Dirty, filthy blues quote of the week, (5)
It’s that time again…….
So, kitties……More from our new series, “Dirty, filthy blues quote of the week.”
Each week around Sunday night (the longest period before more church, lol…) I’ll post a new quote from my friend Debra DeSalvo’s book, The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu.
I love this book.
The quotes won’t always be dirty and filthy (though sometimes they will), but they’ll always be great. And they’ll always be dirty and filthy in spirit, because it is, after all, the blues
Here’s this week’s quote:
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Blues (part one, including “coolness”)
The most popular version of the musical structure known as “the blues” follows a twelve-bar, I-IV-V chord progression, and typically repeats a lyric line twice at the beginning of each verse. The blues form is described in European musical terms as based on a major scale with the third and dominant seventh notes flattened, or as a twelve-bar sequence of tonic, subdominant, and dominant seventh chords. “Such a definition,” LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) argued in Blues People, “is like putting the cart before the horse…. The fact is that [these] are attempts to explain one musical system in terms of another, to describe a nondiatonic music in diatonic terms.” The blues cannot be defined in strictly African terms either, however. The best way to define the blues may be to say that blues music is an American music that reflects African musical devices and aesthetics.
Even though their native languages and music were forcibly suppressed, African slaves in the American colonies managed to hold onto the aesthetic values of African music~~and these profoundly influenced the development of American popular music. Blues, jazz, and rock reflect not only African musical and vocal techniques, but also African principles regarding musical improvisation and such aesthetic values as “coolness.” In Yoruba culture, the ability to connect with one’s inner divinity is described as (itutu) or “coolness.” From this we get the American ideal of the cool or soulful musician. Interestingly, the color most often used to symbolize this quality in African art is blue.
“The blues” stems from the 17th-century English expression, “the blue devils,” which described the intense visual hallucinations of delirium tremens, the trembling and psychosis associated with alcohol withdrawal. Shortened over time to “the blues,” the phrase came to mean a state of emotional agitation or depression. Although there are happy, uptempo blues songs (sometimes called “jump blues”), most blues songs mine a melancholic vein, and express feelings of loss and emotional turmoil.
For white Americans, “blue” meant “drunk” as early as the 1800s. Among African Americans, an intimate couples dance called the slow drag that involved plastering as much of one’s torso to one’s partner’s as possible and grinding the hips together very slowly and sexily was also called “the blues.” A rural juke joint at the turn of the century would be jammed on a Saturday night with couples getting their drink on and doing the precoital shuffle to the accompaniment of a bluesman on guitar, stomping the beat out on the floor with his foot.
Although no one knows for sure, it seems probable that “blue,” meaning drunk, led to a dance called “the blues” that got hotter and sexier the drunker the dancers became. In turn, the slow sensual music that accompanied the dance became known as the blues.
The link between “blue” and drinking and dancing is also indicated by “blue laws” that still prohibit the sale of alcohol and the operating of saloons on Sundays in some states. The term “blue law” was first used by the English Reverend Samuel Peters in his 1781 book General History of Connecticut, which caused a stir when it appeared in London during the American Revolution. Peters described ludicrously punitive Sabbath observance laws purportedly enacted by the Puritan governors of Connecticut. Peters also convincingly described the “march of the frogs of Windham” and claimed that the Puritans were called “pumpkin-heads” in their new homeland. Peters’ work was eventually discredited as a hoax, and he is believed to have made up the blue laws to poke fun at the colonies, which he had been forced to leave during the Revolution. Nonetheless, laws on the books prohibiting certain business and entertainment activities on Sundays are still referred to as blue laws.
(Excerpted from The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu
by Debra DeSalvo. Published 2006 by Billboard Books, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications, a division of VNU Business Media. Reprinted with permission. ISBN: 0823083896)