THE BLUES

All my life I’ve heard that “there’s the blues, then there’s the real blues.” Black musicians have always said that whites will never play it because they’ll never understand it. It’s deeply cultural and racial and goes back to “deep south” oppressions that simply can’t be measured or described.

As a white person I could never fully appreciate this, until, surfing the internet one day, I happened upon an old album entitled, “T-Bone Walker: Super Black Blues.” It was/is a continuous blues number that plays “non-stop” throughout the entire A and B sides – with brief interludes of impromptu (background) laughter. From that moment on, I understood. There truly is a “blues” far and apart from what I conceived to be the blues. It comes from, to use a cliché, “the soul.” But this particular soul is so oppressed and beaten down that it has only the rawest primal opening through which to speak.

I’ve also heard that the reason we play the blues is to “get out of” the blues. It lifts us out of our pain, however briefly, while feeling it at the same time. It’s like a cool ointment on a sore that brings the soreness into the light. Minus the ointment it just “throbs” again, specifically when there isn’t a guitar, drum-set, or harmonica around. There’s a cappella, but it’s too awkward, and many times inappropriate to be singing loudly in public. Humming and toe-tapping are an acceptable compromise. Whistling is not.

What I almost empathically feel today is a transposition of suffering and pain shared cross-culturally, even universally. It carries its own rhythm and tempo. It’s everywhere, crossing the most unexpected boundaries. Black blues has not changed, but the need to feel and express as blacks do is bleeding into the sinews of lighter-skinned cultures. For the longest time the best “white” blues artists have always been good, even great, but never “black.” They could only listen from a distance at the sounds of Robert Johnson, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin Hopkins, Howlin Wolf, T-Bone Walker, and others. Those white players are also the very first to admit that disparity.

We whites have been “deprived” of the true depths of suffering – a truly colossal paradox. In my own experience, it’s like listening to a good song without a bass guitar. There’s no “bottom end,” no depth, no foundation – just notes skimming along the surface.

“Super Black Blues” isn’t just one long tune whose sounds are like a baton passed in a relay race. It’s a language and communication about a shared cultural reality inside a shared political reality inside a spiritual reality inside a racial reality. It’s the morning and even meal at a huge community table. It’s also a morning wake-up call for those anesthetized from who and where they are. The black & white notes are words tapped out in harmonic progressions of 12 bars in a 4/4 time signature, slow and hard tempos, through hands, feet, instruments, and voices. The laughter and moaning are part of the song, the same sign-language. It’s all-inclusive and intact. Nothing is left out.

Hence, “no mistakes, no accidents” in Black blues. This is what separates white music from black music. Whites hear mistakes. They cover them up with 2^nd the 3^rd “takes.” The takes then become end products – which end up mimetic and saccharin. They may be flawless in their timing and execution, but any “soul” that might have been has been long forfeited. In Black music the mistake in incorporated and made part of what comes out. Often it even guides the direction that a score takes.

The only reference to this from a white man (that I can recall) hailed from Jackson Pollack (“Jack the Dripper”) who said, “I deny the accident.” The paint “fell” from his brush with a planned (albeit fortuitous) design and purpose. Some people would call it synchronicity (the “meaningful accident”) and even serendipity.

Which brings up another observation/question: Is there a real blues taking on a more expansive/national/international signature – given the state of the world? Does the blues guitar find itself in bands that are cross-breeding, intersecting, and interlocking, to the point where there are no racial/ethnic/cultural distinctions anymore? Is the “patchwork-quilt” which is America becoming the “melting pot” it was always presumed to be? And if so, what does that say about suffering and oppression everywhere?

There’s lots of celebratory singing and playing, no doubting that – to be applauded and encouraged. But is that also covering up what the entire nation (even the entire human species) might be feeling? Namely, extinction? Celebrations at this scale are often started because they must, because there’s no alternative. Because “up” is the only direction we can go from being so far down. There’s a fine line between faith and belief, just as there is between intuition and projection, wisdom and knowledge, acceptance and hope. Even though the line is very thin, their meanings are very different. The mind is the “master of self-deception,” and we need to understand if “celebration” is really about mourning.

“In the relation of the self (the same) to the Other, the Other is distant, he is the stranger; but if I reverse this relation, the Other relates to me as if I were the Other and thus causes me to take leave of my identity… When thus I am wrested from myself, there remains a passivity bereft of self (sheer alterity, the other without unity).” – Maurice Blanchot.

To this author Susan Gubar (in Racechanges:White Skin, Black Face in American Culture, Oxford Univ. Press, 1997) wrote, “Can human beings (and the cultures they create) be defined as either black or white? Or are most human beings (and the cultures they create) both black and white?” The Janus Gate and the Italian Janiform vase (white face on one side, black face opposite) both share the same head. One is brought forward only if the other is made invisible. They exist codependently, and when spun around at a high velocity they lose their distinctness, becoming fused and confused. – The world now spins like a dynamo, faster than ever. Black and white are becoming a distinct “gray” (mulatto in the racial sense). Think of a “mulatto blues.”

Music is a universal language (another cliche), but everyone truly understands it. It is perhaps the only language that magically unites, if just for 2 ½ minutes (or 30 minutes). Everything stops and people tune in. We go into our bodies and move in ways that only music can induce. It speaks directly to the primal underside. We hear drums again, and we find ourselves at the jungle’s clearing from which we just recently walked away. It blasts through the walls we’ve worked so hard to build since becoming “civilized.” After 3000 years of teaching that we’re “above” the animals, music comes along and crushes it. We find ourselves moving like the animals. Even the most “head-strong” among us succumb to tempos and rhythms without knowing it.

Question: Is it racist to complement a whole race if it borders on a stereotype? Even if it says something positive? Even if you earmark one race with a particular “gift” which other races simply don’t excel at in quite the same way? What’s the difference between a positive and negative criticism in that context? Is it ever okay to generalize in a racial context?

At the risk of sounding racist, being black is being African – is being “earth-connected” and nearer to the roots of a primordial (earthen) past. There’s no denying it in music and dance. As opposed, again, to a white man struggling to dance, which (I’m embarrassed to say) is like watching a catatonic patient convulsing. Even an elderly black man can walk onto a dance floor, who never danced in his life, and look like he’s been there his entire life. It’s about catching a rhythm in a way that a bird catches a warm thermal current.

I recently watched a movie with Morgan Freeman whose character is “forced” out onto a dance floor. At first he doesn’t move at all. He doesn’t have to. The music finds him and fills his body, becomes the body, like a ghost. It’s poetry to watch. And the next 2 minutes is pure movement. – If there’s one thing I envy (and I speak for most white men). it’s the ability to “rhythmically move” in just this way, without effort. But it isn’t just about just moving; it’s about feeling roots down into the earth.

In the fifties and sixties much was written about “black envy.” Assuming that it existed at all (under the weight of Jim Crow), the white race has by now made the minority-man into a tragic anti-hero. The British blues bands of the sixties worshiped black musicians (made them famous) at a time when white America didn’t care. The Rolling Stones,the Yardbirds, the Animals, and others rescued them from the “dive bars” of the deep south and (overnight) brought them into huge venues seating thousands. It was culture-shock for them. But it was the beginning of when the blues began merging with “the blues.” It’s been a journey of meeting somewhere in the middle every since. Whites have evolved (musically), while blacks have compromised and “held back” for the white guitar/drum/harmonica to catch up. It’s been about assimilation ever since. – If you don’t believe me, just listen to “Super Black Blues.” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would be first in line to concur.

Somewhere in between British blues and black blues sits “American white” blues. And here is where I find myself. There are white guitarists who are famous (and great) but not personal favorites, just because they don’t do “riffs” as I want to hear them. Clapton, Beck, Page, Lee, Green, Taylor and others keep their fret fingers in the low registers or high registers too long, just when they should “mix it up” more and go “elsewhere.” Same with Americans like Bonamassa, Buchanan, Cooder, Winter, Stevie Ray, and even Robert Cray (Black man). – Granted, I say this at my own peril.

Yes, it’s all personal and subjective (as art is). But I hear white guitars who sound “lost” and desperately wanting to know where to go. It’s like dancing (or trying to). The black guitarist (harp player, drummer, bassist, pianist) knows exactly where he is, because he never left it (just as he never left the dance floor). – To be clear, I enjoy those many white players to the extent of my own “whiteness.” But then part of me, apparently, isn’t white anymore.

Fortunately, I’ve also heard enormous transitions in the last sixty years, certainly since the 1960s. And many times it’s difficult to tell white from black just by listening. This is a good thing. Whites are visiting those frets, notes, registers, and progressions as if reconnoitering the “super Black.” We know the language and hear the sounds deep down below, and also, tragically, the pain. We’re joining in now and learning from scratch. It says lots about the human race sharing the same spaces. And the timing couldn’t be better. Because we need the blues more than ever.

Granted, it poses an important question: Does the need for the blues derive from feeling more pain? Or does the pain we all feel increase the more we connect with our “minority” brethren (via the blues)? A chicken & egg conundrum. As someone said, “a chicken is just one egg’s way of becoming another egg.” And I’ll just leave it at that.

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