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Overview
Musicologist and writer Samuel Charters (1929–2015) considered blues lyrics a profound cultural expression that could connect all people who love poetry. A pioneer in the exploration of world music, Charters conducted research that brought obscure musicians of the American South and Appalachia into the mainstream. In this landmark volume, the noted blues historian and folklorist presents a rich exploration of blues songs as folk poetry, quoting lyrics by such legends as Son House and Lightnin' Hopkins at length to reveal the depth of feeling and complex literary forms at work within a unique art form.
Originally published in 1963, The Poetry of the Blues raised interest in many previously unrecognized aspects of African-American music and made a significant contribution to the blues revival of the 1960s. This volume features now-vintage black-and-white photographs by Ann Charters from the original edition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486832951 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 04/17/2019 |
| Series: | Dover Books On Music: Folk Songs |
| Pages: | 112 |
| Sales rank: | 778,218 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
In some of the larger cities of the American South there are still signs reading "White Only" painted on the doorways or windows of restaurants and laundries. Dingy clapboard barrooms have painted arrows, usually part of the advertising on the building front, reading "Colored Entrance," the arrow pointing to a back door or to a service window in the side of the building. At hospital entrances there are ornate metal letters reading "Out Patient Dispensary - Colored" and "Out Patient Dispensary White." The doors are separate. In the smaller towns there usually aren't so many signs; except for the benches under the shade of an overhanging store marquee or at a bus stop. Someone who didn't know the town well, someone perhaps in from a nearby farm for some shopping, might get the benches confused. Sometimes drinking fountains are marked, and gasoline station rest rooms, but there usually isn't much need for signs; since the townspeople, white and colored, know every street and every store front and every foot of pavement, and their own place on it. If someone stops in the town he's expected to look around and find where the color line has been drawn. In northern cities the line is less definite, and the emotional response is less intense if the line is crossed, but within every neighborhood some blocks are colored and others white. Even with an increased range of employment opening more and more to young colored men and women, with neighborhood restrictions being slowly pushed aside, and with educational opportunities steadily increasing, the line, despite its seeming vagueness and lack of official sanction, is still tightly drawn. The life of the Negro and the life of his white neighbor is still separate and apart, and despite recent social progress will remain separate for many years to come.
The life of the Negro in America has been so completely lived on the other side of the racial line that it is only with difficulty that white and colored can even understand each other's social attitudes. The Negro has been deprived of any large part in American life, despite the hundred years that have passed since the Civil War ended southern slavery. The inequality of opportunity, social and economic, is so extreme that a sensitive young Negro is forced into an almost intolerable emotional position, and it is only a slowly and painfully acquired set of defenses and self-justifications that makes it possible for him to even force himself to confront the indignity and the anger that is part of being a Negro in the United States.
From this separateness of white and Negro there has come not only differences in social attitude, but also in social expression. The lives of the two groups are so insistently kept apart that there has grown up within the Negro society its own artistic self-expression. There has been another strong influence on the self-expression of the Negro, his African cultural background, but this has been such a disadvantage to his social development that if there had been an opportunity to become part of the main stream of American life it probably would have been as quickly forgotten as the backgrounds and traditions of other groups whose standards and whose expression have become mingled with the larger American attitudes. The Negro has been forced to remain apart. Already, from the separateness of expression which this has meant, have come the musical styles of jazz, which have strongly influenced the development of popular music everywhere in the world, and which may be the root force for a regeneration of the European classical tradition. Lesser known, but of perhaps as great significance, has been the development of a poetic expression of great strength and vividness, the blues.
With the blues the Negro subculture in the United States has its own popular music. As the two groups have adjusted uncomfortably to the separateness of their experience each of them has developed their own popular song, and the blues is to the colored musician what conventional popular music is to the white. Its preoccupations are the concerns and the emotions of ordinary life. Since the audience for the blues, and for popular song, is often a young audience its most persistent theme is their overwhelming concern with the torment of love and their sudden consciousness of sexuality. There are other themes, the insecurity and difficulty of much of Negro life, the discomfort and the loneliness of the enforced wandering of many of the singers, sometimes even a veiled protest at the social situation, but the most broadly woven strand in the texture of the blues is the despair of love. The blues is the song of men and women who have been hurt, who have been disappointed, who feel the confusion and the isolation of love. There are blues which are insistent in their promise of seduction, and there are blues which are large sexual boasts, but the man who usually sings the blues is the man who has found in love only pain and disappointment. As the Mississippi singer J. D. Short expressed it,
Well, the blues first came from people being low in spirit and worried about their loved ones.
It is not in its subject, however, that the blues has become poetic. Love is just as much the theme of the popular music of the larger society, but it is difficult to think of American popular song as having any of the freshness and the vigor of poetry. It is in the strength and vitality of its imagery and expression that the blues has become a poetic language. The language of American popular song has lost its freshness and its ability to convey even strong emotion. The English folk tradition which produced the broadside ballads and the rich profusion of love song and social commentary has dwindled to a repetitive and almost meaningless manipulation of phrases which no longer have even the artistic power of the sentimental Victorian love poetry from which they are derived. As the years pass the blues may become as moribund as popular song has become, and as the developing blues audience forces the singer into repetitions of his own attitudes there is an increasing tendency toward this, but the blues still have a fine, raw vigor.
The blues does not try to express an attitude toward the separateness of Negro life in America. Protest is only a small thread in the blues. But it is an expression of the separateness of the two racial groups. If the color line was not drawn through the streets and the neighborhoods of American cities the blues would not have been developed. There are religious people who strongly oppose the blues, but the attitudes that are expressed by the singers still mirror the attitudes of the Negro community. It is in some ways discomforting to think of the blues as an expression of "differentness," since it is the difference between Negro and white in America which has been used as the justification for preventing the Negro from taking his place in American society, but there is a difference in tradition and in the social memory which gives to both colored and white their distinctiveness. The final measure of a democratic society, however, is not its conformity, but in its diversity, and there must be in America a merging of the two communities, not necessarily into a group without differences, but into a single group that accepts these differences. It is then that the poetry of the blues will take its place as a force in the shaping of a new society, for in the blues will be found the expression of attitudes and beliefs that will become for the American Negro part of a racial memory, and part of a developing social history.
Since the blues is so much a reflection of the life in the segregated slums or the lonely farms where most of the Negro community still remains in the United States today is it possible for someone who is not a Negro to understand the language of the blues? In much of the blues there is a strong universality, and already American popular song has begun to take some of its material from it. There is no difficulty in understanding a verse like,
Did you ever wake up in the morning, find your man had gone?
Did you ever wake up in the morning,
find your man had gone?
You will wring your hands, you will cry the whole day long.
But the blues which are most closely involved with the reality of being a Negro in the United States will always have emotional overtones which will be almost impossible to sense. No one who has not lived as a Negro in the Mississippi Delta can understand fully what the singer Son House meant to express when he sang,
My black woman's face shines like the sun.
My black woman's face shines like the sun.
Lipstick and powder sure can't help her none.
The blues sometimes seems to have traveled a long way before the earliest recordings helped to settle it down in the 1920s. There still seems to be some of the dust and the discomfort of the trip in a singer's voice, or in the imagery of a word or a line. The trip, however, hasn't been a long one. The formal patterns of the blues seem to have developed less than sixty years ago, sometime during the years before the First World War. It is the blues' intensity and directness, its response to the reality of experience, which gives it a traveled appearance. It has been so many generations since European and American popular song has had the immediacy of the blues that there is a tendency to think of the earliest blues as somehow part of this almost forgotten period of history. But in the verses, and in the musical styles, there is still a young, fresh vitality. Many of the older men who remember the blues are still living. Some of them even still sing. They live on back streets in southern cities like Memphis or St. Louis, on run down farms, in smaller towns like Spartanburg or Macon. Some of them have drifted into the slums of New York or Chicago. Some of them have day jobs, a few have become business men, somehow finding a footing in the shifting patterns of southern racial discrimination; others live on welfare checks. Most of them are poorly educated, often broken physically by the long years of menial work or by the drain of long and enthusiastic dissipation. With strangers they often have difficulty in expressing themselves in conversation, but there is one subject on which all of them have definite and carefully considered feelings; the blues.
They don't travel as much as they did when they were younger; when a "travelin' mood" would set them drifting from town to town until they settled with a new job or a new woman. They don't see each other as much and they don't have as much chance to sing together, but their attitudes toward the blues have a marked similarity. Their concern is with the sincerity of the blues. They think of the blues as an expression of the difficulties and the disappointments of the life that they have seen in the streets and tenements and the poor farms. Henry Townsend, in St. Louis, felt that the heart of the blues was "... the true feeling." Furry Lewis, in Memphis said "... all the blues, you can say, is true." As J. D. Short expressed it,
What I think about that makes the blues really good is when a fellow writes a blues and then writes it with a feeling, with great harmony, and there's so many true words in the blues, of things that have happened to so many people, and that's why it makes the feeling in the blues.
The blues, as a poetic language, has still the direct, immediate relationship to experience that is at the heart of all art. It is here that poetry begins, in the response of the artist to life. As the art develops it becomes self conscious and self concerned, and the poetic language begins to imitate itself. Instead of a direct concern with experience there is a concern with the conventions and the restrictions of the forms which the earlier artists have found. This will happen to the language of the blues, as it happens to any art, but for men like Furry Lewis and J. D. Short, the blues were a new response to the reality of their lives. As the Negro community slowly developed a shape and a self-consciousness in the late years of the 19th century it was the blues that developed with it to express the confusion and the joy and the pain of living in this new community, related to the white society economically, but separated from it, and from the conventions that concerned its popular song, by the line of prejudice.
Many of the singers, in their concern with sincerity, feel that not only must the blues have a "true feeling," but that it is the singer himself who must have the emotional experience that the blues expresses. Memphis Willie B. said, "A blues is about something that's real. It's about what a man feels when his wife leaves him, or about some disappointment that happens to him that he can't do anything about. That's why none of these young boys can really sing the blues. They don't know about the things that go into a blues." When asked what was the quality that made a good blues singer, Henry Townsend simply laughed,
Trouble ... that's right. That's the one word solution. Trouble. You know you can only express a true feeling if you're sincere about it. You can only express what happened to you.
Baby Tate in Spartanburg, South Carolina, felt that it was "... difficulties. I don't put it all on drinking or nothing like that, I put it on difficulty in your home." Furry Lewis didn't even think of the writing of the blues as separate from the emotions of the blues.
Well, one thing, when you write the blues and what you be thinking about, you be blue and you ain't got nothing hardly to think about. You just already blue, and you just go on and write.
From this directness of expression have come the dominant themes of the blues, love, disappointment, and anger. In the blues the singer finds a release from his emotions. As Baby Tate put it,
I'll tell you what gives me the blues. When my wife makes me mad. Make me angry otherwise. A dog go mad. But if she makes me angry. I didn't do all I can do or something like that, and she want me to do something else. She get me angry. Well the first thing I do I'll grab my guitar and walk out of the house to keep from having a fight ...
J. D. Short nodded when he was asked if singing helped him to get through periods of emotional stress.
Yes, it actual do. It's a lot of times we can get very worried and dissatisfied, and we can get to singing the blues and if we can play music and play the blues we may play the blues for a while until we get kind of pacified. That cuts off a lot of worry.
And, as he went on to say, there is also an emotional release for the person listening to the blues.
Sometime the people that's listening at you have actual been through some of the same things that I have been through and automatically that takes effect on them and that causes their attention to come.
Henry Townsend described his own feelings about the blues, saying,
When you express yourself, how you felt, how you been mistreated, and the things that happened to you in life, that's the only thing you can say. If you sing anything else then you're singing something somebody else has felt.
then he went on to explain how, as musician, he can reach the emotions of an audience with something that someone else has written.
Now some writer might walk up and tell you, 'Here's a song I want you to sing. Play it cheap, if you want, but it's the truth.' He wants you to sing it because he's not able to and he'd like it to be done, and if you're sincere enough about taking sympathy with the fellow you can do the song for him.
For these men the language of the blues has the directness and the sincerity of their own experience. Even the dominant theme of the blues, the torment and the pain of love, reflects this immediacy of response to life. To Furry Lewis,
"... the blues come from a woman wanting to see her man, and a man wanting to see his woman."
And as Henry Townsend said with a shrug,
You know, that's the major thing in life. Please believe me. What you love the best is what can hurt you the most ...
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Poetry of the Blues"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Samuel Charters.
Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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