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 some relief of articulation. In a narrative sense, it denies a resolution to the predicament.
One of the most widely recognized negotiations between the two art forms is the famous (notorious may be a better word) “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 communal oppression that the poet or singer—the bard—will express on behalf of himself and his listeners. 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 most precisely at home in the hands of those who share in the bard’s own cultural tradition of wound and endurance.
Such lyrics also demonstrate doubleness, a technique of oblique articulation, characteristic of work songs under slavery, from which the blues arose. Songs within earshot of overseers had to convey many meanings “under the radar” rather than by explicit 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, as her meter derived from church hymnals. One could do worse than examine how religious musical traditions have fed poetic forms dealing with extremes of spiritual experience and the desire for transcending earthly torment. In its disembodied utterance, the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example, sits comfortably alongside Dickinson’s obsessive metaphors of suffering and transcendence. Like the work of later poets who would work within an explicitly declared blues mode, Dickinson’s work often ironizes her own suffering without the hope for deus ex machina or any further development of the speaker's own agency.
Likewise, blues as a musical or poetic form rarely offers explicit catharsis for the speaker’s predicament. Because of the strictures under which this form of expression developed, a trademark quality of resignation set in. The song itself, with its sly double-entendres and passive aggression, repetitive rhythms with roots in heave-ho physical labor, was the only avenue for public articulation of the unbearable. After the repetition and refrain enact the relentlessness of the speaker’s situation, articulation often terminates in an attitude of resilience, survival taking the form of an emotional stance either stoic or irreverent.
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 romantic 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 solve the immediate predicament, the speaker finds solace in a defiant irreverence: “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.” She withholds any assurance that the crisis eliciting the earlier distress will be resolved.
Therefore poets that declare a blues mode, as does Gwendolyn Brooks in her 1945 “Queen of the Blues,” follow a similar template. Brooks’s character Mame, a blues singer at a nightclub, airs a list of grievances that includes abusive men, oppressive white folk and her now departed mother; but the narrator’s refrain concerns Mame’s facility for rhythm and dance, bestowing attitudinal status as a queen, with the repeated question “For what did she have/To lose?”
The poem shows Brooks’s grasp of the blues’ underlying concern 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 given voice to demand: “Show me a man/What will love me/Till I die.” The intrinsic concerns of love, health and survival impel the poem in a characteristically upbeat articulation of despair and endurance: more interestingly, the 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?” This ambiguity signifies the utterance as intended for one and all within the bard’s purview of cultural experience.
This sense of intra-cultural code makes it seem fitting that it is often black writers most strictly following these thematic and structural patterns of the blues form. 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 per 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 nigger/ 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 thematic and psychological dimensions of genre.
Ultimately such existential irreverence results in a peculiarly self-reflexive quality: suggesting that the song itself is the vehicle of endurance, harkening back to the time of call-and-response field work and bitterly ironic gaiety under duress.
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 some relief of articulation. In a narrative sense, it denies a resolution to the predicament.
One of the most widely recognized negotiations between the two art forms is the famous (notorious may be a better word) “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 communal oppression that the poet or singer—the bard—will express on behalf of himself and his listeners. 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 most precisely at home in the hands of those who share in the bard’s own cultural tradition of wound and endurance.
Such lyrics also demonstrate doubleness, a technique of oblique articulation, characteristic of work songs under slavery, from which the blues arose. Songs within earshot of overseers had to convey many meanings “under the radar” rather than by explicit 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, as her meter derived from church hymnals. One could do worse than examine how religious musical traditions have fed poetic forms dealing with extremes of spiritual experience and the desire for transcending earthly torment. In its disembodied utterance, the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example, sits comfortably alongside Dickinson’s obsessive metaphors of suffering and transcendence. Like the work of later poets who would work within an explicitly declared blues mode, Dickinson’s work often ironizes her own suffering without the hope for deus ex machina or any further development of the speaker's own agency.
Likewise, blues as a musical or poetic form rarely offers explicit catharsis for the speaker’s predicament. Because of the strictures under which this form of expression developed, a trademark quality of resignation set in. The song itself, with its sly double-entendres and passive aggression, repetitive rhythms with roots in heave-ho physical labor, was the only avenue for public articulation of the unbearable. After the repetition and refrain enact the relentlessness of the speaker’s situation, articulation often terminates in an attitude of resilience, survival taking the form of an emotional stance either stoic or irreverent.
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 romantic 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 solve the immediate predicament, the speaker finds solace in a defiant irreverence: “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.” She withholds any assurance that the crisis eliciting the earlier distress will be resolved.
Therefore poets that declare a blues mode, as does Gwendolyn Brooks in her 1945 “Queen of the Blues,” follow a similar template. Brooks’s character Mame, a blues singer at a nightclub, airs a list of grievances that includes abusive men, oppressive white folk and her now departed mother; but the narrator’s refrain concerns Mame’s facility for rhythm and dance, bestowing attitudinal status as a queen, with the repeated question “For what did she have/To lose?”
The poem shows Brooks’s grasp of the blues’ underlying concern 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 given voice to demand: “Show me a man/What will love me/Till I die.” The intrinsic concerns of love, health and survival impel the poem in a characteristically upbeat articulation of despair and endurance: more interestingly, the 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?” This ambiguity signifies the utterance as intended for one and all within the bard’s purview of cultural experience.
This sense of intra-cultural code makes it seem fitting that it is often black writers most strictly following these thematic and structural patterns of the blues form. 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 per 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 nigger/ 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 thematic and psychological dimensions of genre.
Ultimately such existential irreverence results in a peculiarly self-reflexive quality: suggesting that the song itself is the vehicle of endurance, harkening back to the time of call-and-response field work and bitterly ironic gaiety under duress.
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.