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Blues, Gospel and Jazz Impulses: a Way of Understanding of African American Culture and Damn Near Anything Else, for That Matter

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Blues, Gospel and Jazz Impulses: a Way of Understanding of African American Culture and Damn Near Anything Else, for That Matter 1 Blues, Gospel and Jazz Impulses: A Way of Understanding of African American Culture and Damn Near Anything Else, For That Matter Timothy B. Tyson Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University In his essay, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Ralph Ellison, the great African American novelist and cultural critic, called blues, gospel and jazz the essential “impulses” of black culture in America. Blues, gospel and jazz— not the specific musical forms but the cultural sensibilities they reflect--are not just different styles of approaching the saxophone or piano; blues, gospel and jazz are fundamental ways of addressing the human condition. Craig Werner’s classic A Change Is Gonna Come: Race, Music and the Soul of America expands on Ellison and illuminates the blues, gospel and jazz impulses, drawing on sources from Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues to Willie Dixon’s “Hootchie Kootchie Man” to Ice Cube’s “True to the Game” to the latest and grittiest hip-hop. I spend the most time on the blues impulse here because it is the fundamental recognition necessary to engage the gospel and jazz impulses. Of the blues, gospel and jazz impulses, the blues is the most basic. You cannot do the gospel impulse without going through the blues impulse, nor can you do the jazz impulse without going through the blues. The blues impulse begins in a brutal history, personal or political or most often both. It addresses the grittiest realities of human life: sex, money, violence, mortality and the lack of practically everything. And also the 123 percent of cases in which one might suspect sex and money to be the same damn thing. As Zora Neale Hurston says: “Love made and unmade.” Albert Murray argues that the blues addresses Hamlet’s question—“to be or not to be”—“which is also what the question is when you wake up with the blues there again, not only all around your bed but also inside your head.” As I am tiring of feeling but fond of saying, I don’t just have a problem, I am a problem. And then the blues impulse looks those brutal truths in the eye and says, in the words of Willie Dixon: “I’m here, everybody knows I’m here.” Ellison defines it succinctly: “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not 2 through the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near- tragic, near-comic lyricism.” One woman’s blues, expressed in a country song title: “Killing Him Didn’t Make the Love Go Away.” This definition of the blues as an existential posture is not limited to12-bar musical structures or any particular genre on your iTunes. Blues is instead a posture of confronting the broken world by means of narrative honesty, bitter poetry and hard-won laughter. The blues impulse embraces a brutal history, and not only acknowledges that brutality but refuses to deny responsibility for one’s own part in it. The blues is about endurance, not innocence, it’s about survival, not transcendence, except such transcendence offered by “squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” Not just a musical form but a cultural form. In this sense, hip-hop can be blues, lots of country music can be blues, and some of the books we’re going to read can be blues. Blues starts with the burden of history, the pain of human existence. Unlucky in love, out of money, if you’ve heard blues music you know those themes, but how about chained in the bottom of a boat and sold across the sea? Where does the blues take us from there? It looks a brutal history straight in the eye. And then it turns those agonies into poetry and grim humor. Rather than sipping the weak tea of optimism, rather than praying for Divine intervention, the blues impulse shoots the straight whiskey of truth and fatalism, confessing its own isolation and despair. But rather than succumb to grief, the blues artist laughs to keep from crying and cries to keep from dying and turns to that “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” to turn nightmares into poetry and heartbreak into humor. Always outnumbered and always outgunned, the blues David looks old Goliath in the eye and says, “I’m drinkin’ TNT, I’m smokin’ dynamite / And I hope some fool try to start a fight / I’m ready, ready as anybody can be / I’m ready for you, baby, I hope you’re ready for me.” The blues impulse leads a man to stand up and sing, “I’m a rattlesnakin; daddy / love to rattle all night long,” the whole time knowing, and sometimes crowing, deep in sorrow and hard to say, “there’s another mule kickin’ in my stall.” 3 The blues impulse understands a world in which there are no good choices; in which we have made terrible mistakes already; where we have innocent blood on our hands, even though we had our reasons; a world in which we are damned if we go deeper and damned if we duck out; and yet a world in which we nonetheless have to make choices. Like the underrated theologian Bessie Smith sang: “Nineteen men living in my neighborhood / Eighteen of them fools and the one ain’t no damn good.” The gospel impulse takes us one giant step beyond the blues. Gospel begins with a brutal history, too, asking: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” (In fact, this song in some ways is more blues than gospel, despite its formal genre.) The gospel impulse testifies to the same burdens that the blues carries. Rather than simply enduring, however, the gospel impulse seeks to transcend those burdens by expressing itself in relation to others and to God. The gospel impulse reaches out and reaches up and always moves toward higher ground. “How I Got Over,” Mahalia Jackson sings. The gospel impulse bears witness to the burden and upholds the tradition, but it extends a hand to humanity and to God, and works toward redemption. Where the blues endures, the gospel transcends, lifts up, sees the Divine light within us and finds God in the beauty of Creation. Gospel vision holds out the hope for a better tomorrow. Like blues and gospel, the jazz impulse is rooted in that same burden of a brutal history and in traditions of addressing it. A jazz artist keeps one hand wrapped in what Ellison calls “the chain of tradition,” and yet improvises outward, finding new ways of phrasing and rephrasing the problem and innovative means of dealing with it. Jazz keeps one foot on the old melody, testifying to the burden just like blues and the first turn of gospel, and then tries to work its way forward, keeping the world in motion. Louis Armstrong said that “jazz is music that is never played the same way once.” The jazz impulse is a means of rethinking the human condition, not just an approach to the saxophone. Jazz says we don’t have to do it the way we have always done it. In freedom movement history terms, then, we could read the sit-in movement that began here in North Carolina in 1960 as a blues expression. It walks in, takes a seat, looks a harsh and contemptuous society in the eye and says, “I’m here, what are you going to do about it?” It’s Willie Dixon singing “Hootchie Kootchie Man” again: “I’m here, everybody knows I’m here.” 4 “Two-four-six-eight / We don’t want to integrate,” chanted the segregationist mob. One crowd of sit-in protesters had the wit to chant back, “Eight six four two / Bet you sons-of-bitches do!” That might be blues humor, might be gospel or jazz, too, in some sense; you don’t have to pick one when you’re using Ellison and Werner’s framework for a prism. But of course we could read the sit-ins as gospel, too. You the brutal burden of history, testify to the truth of its inhumanity, and call upon God and call your brothers and sisters together to transcend it. Church clothes, church music, school books, a certain generational strut—smacks of blues—but definitely a clear call for the creation of the beloved community. And at the same time, you could say that the young people who created the sit-in movement were jazz artists. They kept one foot on the tradition. They had learned from their grandparents and parents and teachers and from the Declaration of Independence and the Bible that they had a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that they had a right to the tree of life, and they learned their politics in all-black institutions that were often very cautious environments. They kept one foot on the tradition, but then they reinvented American politics with a bold, defiant stroke that truly brought a new language of freedom into the American political vocabulary. Scarcely a grown-up or a civil rights organization in the South approved at first, but they did it anyway, and it worked. In jazz mode, we might be able to imagine the transitions of understanding to a world beyond white supremacy, beyond sexism and gender-based oppression, beyond classism and poverty, materialism and war. The jazz impulse traces the brutal origins of a historical moment, testifies to its truth, but leaves us open to the possibility that history could have been much better if human beings had acted differently.
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