard to let that happen."

Thinking nigh others, reorienting myself toward the blues community, was a part of the cure. But sheer toughness of spirit, a determination to movement forward anyway, regardless of how I felt, was besides required. Equally it turned out, everything worked out. I bought the new tires and rolled northward; the fever gradually subsided. By the time I hung a left past St. Louis, late that afternoon, I was fine. The weather was hot as hell—over a hundred degrees—only I couldn't complain. The tour went off as planned.

The author'due south feet at the controls of his 1-man-ring percussion ensemble. - Photograph past Steven West. Likens.

Buddhists talk well-nigh the difference between pain and suffering. Pain, they teach, is an inevitable function of embodied life. Suffering, however, is a mental construct—all the feelings of disappointment, negativity, anticipation, and despair with which we routinely surroundings, and enhance, pain. 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 only by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism."^xix Only the dejection ethos, the philosophy of life that sustains blues musicians and other blues people, prefers to acknowledge pain in order to evade suffering, whenever possible. Meet it, say it, sing it, share information technology. Get it out, by all means. Don't deny the pain, or hibernate from it. But don't wallow in it, either. Apply harsh humour—near-tragic, near-comic–to kick it away. Use stoic persistence to become past it. With luck, you lot'll leave it in your rearview mirror. Or not. Only it'due south worth a endeavor.

Adam Gussow is an associate professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. A fellow member of the University of Mississippi faculty since 2002, his teaching and research interests include American and African American literature; blues, state, and other southern musics; the pastoral South; Freedom Summer; and the shaping role of race on southern culture. He has published five books:Mister Satan's Apprentice: A Blues Memoir; Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, winner of the Holman Award from the Order for the Study of Southern Literature; Journeyman's Road: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner'south Mississippi to Post-9/eleven New York; Busker's Holiday, a novel; and, nearly recently, Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition.

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Source: https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/blues-expressiveness-and-the-blues-ethos/

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