The Verbal Dance of the Blues

This is meant as the personal and theoretical introductory essay to a volume of analyses of blues lyrics. I had thought of using “The Poetry of the Blues” which focuses on W. C. Handy’s story of the genre’s origin in this place, but that has been rewritten to follow “The Verbal Dance of the Blues.” At present eighteen essays offering close readings of blues lyrics as poetry are already posted on this site.


     My familiarity with the blues began in childhood, though my home environment could hardly have been more distant from the country porches where the music was born. I grew up within a few miles of the dark and smoky Chicago barrooms where the leading exponents of electrified blues performed, but in a suburb, separated by race and class and culture from their music. I did have the advantage of a hip older brother who special-ordered 45s by John Lee Hooker and Clarence “Frogman” Henry and 33s by Robert Johnson and Robert Pete Williams at the little village record store. His taste may have surprised the clerks, but he was hardly unique. The folk music vogue was rising and, while some favored concert stylings of Anglo-American ballads or original topical material, I was one among many who found in the Mississippi Delta blues a beauty and a power unavailable elsewhere.
     When I was fifteen a slightly older friend and I drove east, stopping at coffee houses to hear what we could of acoustic blues live. I remember Fritz Richmond before he joined Jim Kweskin at the Gaslight and Skip James singing for a half dozen people at a little place within sight of Harvard Gate where a drunken student kept asking him to play “St. James Infirmary.” Back in Chicago my friends and I located live music venues that would not ask for i.d. such as the Club Alex on Roosevelt Road where Magic Sam led the house band. Now and then the Regal Theatre would host a “big blues extravaganza” featuring a solid lineup of now legendary musicians.
     Later as a student of literature and a writer myself I turned from impressionistic appreciation to critical analysis of the literary devices that allowed this music of the poor and oppressed to attain such sophistication and artistry. These essays arise from a lifetime of listening, but also from knowledge of poetry around the world and through the centuries. Perhaps my readings can make a modest contribution to the recognition of the place of American blues lyrics among the greatest achievements of twentieth century American poetry.
     In poetry as in language itself, complexity does not develop over time; it is present from the start. It is in fact an axiom in linguistics that the most complex grammatically languages, those richest in morphological possibilities, are the unwritten ones. With writing, standardization, and time languages seem to become simpler. Thus English has lost the three genders, the dual forms (meaning neither singular nor plural but two) as well as numerous sounds such as the fricative produced in the back of the throat and vestigially represented by the gh in words like light. Vowel sounds once distinct collapse toward a shwa, and dialectical variations fade.
     In the past folk song, like unwritten languages, was often considered “primitive,” rudimentary, and naïve. For the early advocates of such music the motive was often nationalistic as in the cases of Arnim and Brentano, Burns, and Dvořák. The texts of oral poetry were thought to be not so much the work of individual artists as a collective expression of the people as a whole. In the twentieth century folklorists like John Work, the Lomaxes and Harry Oster generally emphasized sociological rather than artistic implications of the material they collected.
     A more sophisticated view of unwritten songs developed with the understanding of oral literature that came with the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry and Lord provided ample proof that each oral text is unique, the work of a specific singer, some gifted poets and others with lesser skills. They demonstrated that the use of conventions and formulaic phrases do not vitiate meaning and, in the use of a master, may increase a poem’s semantic density and subtlety.
     Poets such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha encouraged the treatment of traditional oral texts as works of art, provocatively suggesting that they share techniques with modern avant-gardists and vastly multiplying the readership of poems recorded by anthropologists most of whom (Dennis Tedlock was an early exception) thought of the contents of their field notebooks as scientific data rather than aesthetic objects.
     Such developments have laid a theoretical base for a literary treatment of the blues songs of the Mississippi Delta, a corpus preserved on commercial recordings as well as by folklorists and appreciated by generations of listeners far from life in the Jim Crow rural South. Expressions of enthusiasm such as “Blues are my religion!” while all very well convey nothing of the artistry of the songs themselves. The highly developed conventions and shared allusive language that links song to song resemble those of Greek epigrams, Troubadour cansos, and Elizabethan sonnets, producing a marvelously expressive verbal medium capable of producing beauty as striking and themes as profound as any poetry in American literature.
     In spite of the rarity of direct social comment in the blues, their vision reflects American racism in DuBoisian “double consciousness,” providing a natural “hip” insight to question and enrich each singer’s descriptions. In this it surely reflects a phenomenon evident as well in jazz and rap and more broadly in the musical prominence of the Gnaoui in the Maghreb who were likewise descended from slaves, as well as the Roma, musicians to all classes of Eastern Europe for centuries, though too often otherwise despised. How else has it come that so many important American writers have been Jews and so many contemporary authors like Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Arundhati Roy are bicultural?
     Blues songs address the strongest human passion of eros. Many directly confront mortality, sometimes with Christian apologetics, sometimes without the aid of revelation. A good many might be said to be philosophical expressing existential Angst or ebullient joy. Thus the blues lyrics engage with the most ambitious themes of world literature -- love death and god – no less than Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare.
     Though the blues have long had intellectual appreciators who never experienced, they have rarely received the sort of appreciative explication given writers in the accepted canon. Their manipulation of listener expectations through the use of conventions and set phrases means that these lyrics require close as well as appreciative reading.
     I present here close readings of some of the masterpieces of the Delta blues by which I hope to demonstrate the beauty, expressiveness, and efficiency of the form. Behind these interpretations is the dynamo of my love for the music, unchanged since I first heard these recordings as a schoolboy. Marooned as I felt in suburbia, singers like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson opened my vision every bit as much as Homer and Goethe. Several of these essays concern image clusters or points of blues history rather than stanza by stanza explication, but the thrust of my entire project is to make a case for this body of great American poetry.