Live From the Birthplace of American Music

The Blues: This original American art form is defined by the Mississippi Blues Commission as “African American roots music and the culture that produced it.” Most people think of the music when they think of Blues, but the cultural aspect is extremely important, and the music really can’t be appreciated or understood without it. Blues isn’t just “twelve bar” music, it’s a world view, a way of life, an entire culture. To understand the Blues, one must also know about the River, the Land, Juke Joints, Civil Rights, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration.

The Blues (as a world view) is about paradoxical contradiction and the irresolvable conflict/codependence of opposites. The Blues is about hope and despair, leaving and being left, wronging and being wronged, lynching and loving, tragedy and triumph, Saturday night and Sunday morning. It’s a way of taking trouble and making a song out of it, and helping to explain why the righteous suffer in the process, all in a completely vernacular and secular manner. The Blues makes a joyful noise out of lamentation and mourning. It is a way of making poetic and rhythmic sense out of life, and it grows directly out of the life of the Mississippi Delta.

In 1943, Langston Hughes watched Memphis Minnie perform at the 230 Club in Chicago. He wrote about the evening in The Chicago Defender on January 9, and in the process, defined the Blues:

But Memphis Minnie says nothing of the sort. Instead she grabs the microphone and yells, "Hey, now!" Then she hits a few deep chords at random, leans forward ever so slightly over her guitar, bows her head and begins to beat out a good old steady down-home rhythm on the strings --- a rhythm so contagious that often it, makes the crowd holler out loud.

Then Minnie smiles. Her gold teeth flash for a split second. Her ear-rings tremble. Her left hand with dark red nails moves up and down the strings of the guitar's neck. Her right hand with the dice ring on it picks out the tune, throbs out the rhythm, beats out the blues.

Then, through the smoke and racket of the noisy Chicago bar float Louisiana bayous, muddy old swamps, Mississippi dust and sun, cotton fields, lonesome roads, train whistles in the night, mosquitoes at dawn, and the Rural Free Delivery, that never brings the right letter. All these things cry through the strings on Memphis Minnie's electric guitar, amplified to machine proportions --- a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.

Big rough old Delta Cities float in the smoke, too. Also border cities, Northern cities, Relief, W.P.A., Muscle Shoals, the jooks, "Has Anybody Seen My Pigmeat On The Line," "See-See Rider," St. Louis, Antoine Street, Willow Run, folks on the move who leave and don't care. The hand with the dice-ring picks out music like this. Music with so much in it folks remember that sometimes it makes them holler out loud....

-- Langston Hughes, "Music at Year's End". The Chicago Defender, January 9, 1943. Reprinted in Oxford American Magazine, Spring, 2003

The Blues is the Truth

Listening to it, you sense the sticky mud and searing summer heat of the bottomland, the tenant shacks, and eerie specters at desolate crossroads. You feel the despair, joy, hate, fear, wanderlust, and heartbreak. To put it simply, the Delta blues is the truth. That’s why it resonates so deeply across time and culture.

—Robert Peterson in Charley Patton and his Mississippi Boweavil Blues
American Entomologist, Fall 2007, 53(3): 142-144.

The Blues Is the Mississippi Delta

Blues is both music and the culture that produced it. It is music about the truth of place. It captures the feel and the poetry of the place and re-presents it through rhythm and lyric and sliding “blue” notes.

Part of this place is physical. It is a place of the River, floods and droughts, cotton, mules, shanties and shacks, train whistles, endless fields, and crimson sunsets. It is hot all the time, sweaty, often excessively masculine or excessively feminine. It is sometimes violent but often joyous too. It is a place of soul satisfying food and sometimes hard drinking. It is a place of hard work and hard living, but also of the excitement of life and love.

Another part of this place is metaphysical. It is a place where no good deed goes unpunished, where it is impossible to get ahead no matter how hard one tries, where no lover can ever be trusted for long, where the deck is stacked against the player and the Devil is always ready to make a deal for one’s soul if he hasn’t already done so. At the same time, it is a place where travel means freedom and where a man or woman can make a living with a guitar or harmonica instead of picking cotton in the hot sun.

Finally, part of this place is sociological. It is a place where the Man controls the game, where power and wealth are controlled by the High Sheriff and the judge (if not the hangman), and Parchman Penitentiary is the residence of those who live long enough to end up there. It is a place of Jim Crow segregation, separate and unequal, and perpetual second class citizenship. At the same time, it is a place where a man can live by his wits, where clever rhymes and rhythms can lead to good times and happiness.

This place is the Mississippi Delta. And the Delta Blues is about the truth of the place itself. The Blues weaves the various aspects of the place through its lyrics, using the poetry and the rhythms of the music to re-create the feel, taste, smell, sound, and touch of the Mississippi Delta. The Blues was born here, and it uses music to describe the landscape and the life of the place itself.