Blues Idiom Wisdom
When Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture, invited me to jam with him and Leah Song of the group Rising Appalachia at his virtual book party on Wednesday, April 28, it was a “Is the Pope Catholic?” moment.
My immediate answer: Yes! As I wrote here a few weeks ago, Jamie quotes Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and Stanley Crouch in an “Arcana Americana” section of his chapter on Music. Jamie has cited that particular chapter as his favorite because of evidence, in the American musical tradition, of “redemption songs,” our secret scriptures pointing a way through the leaden lowness of the blues into the golden courage and post-tragic appreciation of the gift of life.
Laughter and joy are two indicators of such hard-earned, soul-stirring gratitude and grace.
So I wrote a short presentation on the dimensions of the blues, perhaps the foundation of what Jamie calls the American redemption song tradition. The blues is of course intrinsic to 20th century American musical genres from gospel to country-and-western to jazz. Since, for me, the deepest chords of critical and philosophical insight into the blues come from the work of Murray and Ellison, I decided to quote them back-to-back, and then, as Murray liked to say, “extend, elaborate, and refine.”
Blues ... Idiom ... Wisdom
Here’s what I shared.
From “Richard Wright’s Blues” in 1945:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near tragic, near comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
—Ralph Ellison
In 1996, Albert Murray was asked: What is the blues idiom? His answer:
It’s an attitude of affirmation in the face of difficulty, of improvisation in the face of challenge. It means you acknowledge that life is a low-down dirty shame yet confront that fact with perseverance, with humor, and above all, with elegance.
—Albert Murray
My own extension crafts the above as a home-grown wisdom lineage.
The blues idiom wisdom tradition is part of the existential equipment for living derived from the embodied experience of Black Americans in American culture. There is truth, goodness, and beauty in this tradition. And, of course, it isn’t confined to my Black American ancestors and their descendants. Once cultural gifts such as blues, jazz, gospel, R&B, funk, soul, and the like are innovated into the world, they become gifts to the world.
The blues idiom wisdom tradition is available to each and every one of us—if we can transcend the fakery of what Stanley Crouch called the ‘decoy of race,’ and embrace the infinite cosmic game of culture, we can intelligently choose such embodied wisdom.
—Greg Thomas
Although I didn’t quote extensively from my friend Stanley that day, I’ll give him the last word here. After all, it was his scintillating prose in the Village Voice that introduced me to what I call the Ellison-Murray Continuum. From Stanley’s classic essay, “Blues to Be Constitutional” (1995):
I am quite sure that jazz is the highest American musical form because it is the most comprehensive, possessing an epic frame of emotional and intellectual reference, sensual clarity, and spiritual radiance. But if it weren’t for the blues, there would be no jazz as we know it, for blues first broke most clearly with the light and maudlin nature of popular music. Blues came up from this land around the turn of the century. We all know that blues seeped out of the Negro, but we should be aware of the fact that it also called backward into the central units of national experience with such accuracy that it came to form the emotional basis of the most indelible secular American music. That is why it had such importance—not because it took wing on the breath, voice, and fingers of an embattled ethnic group, but because the feelings of the form came to magnetize everything from slavery to war to exploration to Indian fighting to natural disaster, from the woes of the soul lost in unhappy love to the mysteries, terrors, and celebrations of life that stretched north from the backwoods to the steel and concrete monuments of the big city. It became, therefore, the aesthetic hymn of the culture, the twentieth-century music that spoke of and to modern experience in a way that no music of European or Third World origin ever has.
—Stanley Crouch