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The Birth of the Blues
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11013 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1993 |
2,717 Words |
| Author
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Eric P. Olsen
Eric P. Olsen is associate executive editor at The World & I.
The author would like to thank British Tourism
(www.visitbritain.com) and BritRail (www.britrail.com) for
their generous assistance in the preparation of this article.
For information on guided tours to the Pilgrim sites in
England and Holland, visit www.mayflowerpilgrims.com. |
THE LAND WHERE THE BLUES BEGAN
Alan Lomax
New York: Pantheon, 1993
540 pp., $25.00
In the summer of 1935, an itinerant black folk singer from the swamps of Louisiana, freed by a stroke of fortune from a sentence at the state penitentiary for carving up six men in a street brawl, was performing some of his repertoire of blues, spirituals, prison work songs, and field hollers before an enthusiastic, mostly white audience in New York City. Realizing that his listeners were puzzled both by his thick dialect and the unfamiliar musical idiom (and trying hard to please), the improbably named Leadbelly began to preface his songs with artless explanations:
Now, this is the blues: You lay down at night, you roll from one side of the bed to the other all night long. You can't sleep. What's the matter the blues has got you. You go put your feet under the table, got everything you want to eat, but you shake your head and get up and you say, Lawd I can't eat, I can't sleep. What's the matter the blues has got you. Want to talk to you!
Can't eat? Can't sleep? Troubled by some exquisite private melancholy? This may be the emotional landscape of a New York nightclub patron, but it is a far cry from where the blues began.
The land where the blues began, as described by folklorist Alan Lomax, is a world of Dantean horrors, where the natural plagues of snake-infested swamps, oppressive heat, and backbreaking labor vie with the human degradation of racial subservience and domestic brutality. And for the rebellious or the quick-tempered, behavior was often tempered by the pervasive threat of a sadistic penal system or, ultimately, a lynch mob.
The Land Where the Blues Began is an account of an America that will surprise and shock many white Americans and perhaps not a few black Americans. It is a journey into a realm where the musical genres assume a grotesque function; the blues, field hollers, and work songs are not idle amusements, not even principally expressions of ethnic identity or self-conscious art. They are strategies of survival, rising up organically, as it were, out of the dark Mississippi Delta earth, made fertile by the blood of the black man caught under the lash.
For those whose musical tastes run other
...
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