“Learning to Sing the Blues” Rev. Greg Ward and Zackrie Vinczen and Soul Rising Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley October 11, 2015
BEGINNING THE JOURNEY: <
When his mother died, Riley had to survive by doing farm work. His uncle taught him guitar, and he bought an eight-dollar guitar for himself to learn on. It wasn’t long until he discovered he could make more money playing on street corners than he could doing farm work. He originally tried singing the gospel music he’d learned from his mother in the church choir. Everybody appreciated it, but nobody gave him any money. So he tried playing the blues, using lyrics he’d learned from gospel songs. Whenever the song said, ‘My Lord’, he sang “my baby” instead. From that point forward, people gave him a lot more money.
He finished a tour in the Army during World War II after which he moved to Memphis. There, he worked as a deejay using the on-air name “Beale Street Blues-Boy,” which got shortened to “Blues Boy”, which got shortened to B.B.
B.B. King toured the country with his trademark red guitar, which he named Lucille, for two decades. He played in black clubs and dance halls, saloons and even in jails.
“Some people smoke and drink to get through their troubles…” he said. “But somehow, just holding the guitar and singing the blues seems to do it for me.”
B.B. King died this past May; he was 89.
Come, let us worship together.
READING <
I grew up in the south. My parents gave me piano lessons, and I learned the classics. I loved Beethoven's, "Moonlight Sonata."
But in my town of Hopewell, Mississippi, I would hear bits and snatches of the blues. When no one was around I tried playing what I heard. I picked out chord changes, and improvised. I sang and played the sadness that came to me on account of my Uncle Bert doing to me things I couldn’t talk to no one about, and “Moonlight Sonata” seemed too nice for my life.
I played the blues in secret until my Mama caught me and told me that that music was ugly. On top of that, Daddy hated the blues and turned red when he heard I'd been playing them. They told me only to play pretty music, like, "Moonlight Sonata." I obliged. But when they wasn’t around, I played the blues. And every once in a while, when Mama and Papa were home, I tried to sneak the blues into, "Moonlight Sonata."
One night when I thought I was alone ‘cause Daddy went out drinking, he came back and heard me singing the blues. He got so mad, he grabbed his pistol, and shot the piano. My ears rang for days. Eventually he pushed the piano out onto the back porch where storms beat on it. I stopped playing altogether and became quiet, as if to become invisible.
I took to walking across town to the train station, just to stand on the platform and look up and down the tracks. Down led to New Orleans and up led to Memphis, which seemed like the other side of the universe, and freedom.
I'd stand on the "whites only" side of the platform all alone. On the colored side folks lined up with belongings in paper bags and children in hand, heading north – out of the cotton fields, to Memphis. Maybe even Chicago. I envied them. They had each other, a ticket to freedom, and a way through the blues. I had nobody, no freedom, and no blues.
I got a job at the local five and ten, and for a couple years hid all my money in my mattress, until one day, when I was seventeen, I packed a suitcase, walked myself to the station, and bought me a ticket north.
I got on that train and thought I was free. But I was so naive. It turned out I took my Mama and Daddy, my Uncle Bert and all of Hopewell, Mississippi right along with me. What I had thought was freedom was only an escape, and when all you do is escape, your shout of freedom is never quite the blues - just a rattling of chains. The most unfree souls I ever knowed spent their (whole) lives escaping.
SERMON <
It got so bad, me and my brother – a year older – made a plan to pack up our things and head out on our own. We made a sign that read, “Two kids, free to a good home.” We were gonna stand out in front of the house until we got an offer. But our neighbors turned us in and our escape was foiled. So we kept our blues to ourselves.
By that time, we were already Unitarian Universalist. Which meant that we couldn’t sing the blues. Not in church anyway. It wasn’t our way. We did a lot of Bach and Brahams in my home church. Good church organ music. But like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – it didn’t seem to fit. I never doubted that UUs felt the blues. I knew we had heartbreaks of our own, deep down. We just had a different way of dealing with them. We didn’t try to sing the blues so much as we tried to intellectualize the blues.
As a UU, I was raised to out think the blues. Develop sophisticated escape routes in my mind. But every one of those routes always returned me back home. I understood what it meant: “The most unfree souls… (always spend) their (whole) lives escaping.”
Of course, I wasn’t the first to try out thinking the blues. In the 5th century BCE, when Socrates was put to death, his protégé, Plato grieved. In his grief, he withdrew from the harsh, imperfect world of feelings, and chose to live in a world of perfect logic. He didn’t get sad or morose. He didn’t get the blues. He simply escaped into his mind.
UU colleague, the Rev. Linda Hansen asks an interesting question about this in an old edition of the UU World.
“Unitarian Universaslists,” she says, “are sometimes dismissive of those who seek refuge in a world beyond this one. But wouldn’t it be more honest to admit that we, too, do this. That there is something of Plato in each of us?” – A penchant to transcend this world of feelings: and worries, and sadness and grief, and insulate ourselves in the contours of our minds?
It’s worth wondering, then, how we plan to love our lives if we never take time to know – to love – the sad parts too. It’s like being in a relationship where you’re only allowed to be happy – where hurt, sadness, grief, anger – even confusion – are unacceptable. So you stuff it down. Or, at best, intellectualize it.
I’m 53 years old now and that was the first half of my life. And that’s my blues. The “invisible child in a divorcing household blues.” Or, later, “I heard my honey promise her love but she was talking to the dog” blues.
What’s your blues? Do you have your own blues song? Maybe you recently let go of a good friend. Or maybe a good friend recently let go of you. Maybe workin’ is gettin’ in the way of loving… or livin’ your dream. Maybe you been waking up alone and wanting to wake up next to someone else. Or maybe you been waking up next to someone else and wanting to wake up alone. In my mind, there isn’t anybody who doesn’t have the goods somewhere in their life, to sing some down home, honest, hard boiled blues now and again. And if you’ve looked hard – real hard – at your whole life… and can’t find something – anything – worth singing the blues for, well, then… that’s an even better reason to sing the blues. ‘Cause, if that’s the case, chances are you haven’t learned to care about anything enough to give it the power to break your heart. A sure fire sign that you spent your life thinking too much!
But maybe… maybe…. you’re like me… and you’ve HAD the blues, but you just aren’t sure how to SING the blues. Well… if that’s the case… maybe we should stop all this heavy thinking, and take a good look at what really IS – and what ISN’T – the blues.
The blues is something you feel, not something you intellectualize. You don’t read ahead and make sure you agree with the words. The blues is something that comes from the heart, runs through your soul, grabs hold of your body and shakes it around - because when you hear the blues, you just gotta move SOMETHING! Snap your fingers or tap your feet. And serious blues means you just shake your head and moan.
The blues, at their best, will have you laughing one minute, and crying the next. The blues is a public call of a private pain. A call for others to participate in some personal heartbreak. From their origin with the blacks and poor whites during the period of American reconstruction, they were often called, ‘holler backs.’ Which meant that when life was yellin’ or bein’ unkind, you holler back at life and tell it about the sorry, slip-shod job it’s been doing at giving you what you need. That’s the blues.
And if you’re listening to something and can’t tell if it’s the blues…? Here’s how you know: If the guitar is out of tune – on purpose – it’s probably the blues. If the singer sounds like he has an old car parked on his chest – it’s probably the blues. If the first words you hear are “I woke up this morning…” it’s probably the blues.
If the song starts out saying "I got a good woman" it’s not the blues - unless - the next line is something nasty, like “I got a good woman-- with the meanest dog in town.” That’s the blues.
Blues lyrics are not terribly intellectual. After you sing the first line, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes. Sort of. It may start: “Got a good woman-- with the meanest dog in town,” And end with: “Got teeth like an alligator-- and weighs ‘bout 500 pounds.” And when the last line describes your woman – not the dog – it’s the blues.
There are a few rules about the blues that everyone should know. If you’re going to sing the blues about your car, it’s better if it’s a Chevy and Cadillac. It’s hard to sing the blues about a Prius or a Tesla. Other acceptable blues transportation includes a Greyhound bus or a southbound train. Walkin' is always popular with the blues. Catching a plane can be about the blues – but usually only if it’s on fire.
And where you choose to have the blues is important. You can’t have the blues in an office park or a shopping mall. The lighting is wrong. Other bad places include Ashrams, Gallery openings or dinners at Chez Panisse. The blues is made for basements and back porches, unnamed highways and county jails. Empty beds and empty houses make for the blues.
It’s always easier to sing the blues about being blind; or having shot a man in Memphis; or getting the news that you’re gonna die.
It’s much harder to sing the blues about how you were once blind, but now can see; about having stolen the last piece of pound cake or getting the news that you’re about to be taxed on the income from your trust fund.
If you ask for water and your baby gives you gasoline, it's the blues. But don’t sing about any drink that has an umbrella in it. Or Perrier or a Pumpkin Spice Latte… that’s not the blues.
And when it comes to dying, if it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it's the blues. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is a blues way to die. So is the electric chair, substance abuse, or being denied treatment in an emergency room. If you die while getting a butt implant, it’s not the blues.
One important thing to remember is that the blues always has something to do with dying. Whether it be a friend, a lover, a dream or your dignity, something is lost that never thought you could live without. And the pain is everywhere. You can’t out run it, you can’t out hide it, and you can’t out think it. The pain is there until you find a way to face up to it. That’s the blues.
The great black writer Ralph Ellison understood this. Ellison – you may know – was famous for writing the American classic, ‘The Invisible Man.’ But what you may not know was that his book was not the late night horror movie we’ve turned it into. It was really about how he felt as a black man in white America. It was a commentary about social standing, and how being black made him feel invisible. If someone used racial slurs he knew they weren’t seeing who he really was. If they apologized after bumping into him, they did so in sterile politeness without ever looking him in the face. Feeling invisible was Ellison’s blues.
He also happened to be a huge fan of the blues. In one of his essays, he said this:
“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness. To finger one’s jagged grain. The blues is an autobiographical chronicle of a personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
In other words, he’s suggesting that we have a need to finger the jagged grain’ of our life, or we’ll never find our path to freedom. Bandaids and tunicates are not the answer, because it’s not about ending or escaping the pain. It’s about exploring the sharpness of that which has cut into us… taking inventory of the unrealized dreams that have bled out… while still clinging to that last hope worth holding on to.
And as much as we think we can do this without others – do it by our thoughts alone – we are wrong. When we have a physical wound, we let a doctor examine it so our body can heal. Singing the blues is the way we show the outer world our inner wounds so our soul can heal.
But there’s another reason, as well, that we sing the blues – and that is for the people listening. As much as we allow ourselves to think we’re alone in our pain, we never are. And when someone hears our cry for hope or healing, they may just recognize that hard road to freedom we’re on and start walking themselves.
That’s how it was for me. 25 years ago this fall, after spending half my life one step ahead of my blues I began to wonder why I was so ashamed of the pain inside me. I realized that instead of singing the blues away, I had spent my whole life explaining the blues away. And the difference was my self acceptance and self respect.
And one Sunday it all caught up with me. I found myself in church. I can’t remember the theme… or the sermon that morning. But I remember the hymn. And the story that introduced it. It was the story behind ‘Precious Lord’. “Precious Lord! Take my hand, lead me on, let me stand. I am tired. I am weak. I am worn.”
I remember hearing those lines was like my story catching up with me. I may have been in a church. But it was the blues. I realized then that, despite all my effort, I hadn’t managed to outrun or outthink the blues. I had only retarded their expression. That’s when it became clear: I was a blues retard.
The next lines of the hymn were even more powerful: “Through the storm, through the night, lead me on, to the light. Take my hand, Precious Lord, lead me home.” I knew – it wasn’t just one heartbreak that that stood at the breech, but a lifetime of them. A hurricane of pain that felt just too much to face – against which I felt all alone. I needed some people who would listen. Hold my hand. Lead me home.
Thomas Dorsey didn’t know he would help me with my blues when he wrote that hymn. He wrote it in 1932 as a way ‘to keep the painful details of his own brutal experience alive in his consciousness.’ It came several months after he reluctantly left his pregnant wife behind in Chicago to be the featured soloist for a revival in St. Louis. During an encore, with the crowd going wild, a courier came on stage to hand him a telegram. It informed him that his wife had died in labor giving birth to his son. The next day he got another telegram telling him that his son died as well.
Dorsey was devastated… and railed at the unfairness. He said that for a long time he couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t play, couldn’t write. All he wanted to do was to curl up and die. But a friend encouraged him to try and find his way back to what he loved. And what loved him. He wrote this hymn. And in so doing, helped me – and so many more, find their way back as well.
It works that way sometimes. One person getting in touch with their pain helps us find a way through ours. Isn’t that what the church is all about? A place where we can learn to deal with the pain that we’ve carried? That others have carried? That the world carries?
The church needs to be in touch with the pain of the world or it simply isn’t doing its job. And you can hardly get in touch with the pain of the world if you can’t sing the blues – at least a little – every now and then. In fact, I believe, when we are really tired… and weak… and worn, singing the blues is the only thing we have that will lead us home.
To the Glory of Life.
SINGING TOGETHER <