The Beat Goes On: Blues, Soul, and Meaning in the Blues
by Mark Winborn
Night has fallen, blanketing Route 4 near Chulahoma, Mississippi in darkness. Mist rises from the surrounding fields as they release the heat of the day still trapped in the soil. To one side of the road sits an isolated, ramshackle wooden structure capped by a rusting tin roof. Cars are parked haphazardly in a poorly defined gravel area occupying the space between the building and the narrow, rural road. To one side of the parking area, an intermittently flickering sign identifies the structure as Junior’s Place. A pungent olfactory jumble of barbeque hot wings, stale beer, and cigarettes hangs in the air. The small 30-foot by 60-foot building is adorned with a random assortment of frayed chairs and couches occupying the periphery of the dance floor and the area occupied by a pool table. There is no stage. To one side, partially obscured by an oil drum heater, the band shuffles forward to occupy bedraggled metal chairs. Without introduction, Junior Kimbrough, the de facto leader of the band, quietly counts off, “one and two and three and…” On the unspoken fourth beat the sound of the kick drum reverberates through the room and the band launches into Kimbrough’s signature song, All Night Long. Immediately, the guitar, drums, and bass lock into a loose groove that simultaneously infects the audience. Feet tap, heads bob, and bodies sway in an organic synchrony of rhythm. So begins the life of the big beat; the rhythmic heart that permeates the blues. The big beat creates a scaffolding or wave, carrying the music forward, infiltrating both audience and musicians, allowing them to float together on some unseen chrono-vibrational platform. The big beat serves to animate juke joints, night clubs, street corners, front porches, house parties, and concert stages around the world.
Blues music is about hearing and resonating with the pain, suffering, joy, or sadness in the voice of the blues singer. The understanding of the blues comes through the direct experience of the music rather than through the intellect. Understanding the blues is similar Carl Jung’s perspective on images – “Image and meaning are identical . . . the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning.” The word “blues” is derived from the term “blue devils” which referred to contrary spirits that hung around and created sadness. I believe it is the capacity of the blues to speak at an archetypal level about universally felt experiences that give power to the blues for both the performer and the audience. The music of the blues is the only genre specifically created for the evocation of an emotional response. In fact, the phrase “the blues” refers to both the music and a feeling. While all forms of music create a connection on an emotional level – it is only with the blues that this becomes the primary focus of the creative act.
The blues sound is generally raw and primitive. It has some basic but fluid forms. It is culled up out of the prima materia of life and has never lost touch with the base elements of human existence. The origins of the blues reflect its austere beginnings with early blues performers relying only on guitar, harmonica, and vocals to communicate their message. The overarching themes are emotional and spiritual, rather than rational.
The early influences of the blues originate in West Africa, transported to America by African slaves. In West Africa there is a term, griot, which is used to refer to a tribal singer but also refers to a tribe’s archive of musical stories which preserve the tribe’s history and culture. The blues carries on this tradition of musical lore with timeless songs that are continuously remade because of the emotional depth and wisdom that they possess. The first generation of African slaves sang songs and chants they carried from Africa. By the second generation those African songs were quickly being replaced by work songs with the difficult conditions of the harsh new environment as the focus. These songs, often referred to as arwhoolies, eased the passage of time during work and helped coordinate their collective efforts. Arwhoolies also became adapted to the work life in prisons and on chain gangs. Dr. Cornel West – Harvard professor of African-American Studies and Harvard Divinity School – said:
“Black music was the black response to being terrorized and traumatized. It spread some soothing sweetness against the backdrop of a dark catastrophe.”
As Jon Spencer puts it:
“Only the complex web of racist oppression suffered by blacks at the hands of whites produced the blues, regardless of the many types of suffering with which the blues deals in the manifest content of songs.”
Just as great emphasis is placed on the importance of emotional expression in analytic therapy as part of the healing process, the blues might also be seen as a means of transcending the immediate experience of oppression through creative musical expression.
Most evidence suggests that the blues originated in the Delta cotton country of northwest Mississippi during the late 1800’s from the work songs of former slaves, sharecroppers, and chain gang prisoners. In contrast to the thematic patterns found in West African story songs which focused largely on collective themes and concerns, the music of the blues is typically sung from an individual perspective but about issues and emotional experiences common to all – for example – lost love, joy, sexuality, rage, sadness, and grief. It speaks of oppression, addiction, migration, the outlaw, or the trickster.
The blues philosophy, expressed through the music, includes the idea that the blues is something to be accepted; not something to be gotten rid of or fixed. The blues is experienced, lived through, and survived; not conquered or overcome. One hopes to eventually feel better but the intent is to acknowledge and cope with the deeply visceral experience of the blues. Most often the listener has the sense that the singer is communicating observations rather than complaints. Always underlying the effort to survive the blues is the assumption and acceptance that the blues will return again, to be dealt with again; the ongoing cycle of the fall and redemption, death and resurrection, the mythologem of the Great Round. This is reflected in the title of a song by Muddy Waters, No Escape from the Blues, and also in the song Hard Times Ain’t Gone Nowhere by Lonnie Johnson:
People raving about hard times,
I don’t know why they should.
If some people was like me,
they didn’t have no money when times was good
This same attitude is reflected in Jung’s comments in Answer to Job:
It is far better to admit the affect and submit to its violence than to try to escape it . . . the violence is meant to penetrate to a man’s vitals, and he to succumb to its action. He must be affected by it, otherwise its full effect will not reach him. But he should know, or learn to know, what has affected him, for in this way he transforms the blindness of the violence on the one hand and of the affect on the other into knowledge.
However, despite the frequent focus on suffering, there are other facets to the blues which create a tension of opposites for the singer and the audience. Blueswoman Van Zula Hunt says the blues are – “a sad thing and a rejoicing thing.” A good example of this tension of opposites in the blues can be heard in the lyrics to T-Bone Walker’s Stormy Monday. He sings, “The eagle flies on Friday and Saturday I go out to play,” invoking the listener’s anticipation of payday and the associated pleasures and excesses which will take place on Saturday night. But as the song continues Walker sings, “Sunday I go to church and I kneel down ‘n’ pray, and this is what I say, baby, Lord have mercy, Lord, have mercy on me.” In making this movement within the song, Walker juxtaposes the sacred and the profane. Within the reality of the blues, good and evil, love and hate, staying or leaving coexist side by side without an experience of internal contradiction.
It is in the power to transcend boundaries of individual and group experience that the blues speak and act most powerfully. Jungian analyst, Erich Neumann, uses the phrase “unitary reality” to describe experiences in which the boundaries and distinction between individuals and between individuals and the world become blurred – resulting in an experience of a shared reality. Such experiences are common in the blues. Neumann defines unitary reality as, “A reciprocal co-ordination between world and psyche . . . a co-ordination which is based on the archetypal structure which embraces both, or of which both are partial aspects . . .” and which “leads to an emotionally toned unitary experience.” The blues is a manifestation of the archetypal field that constitutes unitary reality. This blurring can occur between the musician and the music, between performer and instrument, and between audience and performer.
When a blues musician refers to himself as a “bluesman” he is not only referring to the type of music he plays but also the type of life he has led and the attitude he has about life. It is an orientation to life in which the surrounding world is seen as being alive and insists on being engaged with. It is in this last sense that the blues begins to comment upon or amplify the anima mundi, or world soul. An awareness of the world soul can be detected in many blues songs, such as T-Bone Walker’s – Mean Old World, “This is a mean old world to live in by yourself,” or The Sky is Crying by Elmore James where the tears of the singer and the tears of the world run together. Attending a blues performance is a shared experience of the unitary field of blues consciousness. The blues performer and blues audience are both making an internal reference about what it is like to have the blues and realizing that the other one also knows.
In our increasingly isolated and technologically engrossed culture there are fewer and fewer opportunities to move into these shared experiences of unitary reality in which the bubble of our individualism is pierced and we are able to move into felt, relational connection to our environment and those around us. The blues allows us to move into a deeper communion with our own emotional life, especially the more difficult emotions that are often shunned in our relentless pursuit of happiness, material acquisition, and activities designed to occupy time rather than expand soul. Often it is only by moving into and through sadness that we can be released into an experience of joy.
In this regard the bluesman, by communicating feelings in song that resonate within the listener, serves as a modern-day shaman who heals through the ritual of music. The blues originated in experiences of trauma, oppression, and enslavement but now serve to liberate our emotional lives and facilitate a deeper union with our environment and those around us. Robert Johnson, Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf all have something significant to contribute to the care of our soul.
Adapted from Mark Winborn (2011) Deep Blues: Human Soundscapes for the Archetypal Journey. Carmel, CA: Fisher King Press.