“Preachin’ the Blues” (Son House)

I discuss here House’s 1930 recording, the text of which is appended. I have added also for comparison his 1965 version.


     Literature, indeed, art in general, is particularly effective in dealing with thematic material which is conflicted, ambivalent, paradoxical, and mysterious. This characteristic of poetic truth arises not from a valuation of obscurity for its own sake, but rather from the complexity of people’s own attitudes, particularly toward the subjects that matter most: love, death, and the divine. Self-contradictory codes flourish in poetry because binary oppositions are often reductive or false. An accurate answer is often "neither and both."
     Son House exemplifies in his life as well as his work the tension between the sacred and the secular in early Delta blues singers and in African-American culture more generally. Though in his youth he was a regular church-goer and generally an enthusiastic Christian, his ambivalence toward religion and its associated codes of morality emerged in periodic heavy drinking which resulted in his leaving the church for a time, though he later returned to become a deacon and then a preacher for several years. At the age of twenty-five, he was captivated upon hearing a friend play slide guitar, and, in what has been called a reverse conversion, he returned to the blues. [1] The lifestyle that resulted from his commitment to secular music led to his involvement in periodic fights and twice to his arrest for murder. [2]
     One of his most well-known tunes, “Preachin’ the Blues,” recorded for Paramount in two parts in 1930, expresses the bipolar opposition of sacred and secular in its paradoxical title as well as in House’s intense, strained vocal quality and the driving, if simple, accompaniment. The pressured vocalizations of the performance push against the limits of the artist’s virtuosity, piercing the border of intelligibility to heighten the tone and leaping thereby into the sublime beginning with the very first syllable, an extended “ohhh” that seems to rise from the depths.
     The pattern of these apparently “spontaneous overflows of powerful emotion” is highly symmetrical. The afflatus above the register of words is maintained through the second verse’s “mmm” sound, the heart-felt “yeah” of verses six and seven which links the last verse on side one and the first of side two, the first of which is supported by an “oh” and the second by a “whoa.” The final verse brings a unifying return to the “oh” from the abyss which opened the song.
     Similarly, House’s exclamations, replicating those that would arise from a Pentecostal congregation, “Lord God almighty” and “praise God almighty,” indicate a level of emotional excitement, though their piety is radically ambivalent, caught on the ridgepole of doubt that supports the entire song.
     The song opens with what might sound like a declaration of faith in church, the commitment of a sinner coming forward to be saved: “Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church.” Yet ambiguity emerges immediately as the rhyme line turns to satire emphasized by the vocal waver about the word “have to” in the line “so I won’t have to work.” House thus ridicules the most respected member of the community at the same time as he implicitly rejects the work ethic embraced by “respectable” blacks. His listeners were familiar with jokes and stories based on men of the cloth whose minds were less on things of the spirit than on chicken dinners from the parishioners, if not the church ladies’ beds. [3]
     He then tightly conflates the sacred and the secular by announcing “Oh, I’m gonna preach these blues now“ and asking “I want everybody to shout,” as though they were in a church rather than a juke joint, the likely venue for the song’s performance. Just after saying he would accept religion, he begins to preach, but not from a gospel perspective, rather “I'm gonna preach these blues now,” suggesting the music might prove for him a sort of religion. He continues “I want everybody to shout” as though leading a fundamentalist worship service where the congregation is anything but passive.
     While this may seem to continue the mocking of men of the cloth by conducting a sort of black Protestant equivalent of a Black Mass, celebrating the opposite of Christian values, the last line of the second verse disappoints that expectation with an apparently sincere search for spiritual release, just as the rhyme-line of the first stanza upset the rhetoric of the very first verse. The poignant longing of the line is unmistakable, “I'm gonna do like a prisoner, I'm gon' roll my time on out.”
     The word prisoner here is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, an irreligious person might regard the rules of the church as a “prison.” For the observant when House compares himself to a prisoner, the term may recall St. Paul’s references to himself as “a prisoner of Jesus Christ.” [4] Paul was speaking of his being made a literal prisoner because of his righteousness alone, but also of his submissive commitment to Christian morality and values. Finally, behind these associations is the old sense of the body itself as a prison and life as a long incarceration. [5]
     “I'm gon' roll my time on out” surely means that the speaker will live his life, with all its restrictions and suffering, in such a way as to make it as easy as possible, while maintaining a neutrality about Christianity or loose living will be the greater aid toward that end.
     In the third verse the ambiguities continue as the singer, having resolved to “do his time” on earth as easily as possible, commences to seek the consolation of religion in an altogether conventional way. “In my room I bowed down to pray,” but his intentions are short-lived since “the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away.” The speaker is apparently passive, he is trying to do right, but the blues rear up, actively curtailing his devotions. The personification anticipates the phrase that occurs later: “the blues came walking like a man.” [6] What could he do with his spirit involuntarily dissipated and his soul in the grip of the blues?
     Simply to reinforce his case, the speaker goes on to insist “I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day/ But the womens and the whiskey, well, they would not let me pray.” Again he blames an outside agency for overwhelming his good faith attempts to lead a Christian life. He proceeds to yearn for heaven and, for good measure, praises “God almighty,” but then reveals that his own paradise would be “a long, long happy home” populated by “all my women,” implying that eternal love-making rather than choral song would occupy his black angels. [7] He is holding tightly to both sides of the bipolar opposition, seeking salvation (which one might also call liberation or enlightenment) while at the same time affirming his incorrigible pursuit of pleasure.
     The singer readily confesses the egocentric basis of his earthly love, noting in the sixth verse, after a passionate “yeah,” an enthusiastic affirmation: “I love my baby just like I love myself.” Christ after all, asked neither more nor less. [8] House, however, is swift to add the aggressively possessive and quite unchristian sentiment: “if she don't have me she won't have nobody else.”
     On the second side of the record, “Preachin’ the Blues, Part 2” House elaborates the synthesis of the sacred and the secular, implying a new sort of blues which provides a vision entire and specific of blues as an experience potentially as profound and soul-satisfying as the church. As before, he begins by sounding as though he is conventionally pious: “I'm gon' fold my arms , I'm gonna kneel down in prayer.” The rhyme-line, though recoils on this meaning: “when I get up I'm gonna leave my preachin blues laying there.” Though the precise implication of this statement is mysterious, House again beings into creation through naming that odd hybrid, the preaching blues.
     A sort of theophany follows with the devotee’s communion with the supernatural. “I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man,” human because, of course, only sentient beings can get the blues. Rather than fleeing, the persona reaches out in fellowship to embrace his own suffering, saying “give me you right hand.”
     The knotty problem that motivates both the devout and those dedicated to the blues, the dilemma of suffering, is then resolved. The singer confidently states “there aint nothing now baby, Lord that's gon' worry my mind,” placing his lover and his god paratactically next to each other, as though he is addressing both at the same time. In a new state of blessedness, he says all is well, “I'm satisfied I got the longest line.”
     The last two stanzas, punctuated by the call to “praise God,” are filled with the resolution to continue in his practice of refusing to select either the sacred or the secular, but rather combining them into a synthesis better suited to his sensibility. Vowing “to stay on the job” and “preach these gospel blues,” he can not only lift up his own soul but can inspire a similar excited joy in his listeners.


Whoa, I'm gonna preach these blues now and choose my seat and sit down
When the spirit comes, I want you to jump straight up and down


     A primary weakness of the church is its hypocrisy. Believers and men of the cloth alike are expected to deny their own essential nature in order to be holy. The singer seeks to integrate spiritual growth with a more realistic assessment of what it is to be human in which both religion and sensuality have a part. Son House in this song testifies to the spiritual power of the blues, a power felt by many practitioners and listeners through the life of the genre. [9] The gravitas and passion he brings to the song lifts it far above satire of the failings of the church and its adherents into a search after a new synthesis of the sacred and the secular which might provide the individual with purpose and peace of mind more attuned to human nature than fundamentalist Christianity. If the tension is never resolved between sacred and secular that, too, reflects the singer’s (and perhaps the listener’s) lived experience.



1. Further biographical details may be found in Daniel Beaumont’s Preachin' the Blues; The Life and Times of Son House (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2011).

2. He served several years at Parchman Farm the first time, but the second time, twenty-five years later, the charges were dropped.

3. In The ground-breaking Deep Down in the Jungle (p. 199) Roger D. Abrahams notes a precedent in Boccaccio when introducing jokes, which he describes as “legion,” on “the sexual promiscuity of the clergy”.

4. See Philemon I,9, Ephesians 4:1, etc. See also “slaves of God” (Romans 6:22). In the Eastern Orthodox Church, this term is used to refer to any Eastern Orthodox Christian. The Arabic name Abdullah (from عبد الله, ʿAbd Allāh) means "slave of God," as do the Hebrew name Obadiah (עובדיה), the German name Gottschalk, and the Sanskrit name Devadasa.

5. The trope appears around the world. See, for instance, Plato, Cratylus, 400c, Phaedo, 61e-62c, Gorgias, 493a, Phaedrus 250c, and Republic IX 586a. Leo III’s De Miseria Condicionis Humane (XIX) says straightforwardly “the body is the prison of the soul.”

6. These same words also appear in Robert Johnson’s song titled “Preachin’ Blues.”

7. Cf. Robert Nighthawk’s “Sweet Black Angel.” Or Lucille Bogan’s version “Black Angel Blues” Louis Lasky (“Teasin’ Brown Blues”), Charlie McCoy (“Last Time Blues”), and Blind Willie McTell (“Talking to Myself” and “Ticket Agent Blues”) are among those whose songs ask God to “send me an angel down.”

8. See Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31, and Luke 12:27.

9. There are at least two albums titled Blues are my Religion (by Eric Culberson and Sonny Rhodes). For a scholarly iteration, see Jon Michael Spencer’s Blues and Evil. Cf. Ted Joans’ poem “Jazz is my Religion.”


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”


Preachin’ the Blues
part 1 1930 version

Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church
Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church
I'm gon' be a baptist preacher and I sure won't have to work

Oh, I'm gonna preach these blues now, and I want everybody to shout
Mmm-mmm, I want everybody to shout
I'm gonna do like a prisoner, I'm gon' roll my time on out

Oh, in my room I bowed down to pray
Oh, up in my room I bowed down to pray
Then the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away

Oh, I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day
Oh, I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day
But the womens and whiskey, well, they would not let me pray

Oh, I wish I had me a heaven of my own,
(praise God almighty)
Yeah, heaven of my own,
Then I'd give all my women a long, long happy home

Yeah, I love my baby just like I love myself
Oh, just like I love myself
But if she don't have me she won't have nobody else.


part 2

Yeah, I'm gon' fold my arms , I'm gonna kneel down in prayer
Whoa, I fold my arms, gonna kneel down in prayer
When I get up I'm gonna leave my preachin blues laying there

Now I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man
Oh, walking just like a man
I said good morning blues, now give me you right hand

Now there aint nothing now baby, Lord that's gon' worry my mind
Oh, Lord that's gon' worry my mind
I'm satisfied I got the longest line

I got to stay on the job,I aint got no time to lose
Yeah, I aint got no time to lose
I swear to God, I got to preach these gospel blues

(Praise God almighty)

Oh, I'm gonna preach these blues and choose my seat and sit down
Whoa, I'm gonna preach these blues now and choose my seat and sit down
When the spirit comes, I want you to jump straight up and down



Preachin’ Blues (1965)

Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
You know I wanna be a Baptist preacher, just so I won't have to work.

One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
You know he said, "One thing, elder. I believe I'll go back to barrelhousin again."

One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
"You know I'm glad this corn liquor's goin out."

Another deacon jumped up and said, "Why don't ya hush?"
Another deacon jumped up and said, "Why don't ya hush?"
"You know you drink corn liquor and your lie's a horrible stink."

One sister jumped up and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up and she began to shout.
"I believe I can tell ya'll what it's all about."

Another sister jumped up, she said, "Why don't ya hush?"
Another sister jumped up, she said, "Why don't ya hush?"
"You know he's abandoned, and you outta hush your fuss."

I was in the pulpit, I's jumpin up and down.
I was in the pulpit, I's jumpin up and down.
My sisters in the corner, they're hollerin Alabama bound.

Grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road.
Grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road.
I said, "Farewell church, may the good Lord bless your soul."
You know I wish I had a heaven of my own.
You know I wish I had a heaven of my own.
I'd give all my women a good ole happy home.

I'm gonna preach these blues and I'm gonna choose my seat and sit down.
I'm gonna preach these blues and I'm gonna choose my seat and sit down.
But, when the Spirit comes, I want you to

The Bloody Venus of Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”

     Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” is described in the 1593 entry in the Stationer’s Register as “an amourous poem.” While the adjective is apt, Marlowe’s depiction of erotic delights and dangers is strikingly ambivalent. The susceptible reader may find some passages such a richly brocaded fabric that the poet’s aim can only be beauty and pleasure alone, yet other passages betray a disturbing ambiguity. Marlowe suggests that the experience of love is ecstatic and portrays a sensual paradise in the intoxicating possibilities each lover’s body holds for then other, hardly less enthralling in contemplation than in possession, yet the mythological parallels he cites regularly entail deep suffering. The love of the poem is far from the ingenuous romance of Valentines or the hyperbolic praise of courtly love.

     Unsurprisingly, recent commentary has emphasized dark, ironic, and humorous elements of “Hero and Leander,” but two generations ago a leading scholar could describe the poem as “an unclouded celebration of youthful passion and fullness of physical life,” and “a pretty piece of paganism,” amounting in the end to a “rapturous exaltation of the senses.” [1]

     To another critic of that period the poem “puts aside for the moment the great issues of life and chooses an idyllic theme,” creating a “holiday mood,” “a new and lovely region” with “clear bright air,” “one of the purest things in Elizabethan literature.” This particular reading betrays its blind spots by making the claim that the poem contains “not an obscene word or degenerate description,” [2] though no reader in any era could miss the many double entendres or the repeated introduction of homoerotic content with no direct relation to the central story.

     The very first line calls the Hellespont “guilty of true love’s blood,” foreshadowing a tragic outcome, yet this is easily assimilated under the rubric of “star-crossed love,” the more poignantly affecting for its unhappy conclusion. The reader is likely to be given pause, however, a few lines later, upon discovering that upon Hero’s “kirtle blue” may be found “many a stain/ Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.” (16-17) The syntax makes it obscure at first reading whether the blood is on Venus’ or on Hero’s garment, but of course the latter is an instance here of the former, so like that the mortal attracts divine love and outshine Nature herself.

     Indeed, the reader very shortly learns details of Venus’ own blood guilt. Her temple, called “Venus’ glass,” (I, 142) is ornamented with depictions of love among the immortals, but these are not tender scenes of affection, but rather “riots, incest, rapes.” (I, 144) The mythological models for erotic behavior include Danae (imprisoned, then victim of rape and attempted murder), Ganymede (abducted), Danae (abducted), Mars (the adulterer), and Sylvanus (whose lover Cyparissus died of grief). [3] Here turtle-doves are quite properly not admired but rather sacrificed, (I, 158) and their blood must come to mind when Hero calls herself a sacrifice to Leander. (II, 48)

     With considerable wit, Marlowe takes pains to ensure that a sinister subtext underlies even what might seem at first glance a conventional compliment.[4] In the description of Leander, for instance, the poet praises the youth: “His body was as straight as Circe’s wand.” (I, 61) Yet the reader thinks more of the fate of Odysseus’ men, transformed to beasts, than of good posture. [5] Immediately following a reference to Leander’s being like “delicious meat” (I, 63) to Jove, his neck is said to surpass “the white of Pelops’ shoulder” (I, 65) whose body was in fact served up in sacrifice. The mention of Pelops suggests the whole multi-generational tragedy of Tantalus and the Atreidai. [6]

     Even a god like Neptune is not merely embarrassed but feels “malice” due to his infatuation with Leander. (II, 208) His own ambivalence causes him to call back his mace thus wounding himself. (II, 213) The digression on Mercury is filled with examples of mortals who came to grief through love entanglements: Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Peleus. Leander’s love “is not full of pity (as men say)/ But deaf and cruel where he means to prey.” (II, 287-288) Hero, for her part, is figured as a siren (I, 105) or a terrible harpy (II, 270), a threat to potential lovers.

     This ambivalent or conflicted view of human eroticism, combining the most sublime delights and the most agonized suffering, new life and its complement death, introduced enough cognitive dissonance to render it nearly invisible to early critics. This complex, puzzle-like picture of love is aesthetically pleasing after the manner of a riddle with a similar reader satisfaction once the sense in its nonsense emerges. The fact is that love is compounded of ego and unselfishness, aggression and vulnerability, with immense potential for both violence and tenderness. Evidence is available in the ordinary transactions of life as well as in extreme dramatic phenomena such as sado-masochist fetishes and domestic assaults. With scintillating courtly wit, including a barrage of learned references, Marlowe constructs a picture of two lovers, neither more naïve at the outset nor more doomed in the sequel than his readers. Love may rule the world, but Marlowe leaves no doubt that this means pain and suffering as well as bliss.



1. Douglas Bush, in Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English, p. 33, 125, and 133. Wordsworth had called Keats’ Endymion “a pretty piece of paganism.” The view persisted. Paul Cubeta’s “Marlowe’s Poet in hero and Leander” in College English Vol. 26, No. 7 (Apr., 1965), pp. 500-505 declares “the central purpose of Marlowe’s poem to be “the celebration of erotic rapture.”

2. Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe : a study of his thought, learning, and character, p. 313, 294, and 514.

3. The only image which does not necessarily reflect coercion or deception is that of Iris. Since Marlowe has her tumbling with Jove in a cloud, he likely imagined her as ravished. (I, 150)

4. The similar partially submerged use of the reference to Philomel in Raleigh’s “The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd” indicates that such sly use of allusion was well-established.

5. Circe had become by the Middle Ages a type of a deceptive seducer who leads men astray. See, for instance, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, 1361-1362.

6. Other relevant aspects of Pelops’ myth include his love relationship with Neptune (or Poseidon, see Pindar, Ist Olympian, 71) and his perilous courtship of Hippodamia, who had killed eighteen earlier suitors.

Notes on Recent Reading 36 (Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand)

The Pit (Norris)

     Might one write a good novel about the financial markets? Bonfire of the Vanities doesn’t make it, but Norris made a decent attempt with The Pit in 1903. Envisioned as the middle work of a trilogy following a crop of wheat from production through sale to consumption (hardly a promising theme), the story concerns Curtis Jadwin who initially eschews speculation but who is eventually seduced and finally ruined by it. His devotion to his wife, the much-admired Laura Dearborn, is gradually eroded by his addiction to the pursuit of the biggest of deals, cornering the market. (One recalls, of course, that the book was written in the time of anti-trust agitation.) Laura, on the other hand, is self-absorbed, far less mutual in the relationship of her marriage than her sister Page in hers to Landry Court. In fact, the married love themes coexist with the business and economic one without any real attempt toward synthesis or harmony. The conclusion is unconvincing, facile, and abrupt, as Jadwin, while ruined, sets off cheerfully to begin anew, sadder but wiser.
     Norris’ naturalist themes are apparent in his description of the commodities market as a great independent being in the coils of which humans are helpless. In the narrative, both Jadwin’s attempts to corner the market and his attempts at self-restraint are equivalent to challenging nature itself. As elsewhere in Norris, the world of business is contrasted to that of art, and his artist here Sheldon Corthell, charms the ladies and makes insightful observations from the sidelines. Though the book, which appeared after the author’s death, was widely reviewed and generally applauded, I would concur with those critics who find it weaker than the gritty lower depths of McTeague or the Cinemascope Western grandeur of The Octopus.


Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (Rexroth, Laughlin)

     Having valued Rexroth’s poetry, translations, and criticism for my entire life, indeed, having modeled some of my own studies after his own, I was perhaps over-sensitive to the more personal of these communications. While I was rewarded by finding Rexroth’s customarily knowledgeable and acute critical judgments on nearly every page (the Norton edition edited by Lee Bartlett is, if anything, excessively annotated), I was also put off by my man’s constant badgering, pushing repeatedly for more publications, scolding Laughlin for his refusal to completely discount the writers whom Rexroth calls academic, attacking him for his wealth while always trying to get a bit more of it out of him. In spite of the perils of irascibility and self-pity for those of us who deliberately chose poverty and the counter-culture, I salute Rexroth in the end for his simultaneous principled dedication to the classics and the avant-garde. And his translations from the Chinese can be quite wonderful even if, as the reader of these letters learns, he was capable of translating really from Judith Gautier’s fin-de-siècle French while pretending to work from Chinese. (Characteristically, Laughlin generously notes that he eventually learned quite a few characters and could work to some extent from the original.) He probably knew as much as Pound did, and Pound’s Cathay contains some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century. The prose in this volume is rarely distinguished, but the literary history and the off-hand critical comments make it essential even for those to whom the hip ideal is less appealing.


Lettres d’un Voyageur (Sand)

     George Sand’s book is at once a memoir, a travel book, and a novel. She passes from one genre to the next as she relates her experiences in Italy and France. Some passages are in fact from actual letters she wrote at the time, while others were composed later. Though there is not enough plot to make a steady story line, she describes her emotional and geographic peregrinations at the center of a love triangle with a poet – the original was Musset – and her physician. The capping detail to this generic conundrum is that parts of the book were first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris. So these letters had a rather wide audience at the time of their publication. Perhaps the celebrity/romance/mystery aspect was significant in the book’s first readership who may have received it as a classier People magazine.
     Yet I am afraid that I feel as a French cookbook once said about a Provencal olive oil pastry touted as equally useful for pie crust, tarts, strudel, and pasta, “good for everything means good for nothing.” The incidents lack the principal desideratum of each sort of book: the structure of a novel, the detailed outward focus of a travel book, and the consistent fidelity to subjective experience of a memoir. The reader who may be satisfied with partial quotients of each will nonetheless find the book worth reading. Now no less than in her lifetime the author has a palpable charisma about her.