Sexual signifying offers blues song a way of creating pleasure through heavily freighted indirection: plays on words that gesture forcefully at sexualized bodies and the sex acts they engage in without actually using the four-letter Anglo Saxon equivalents. Johnson, Bessie Smith sings of being deserted by a new lover, celebrating with vivid suggestiveness his hip-powered prowess and endurance:.
Bought me a coffee grinder, got the best one I could find Bought me a coffee grinder, got the best one I could find So he could grind my coffee cause he has a new grind. The origins of signifying lie in the antebellum South, when enslaved African Americans had a pressing need to communicate sensitive information with each other in public spaces on the plantation—an impending escape attempt, for example—in a way that evaded detection by the master.
No longer did the slavemaster have the right to select your mate and keep you down on the farm. The blues lyric tradition signifies endlessly on this point.
What is the blues ethos and why does it matter? Like blues expressiveness, the blues ethos is several related things, not just one thing.
When most people offer definitions of the blues, they tend to neglect the blues ethos. My first exposure to the blues ethos came long before I had encountered the concept by name. In , shortly after I began playing harmonica on the streets of Harlem with a Mississippi-born guitarist known as Mr. Satan, one of his sidewalk fans told me that his real name was Sterling Magee.
When I expressed curiosity about the name-change, a story soon emerged. He stayed right by her bedside, nursing her. When she died, he fell off the deep end. He dragged himself back home to Mississippi, drunk and inconsolable; months later, when he returned to Harlem, he was calling himself by the new name and demanding that everybody else do the same. That was five years before I had come along. The Mr. Satan I knew was the opposite of despairing: he was a ring-tailed roarer animated by phenomenal talent and energy, joyous and irrepressible.
How—knowing what I knew of his own encounter not just with romantic tragedy but with death—could I not put aside my self-pity and get back to the business of living? That was my baptism into the blues ethos: that harsh laugh, and the exaggeration that accompanied it, transforming pain into life force. I had not yet encountered the writings of Albert Murray or Kalamu ya Salaam, but the experience helped me appreciate their insights when I finally did. And a certain kind of reality-based, fantasy-assisted humor, according to Salaam, is a tool with which blues people have managed to enable such persistence.
This grace includes, but is not overcome by, a profound recognition of the economic inequality and political racism of America. Thus, we laugh loud and heartily when every rational expectation suggests we should be crying in despair. The combination of exaggeration and conscious recognition of the brutal facts of life is the basis for the humor of blues people, which is real black humor.
How should you deal with bad news? They complain, to be sure, but they do so in a context that facilitates a spirit of creative resistance. The blues ethos acknowledges the power generated when emotional pain is annealed with a self-mockery that wards off descent into outright, immobilizing depression. Spiritual toughness is part of the blues ethos. Even when you give up, do so only as long as you need to. Then pick yourself up and get cracking.
To do so bespeaks spiritual immaturity: an unwise insistence on reifying the miseries of the present moment. Trouble in mind. The long arc of black history, bringing African slaves to Jamestown in and an African American President to the White House in , energizes both poles of the dialectic.
When all else fails, insists the blues ethos, look down that road. Take the long view. Stay loose. Keep things moving. Give your luck a chance to change. Several months earlier, Bill had had a minor stroke and lost ninety percent of his vision.
Yet his spirits were undimmed, even ebullient. I stayed there for a week, played a few pickup gigs, and made enough money to get back to Chicago. Bill could have retreated his hotel room in shock. He could have drowned in his own fury and self-pity, flailing helplessly.
But his response to the sudden appearance of blues conditions—loss of a job and housing, incipient poverty, sudden stranding a long way from home—was to remain loose and forward-looking rather than giving in to shame, fear, and despair. He got out on the road and started walking. He gave the world a chance to rectify the situation. And it did. That sort of quick reversal rarely happens, of course. But it is guaranteed not to happen unless you put yourself in a position where it can happen.
The blues ethos knows all this. Those who embody the blues ethos have the wisdom and resilience, the strength of character, to respond to bad luck by setting transformative possibilities in motion.
I came to a deeper understanding of the blues ethos after Mr. Satan and I left the streets of Harlem in the early s and began to tour, putting in some serious road-miles.
He was a feelingful man, but an unsentimental one, disinclined to coddle or be coddled. One night when I picked him up at his apartment for a downtown gig, he had a bloody bandage wrapped around his hand. Any other guitar player would have canceled the gig.
He played the five-hour gig, wincing occasionally but never complaining. Make the gig: that was his philosophy. The blues ethos in action.
It put things in perspective. It reframed them in a useful way. Satan was ready. Several summers ago I drew on the blues ethos in a way that showed me the practical efficacy of the concept. Jazz is a fusion of African and European music and was developed in the USA in the early part of the 20th century.
The style started out as Dixieland jazz in New Orleans in the early s. It is a mix of brass band marches, ragtime, blues and gospel. One of the primary features of the style was that performers improvised together rather than taking solo improvisation spots, which gives a polyphonic texture. Jazz was played in bars as they were one of the few places where African American citizens were allowed to perform.
Several types of jazz music developed during the 20th century but many famous jazz musicians crossed over between styles. The origins of the blues and the jazz movement The birth of the blues. Singer, Bessie Smith. The male singers often became migrant workers, moving from the plantations of the Mississippi delta to larger towns and cities such as Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago, often living in very tough conditions and subject to racial segregation and abuse.
In these displaced communities, singing and dancing became a means of maintaining a collective identity and voicing emotions. Migrant musicians tended to accompany themselves on guitar rather than piano because of its portability.
The original delta blues continued to be part of the southern culture, but as musicians became more mobile, the blues were transformed for new communities. The large-scale migration of black workers from the southern states to the northern cities — often referred to as the Great Migration — created pockets of densely populated and very poor black communities within the urban areas of the cities.
Prior to the Great Depression of the s, many of the migrant agricultural labourers found themselves jobs in city factories, but these were poorly paid. However, they took their sense of community with them and a more dynamic version of the blues emerged, making use of the new technology of electric amplification. Making the decision to study can be a big step, which is why you'll want a trusted University. Take a look at all Open University courses.
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