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 three)
Although very early blues did not have the twelve-bar, three-line AAB structure of the classic blues of the 1920s, the three-line structure of the blues verse that eventually emerged was a function of call-and-response singing. The lead singer would repeat a line twice while waiting for another singer to improvise a response. African spiritual chants often repeat an important line. Yorubans, for instance, rely on the poetic chants of a divination system called Ifá for insights into their personal problems[i]:
The life of Ifá surpasses water’s coolness
The life of Ifá surpasses water’s coolness
The speaker-of-all languages married a woman
Who herself bathed only in water that is cold
The life of Ifá surpasses water in its coolness
Work songs were primarily sung primarily a cappella, but after Emancipation, the guitar and harmonica made it possible for traveling country blues singers to earn money playing for juke joint dances, passing their songs along in the process. Over time, the blues developed into music played and listened to for pleasure, not for work. It became music that expressed the singer’s individual struggles and passions, both carnal and spiritual. It is interesting that the idea of the instrumental solo, relatively unimportant in West African music, became very important in the blues, which emerged in a country that idolized the individual and had steamrolled over the concept of tribe altogether.
Unlike Africa’s wandering griots, who keep tribal histories intact over centuries, emerging blues singers, according to musicographer Samuel Charters, used “little history and even less political comment.” Most observers believed, Charters wrote in The Roots of the Blues, that “The blues function in American black society as a popular love song~~in the early period almost obsessively concerned with infidelity.”[ii] It is possible, however, that all those songs about wreaking revenge on a “no-good woman” who kept a man “in chains” were metaphorical expressions of the determination of African Americans to free themselves from oppression. (See also signifying.)
While Charters was in Africa, he observed that although their songs served different purposes: “The voices themselves [of blues singers and griots] had a great deal of similarity in tone and texture. If a griot like Jali Nyama Suso had sung in English the sound of his voice would have been difficult to distinguish from an Afro-American singer. There was the same kind of tone production, the same forcing of higher notes. In the gruffness of the lower range and the strong expressiveness of the middle voice I could hear stylistic similarities to singing I had heard in many parts of the South.”[iii]
Blues guitarists transferred African vocal devices to the guitar, and bent the strings to mimic singing but to mimic singing by reach intervals beyond the limitations of the frets. They flatted the thirds, fifths, and sevenths into quartertones~~blue notes.
Alan Lomax offered an interesting take on this in The Land Where the Blues Began. He theorized that “interval size is correlated cross-culturally to those factors that restrict the social independence of the individual.”[iv] He noted that where strict castes have developed, such as in India, musicians use quartertones and other intervals smaller than a second. In contrast, hunters and gatherers from more easy-going societies, such as Native American and African Pygmy, sing songs filled with great leaps, such as octaves and fifths. In sub-Saharan Africa, “where only a modest level of social layering stiffened social intercourse,” the most common intervals were thirds and fifths. These were sometimes flatted but not nearly so much as they are in the blues.
Lomax attributed this favoring of narrowed intervals among blues musicians to “the painful encounter of the black community with the caste-and-class system of the post-Reconstruction period.”[v] Freed by the Civil War, yet hemmed in by racism, African Americans wound up on very bottom of the social heap as day laborers and sharecroppers. “Homelessness and orphaning were the order of the day for Delta working-class blacks, creating the wellspring of melancholy whose theme song was the blues,” Lomax wrote.[vi]
This very expression of a tough situation, however, became a way out of poverty for some African Americans. The country blues, sung by one singer accompanying him- or herself on guitar or banjo, evolved into the classic blues of the 1920s and 1930s, sung by such stars as Bessie Smith in front of a big band or piano-led combo. The blues gave options to women like Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, who without it might have spent their lives scrubbing white peoples’ floors and washing their clothes. [M: I changed Ma Rainey to Memphis Minnie cause Ma Rainey worked a lot as a housekeeper.] The blues drew together the descendants of once-disparate tribal people who had suffered sickening humiliations in a foreign land.
[i]Flash of the Spirit: African &and Afro-American Art &and Philosophy, by Robert Farris Thompson, p. 37 (New York: Random House, 1983).
[ii] The Roots of the Blues: An African Search, by Samuel Charters, p. 123 (New Hampshire: Da Capo Press, 1981).
[iii]Ibid, p. 119.
[iv] Lomax, p. 354.
[v]Ibid.
[vi]Ibid.
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(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)
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