Feeling Black and Blue: Considering Thematic Parameters
November 2, 2010
The mutual attraction between blues as a poetic form and blues as a musical form, their fertile historical interaction, seems to me reliant on an unspoken agreement.
This is that “blues” presides over a distinct range of emotional expression – one concerned not only with oppression but with its endurance, employing irony and intra-cultural understanding, typically racially contextualized; one which, with its roots in spirituals, will readily consider notions of mortality. Rhyme, rhythm and repetition can decisively evoke a blues form in poetry or in song, but these ingredients have little meaning outside of the tacitly agreed-on thematic range. The underlying attraction, then, between these forms seems less strictly technical than emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Such concerns generate the identifiable genre pattern between two media.
"Bruise" may not be the root of the term, but the auditory connotation is fitting. The term “blues,” with its echo of “bruise” and the attendant coloring, limns the expressive parameters. Blues is more a diagnostic than a cathartic mode of expression, both a self-examination spurred by injury and a coming to terms with that injury. The typical blues narrative is only "cathartic" in the sense of allowing its protagonist the relief of articulation. Narratively, it denies a resolution to the stated predicament.
One of the most widely recognized negotiations between the two art forms is the famous (notorious might be a better term) “Strange Fruit,” popularized by Billie Holiday, composed upon a 1936 poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high-school teacher from the Bronx. “Strange Fruit” typifies what we think of as the blues' macabre gaiety: what Emily Dickinson described as “singing off of charnel house steps.” It is a way to taste one’s own despair--to savor it:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The lyrics of Meeropol’s original poem transmute utmost suffering and injustice into something succulent, if only in a world of bitterest irony: just as a musical form of the blues transforms the suffering into thumping grooves and barbecue-tasty guitar licks.
Such lyrics typify the blues’ sense of a shared ordeal that the poet or singer—the bard—will express on behalf of himself and his audience. The odd impersonality of blues lyrics, and to poems operating in a blues register, derives from their elemental language and subject matter, their sense of a collective identity. Like works in the British ballad tradition, the lyrics are stones worn smooth by much handling, passed around over time; they can fit many a palm, but seem at home in the hands of those who can most plausibly be seen to partake, through cultural identity or fitting experience, in the bard’s own wounds and endurance.
Such lyrics also demonstrate a doubleness, a technique of oblique articulation, characteristic of field hollers and work songs during enslavement, where the blues found its rhythmic and rhetorical origins. Songs within earshot of overseers had to convey many meanings “under the radar” and seek alternatives to more explicit forms of protest. Dickinson again: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—/Success in Circuit lies.”
Dickinson's work is not entirely incidental to this discussion, having largely derived its meter from 18th and 19th-century church hymnals. One could do worse than to examine how religious musical traditions fed poetic forms dealing with extremes of spiritual experience, and a specific desire on the part of the speaker to transcend corporeal hardship. With its sense of impending disembodiment, a spiritual like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” might sit comfortably alongside Dickinson’s concretizing metaphors for suffering, death and transcendence ("The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.") As with the work of later poets operating within an explicitly stated blues mode, Dickinson’s work often ironizes her own suffering, without any hope for resolution via deus ex machina, or a speaker's personal agency.
Indeed, blues as a musical or poetic form rarely offers the listener any explicit catharsis for a speaker’s predicament. Unsurprisingly, given the conditions under which this form of expression developed, a trademark quality of resignation seemed to set in. The song itself, with its sly double-entendres and passive aggressions, its repetitive rhythms with roots in physical labor, became the vehicle with which to navigate otherwise intolerable conditions. After repetition and refrain enact the relentlessness of the speaker’s ordeal, the expression often ends by describing a state of resilience, taking the form of a particular emotional stance: stoic, irreverent, defiantly matter-of-fact.
In “Billie’s Blues,” written by Billie Holiday and recorded July 10, 1936, the same year as “Strange Fruit” was published in an educational industry journal, the speaker voices an intimate distress --
Lord, I love my man, tell the world I do,
I love my man, tell the world I do;
But when he mistreats me, makes me feel so blue.
My man wouldn't give me no breakfast, wouldn't give me no dinner,
Squawked about my supper and put me outdoors ...
Rather than resolve her immediate predicament, the speaker takes solace in a kind of wry consideration. “Some men like me 'cause I'm happy, some 'cause I'm snappy,/...Now, if you put that all together, makes me everything a good man needs.” The expression withholds all assurance that the crisis will be resolved in any literal sense.
It's fitting, then, that poets who declare an explicit blues mode, as Gwendolyn Brooks does in her 1945 “Queen of the Blues,” will often take a similar approach. Brooks’s character Mame, a blues singer at a nightclub, airs a list of grievances that includes the acts of abusive men, oppressive white folk and her now departed mother; but the narration emphasizes Mame’s talent for rhythm and movement, employing the question, “For what did she have/To lose?” as its refrain.
As well, the poem displays Brooks’s grasp of the genre’s fundamental engagement with mortality. After the omniscient narrator questions whether it was two years ago or three that Mame put her mother in the ground, Mame is a given voice to demand, “Show me a man/What will love me/Till I die.” Describing the pursuit of love, strength and survival propels this speaker toward a characteristic articulation of both despair and endurance; interestingly, this omniscient speaker’s voice seems to merge with Mame’s in an ambiguously attributable final utterance. “Men are low down/Dirty and mean./Why don't they tip/Their hats to a queen?” The indeterminacy of attribution expands the address to include one and all within the bard’s scope of experience and performance.
The sense of intra-cultural code makes it seem fitting that it is often Black writers declaring and adhering most closely to the thematic and structural traditions of the blues mode. Examples abound, one being Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues,” which employs rollicking rhymed couplets and refrains and describes a Negro who plays “a drowsy syncopated tune” and sings “Ain't got nobody in all this world/Ain't got nobody but ma self./I's gwine to quit ma frownin'/And put ma troubles on the shelf.” Once again, the bard’s acceptance allows for an alchemization of his hardship into song. But as usual in the blues, mortality circumscribes the act. Following this declaration, “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”
The compositional patterns emerge in the work of Caribbean poet Derek Walcott in “Blues,” drawing on the American tradition (1969). Although the rhyme scheme in “Blues” is subtle and irregular, Walcott takes up the theme of racial trial and injury (“They beat this yellow n-----/ black and blue”) and the speaker's characteristic stance of nihilistic stoicism ("It's nothing really ... Still it taught me something/ about love./ If it's so tough, forget it”). Walcott's invocation of blues form acknowledges the rhythm and rhyme scheme as secondary to the thematic and psychological dimensions of the genre.
Contemporary discourse on poetics often grapples with the sense that irony has been divorced from its roots in emotional urgency, and become an airier gesture uncomfortably close to self-satisfied cleverness. The irony employed by the blues, the macabre gaiety, the weaving of trial into song, is born of pain and the basic human need to endure. It provides a fruitful model for a species of irony that is resonant on a spiritual level — if only because it never has to question whether an enduring spirit exists.
November 2, 2010
The mutual attraction between blues as a poetic form and blues as a musical form, their fertile historical interaction, seems to me reliant on an unspoken agreement.
This is that “blues” presides over a distinct range of emotional expression – one concerned not only with oppression but with its endurance, employing irony and intra-cultural understanding, typically racially contextualized; one which, with its roots in spirituals, will readily consider notions of mortality. Rhyme, rhythm and repetition can decisively evoke a blues form in poetry or in song, but these ingredients have little meaning outside of the tacitly agreed-on thematic range. The underlying attraction, then, between these forms seems less strictly technical than emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Such concerns generate the identifiable genre pattern between two media.
"Bruise" may not be the root of the term, but the auditory connotation is fitting. The term “blues,” with its echo of “bruise” and the attendant coloring, limns the expressive parameters. Blues is more a diagnostic than a cathartic mode of expression, both a self-examination spurred by injury and a coming to terms with that injury. The typical blues narrative is only "cathartic" in the sense of allowing its protagonist the relief of articulation. Narratively, it denies a resolution to the stated predicament.
One of the most widely recognized negotiations between the two art forms is the famous (notorious might be a better term) “Strange Fruit,” popularized by Billie Holiday, composed upon a 1936 poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish high-school teacher from the Bronx. “Strange Fruit” typifies what we think of as the blues' macabre gaiety: what Emily Dickinson described as “singing off of charnel house steps.” It is a way to taste one’s own despair--to savor it:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The lyrics of Meeropol’s original poem transmute utmost suffering and injustice into something succulent, if only in a world of bitterest irony: just as a musical form of the blues transforms the suffering into thumping grooves and barbecue-tasty guitar licks.
Such lyrics typify the blues’ sense of a shared ordeal that the poet or singer—the bard—will express on behalf of himself and his audience. The odd impersonality of blues lyrics, and to poems operating in a blues register, derives from their elemental language and subject matter, their sense of a collective identity. Like works in the British ballad tradition, the lyrics are stones worn smooth by much handling, passed around over time; they can fit many a palm, but seem at home in the hands of those who can most plausibly be seen to partake, through cultural identity or fitting experience, in the bard’s own wounds and endurance.
Such lyrics also demonstrate a doubleness, a technique of oblique articulation, characteristic of field hollers and work songs during enslavement, where the blues found its rhythmic and rhetorical origins. Songs within earshot of overseers had to convey many meanings “under the radar” and seek alternatives to more explicit forms of protest. Dickinson again: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—/Success in Circuit lies.”
Dickinson's work is not entirely incidental to this discussion, having largely derived its meter from 18th and 19th-century church hymnals. One could do worse than to examine how religious musical traditions fed poetic forms dealing with extremes of spiritual experience, and a specific desire on the part of the speaker to transcend corporeal hardship. With its sense of impending disembodiment, a spiritual like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” might sit comfortably alongside Dickinson’s concretizing metaphors for suffering, death and transcendence ("The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.") As with the work of later poets operating within an explicitly stated blues mode, Dickinson’s work often ironizes her own suffering, without any hope for resolution via deus ex machina, or a speaker's personal agency.
Indeed, blues as a musical or poetic form rarely offers the listener any explicit catharsis for a speaker’s predicament. Unsurprisingly, given the conditions under which this form of expression developed, a trademark quality of resignation seemed to set in. The song itself, with its sly double-entendres and passive aggressions, its repetitive rhythms with roots in physical labor, became the vehicle with which to navigate otherwise intolerable conditions. After repetition and refrain enact the relentlessness of the speaker’s ordeal, the expression often ends by describing a state of resilience, taking the form of a particular emotional stance: stoic, irreverent, defiantly matter-of-fact.
In “Billie’s Blues,” written by Billie Holiday and recorded July 10, 1936, the same year as “Strange Fruit” was published in an educational industry journal, the speaker voices an intimate distress --
Lord, I love my man, tell the world I do,
I love my man, tell the world I do;
But when he mistreats me, makes me feel so blue.
My man wouldn't give me no breakfast, wouldn't give me no dinner,
Squawked about my supper and put me outdoors ...
Rather than resolve her immediate predicament, the speaker takes solace in a kind of wry consideration. “Some men like me 'cause I'm happy, some 'cause I'm snappy,/...Now, if you put that all together, makes me everything a good man needs.” The expression withholds all assurance that the crisis will be resolved in any literal sense.
It's fitting, then, that poets who declare an explicit blues mode, as Gwendolyn Brooks does in her 1945 “Queen of the Blues,” will often take a similar approach. Brooks’s character Mame, a blues singer at a nightclub, airs a list of grievances that includes the acts of abusive men, oppressive white folk and her now departed mother; but the narration emphasizes Mame’s talent for rhythm and movement, employing the question, “For what did she have/To lose?” as its refrain.
As well, the poem displays Brooks’s grasp of the genre’s fundamental engagement with mortality. After the omniscient narrator questions whether it was two years ago or three that Mame put her mother in the ground, Mame is a given voice to demand, “Show me a man/What will love me/Till I die.” Describing the pursuit of love, strength and survival propels this speaker toward a characteristic articulation of both despair and endurance; interestingly, this omniscient speaker’s voice seems to merge with Mame’s in an ambiguously attributable final utterance. “Men are low down/Dirty and mean./Why don't they tip/Their hats to a queen?” The indeterminacy of attribution expands the address to include one and all within the bard’s scope of experience and performance.
The sense of intra-cultural code makes it seem fitting that it is often Black writers declaring and adhering most closely to the thematic and structural traditions of the blues mode. Examples abound, one being Langston Hughes’s “The Weary Blues,” which employs rollicking rhymed couplets and refrains and describes a Negro who plays “a drowsy syncopated tune” and sings “Ain't got nobody in all this world/Ain't got nobody but ma self./I's gwine to quit ma frownin'/And put ma troubles on the shelf.” Once again, the bard’s acceptance allows for an alchemization of his hardship into song. But as usual in the blues, mortality circumscribes the act. Following this declaration, “He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.”
The compositional patterns emerge in the work of Caribbean poet Derek Walcott in “Blues,” drawing on the American tradition (1969). Although the rhyme scheme in “Blues” is subtle and irregular, Walcott takes up the theme of racial trial and injury (“They beat this yellow n-----/ black and blue”) and the speaker's characteristic stance of nihilistic stoicism ("It's nothing really ... Still it taught me something/ about love./ If it's so tough, forget it”). Walcott's invocation of blues form acknowledges the rhythm and rhyme scheme as secondary to the thematic and psychological dimensions of the genre.
Contemporary discourse on poetics often grapples with the sense that irony has been divorced from its roots in emotional urgency, and become an airier gesture uncomfortably close to self-satisfied cleverness. The irony employed by the blues, the macabre gaiety, the weaving of trial into song, is born of pain and the basic human need to endure. It provides a fruitful model for a species of irony that is resonant on a spiritual level — if only because it never has to question whether an enduring spirit exists.