The word/the blues. A meditation. Investigating blues poetry, an old tradition

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2004 by Tyehimba Jess

The blues haunts us, haints us, holds us tight to memory. Ancestor bound and rhythm rocked, it recalls our hurts, healing them through a bent-note gospel of moan. Hard hearted blues. Hard-workin' blues. Lost Woman blues. Baby, come back blues. Blues birthed between the thighs of hallelujah shouts and work song rhythm, filled with cotton field sweat and the salve of a churchified moan. We created songs of redemption that conquered pain by claiming and naming our hurt, whether it's good lovin' gone bad or bad luck gone worse.

The Blues/The Blues/The Blues Is Alright

There are those who would like to forget the blues, to sink them in Mississippi mud or leave them hanging on Tennessee trees like a bad memory. They may associate blues with an attitude of defeat, a funeral dirge, not a resurrection; a way out of no way. But it is nearly impossible to bypass the blues, to skip that shotgun shack filled with chittlin' hamhock and cornbread culture, a genius that turned the master's dinner table leavings into new beginnings.

Honoree Jeffers, author u[ The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State University Press, November 2000) and Outlandish Blues (Wesleyan University Press, April 2003), equates exploration of the blues with a willingness to fully uncover the beaut3, and horror of the past. "Many black folks are scared to mine black history. That is the issue with the blues. Blues is a way to mine that history." Her father, blues and classical pianist Lance Jeffers, was a poet of note. As a youngster, Jeffers was embarrassed by her father's blues piano parties. But later its grip look hold of her: '"1 he blues choose you, you don't choose the blues. There is no way to write black history without writing blues." A fuller exploration of the blues aesthetic can lead disbelievers into an understanding of what it is to bend and not break, to hear up under pressure and keep on keepin' on.

Larry Neal wrote in his essay "The Ethos of the Blues" that "... the blues are basically defiant in their attitude toward life. They are about survival on the meanest, most gut level of human existence. The essential motive behind the best blues song is the acquisition of insight, wisdom."

Neal also recalls that the role of the blues singer is not unlike that of the griot in traditional African societies. The griot was willing to carry the history of his people, good and bad memories together, and transform them into song. But carrying around the truth doesn't always make a body welcome all the time. "The country blues singers were already stamped as men of sin," wrote Neat. "Many Negro ministers warned their congregations against associating with blues singers. A black man with a guitar ('devil box') was not allowed even to pass into the front yard of the church unless he left his guitar outside." While he was welcome to share his traveling news at the juke joint, he was obliged to keep such ramblings to himself around formal gatherings.

This is the same outsider/insider duality of the poet who has to carry bad news, along with the good. The reception isn't always pretty. Such was the job of Harlem Renaissance poets who sang their blues to America's hegemony and Black Arts Movement writers in the '60s who challenged class values and the status quo. Such was the task of black women writers of the '70s and '80s who were willing to break silence on sexism, and such has been the task of gay and lesbian poets who have named the truth of black homophobia. Such is the job of the griot, to "tell the truth to the people" as Mart Evans wrote. To carry forth his/her collective message: I have suffered. I will survive.

Blackening and Bluing the King's English

In Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1964; William Morrow paperback, 1999) Amiri Baraka cited "the beginning of the blues as one beginning of American Negroes. Or, let me say, the reaction and subsequent relation of the Negro's experience in this country in his English is one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene."

If the blues is a single note that is slurred into a different tone, then we have taken the King's English and blued it into our own dialect. We have bruised nouns and verbs in to new meanings, blackening and bluing the language to suit our purpose, subverting the traditional so it will serve our humanity.

In 1949, Lorenzo Dow Turner's seminal research in Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (reissued by University of South Carolina Press, June 2002) detailed the ways African languages impacted American English. Africans added our own words, such as banjo, okay, boogie and yakety-yak.

Zora Neale Hurston's "Glossary of Harlem Slang" detailed the poetry of African American speech from boogie-woogie to gettin' salty to woofin' and solid. Using African American slang is essential to being hip in America. When American writers use this same genius in their literature, they are bringing blues to the page, wading their words in the waters of a tradition wide and deep as the Mississippi River, that artery of sustenance that nurtures the nation. When you read many outstanding figures in American literature, you'll bear the blues flowing through their verse.