Brief Intro to the Blues Idiom Wisdom Tradition
Founders of the Blues Idiom Wisdom Tradition, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman
This past Friday afternoon, I participated in an online conference organized by a team led by my friend and associate Dr. Gregg Henriques, “Consilience: Unifying Knowledge and Orienting Toward a Wisdom Commons.”
Upon Gregg’s invitation, I agreed to participate and present on “The Blues Idiom Wisdom Tradition.” I’ve written previously on this blog about this term, which I’ve coined as an extension of a perspectival foundation provided by blues and jazz music and a philosophical orientation explicated by Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch and Wynton Marsalis. Below, I share a slightly modified excerpt from the presentation, an introductory exploration of the phrase and an account of the evolution of my own viewpoint on the blues.
Thanks, Gregg, for inviting me to present on what I call the “Blues Idiom Wisdom Tradition.” Let’s start with the word “tradition.” A basic definition of tradition is “an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior.” Blues idiom wisdom is an inherited and established American cultural pattern of thought, action, and behavior developed and explicated primarily, but not exclusively, by Americans of African descent.
Specifically, it’s a tradition developed on North American soil over the past approximately 150 years. The blues idiom is a tradition that interpenetrates the sacred and the secular, is both rooted and cosmopolitan, and conjoins the tragic dimensions of life with the comic, and, in the process, can achieve what Zak Stein calls a post-tragic awareness. A post-tragic sensibility is in my estimation akin to what Victor Frankl and Stanley Crouch called “tragic optimism.” And since the tradition began amid unfreedom in the United States, it fights against injustice while aspiring toward freedom and the realization of the Omni-American promises of the nation’s motto, E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one. As such, the tradition wisely de-emphasizes race while emphasizing cultural intelligence.
The word “idiom” in the presentation title is a style, a way of life, and a characteristic mode of expression. Before I discuss my own evolution regarding the blues, I’ll riff on wisdom, as I endeavor for the blues idiom wisdom tradition to become a part of a collective wisdom commons.
As with the word culture, wisdom has a plethora of descriptions and definitions. Meta-theorist Gregg Henriques avers that it refers to “knowledge that fosters the values of Beauty, Goodness, and, Truth, which correspond to dignity, well-being and integrity.” In a chapter draft by scholar Tom Murray for inclusion in the Oxford Handbook of Adult Development and Wisdom, he describes “wisdom skills as complexity capacity plus spiritual clarity.” This morning, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke related wisdom to an optimal grip and agent-arena attunement, a quality of being fitted with oneself, with others, and with the world.
I’d like to approach wisdom through inquiry. The blues idiom wisdom tradition allows one to consider and confront questions such as: How can I and We create forms of meaning, value, and coherence in the midst of absurdity, terror, horror, repression, and oppression? How can one, how can we, look ahead with any semblance of hope, let alone optimism, when one is born with natal alienation and what Orlando Patterson called “social death”? And how can a people exist in the midst of domination without becoming anti-human themselves?
Afro-Americans confronted such questions by creating forms of expression and the serious play of ritual, allowing them to define and reflect the reality of their humanity in the midst of inhumanity. The spirituals, the blues, jazz, and other cultural modes of being evidence such forms. And aspects of the work and thought and actions of people such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and political philosopher Danielle Allen are additional confirmation.
Now I’ll speak from a first-person perspective on the evolution of my consciousness in relation to the blues. What follows is a short address that I gave over a decade ago for an event titled, “Harlem Is: The Blues Tradition”:
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York in the tumultuous '60s and the far-out '70s, soul music, funk, R&B, soft and hard rock, the Motown and Philly Sounds, and even disco were most popular. Being young and ignorant, I shied away from the blues. "That's old timey," said I, as an adolescent. "That's from slavery times," I thought, as a teen. "That's simple stuff compared to bebop jazz and European classical," I said, while in college.
See, for me, a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. But the more I listened, the more I heard blues everywhere—all up in and around the jazz I fell in love with 30 years ago; in the soul, funk, R&B, and rock and roll on the radio; and even in the gospel I heard going to church in the South and the North. And the more I studied, the more profound the blues became to me. I learned that the blues was like vaccine, or a homeopathic remedy, giving you little doses of heartache lyrically, so you'd be able to withstand and understand the real heartbreak a little better, later. I found out that the blues and its siblings, the spirituals and gospel, were what black American folk had instead of Freudian psychology.
I came to see that blues, like Brer Rabbit tales, the stories of Uncle Remus, and the myths of John Henry and Aunt Hagar, were the folk wisdom of a strong, resilient, persevering people. I learned that whereas what the great writer on blues and jazz Albert Murray called the blues as such was about sadness, frustration and even depression, I also came to understand from him that blues music was about communal celebration and victory, elegance and style, and lettin' the good times roll between a man and a woman. That's how you stomp the blues!
I noticed that all of the great innovators of jazz—from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk to Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman—were masters of the blues. I also perceived that the most beloved ladies of song in blues and jazz—from Bessie and Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and Ethel Waters to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington, Carmen McRae and Betty Carter—were steeped, marinated, and even perfumed sweetly in the blues. So when we're talking about the blues, we talkin' about something with deep roots and branches that found its extension and refinement in other forms and genres we hold dear. When we talkin' about the blues, we talkin' about the existential wisdom of a people.