Nicholas Higgins 13/07/2020

The Sky is Cryin

‘The whole of life expresses the blues. That’s why I always say the blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling and understanding’, Willie Dixon

The influence of the blues has been vast. It can lay claim to be the father of pretty much all popular Western music styles today, from Jazz, to R and B to Rock and Roll. The music’s historic masters - Robert Johnson, Elmore James, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson and their progeny have the status of icons. Their music is a canon, like the classical repertoire, interpreted and imitated by generation after generation of admirers, black and white, male and female.

We might define it as a distinctly African-American type of folk music. As it’s name implies, it’s almost synonymous with lamentation and commiseration. If we are getting into terminology, it typically has 12 bars and three chords arranged in a I-IV-I-V-VI-I structure. It usually contains flatted thirds and sevenths (the ‘blue notes’). It is instantly recognisable by its strong back beat and characteristic pulsating rhythm. 

What truly defines it, however, is the power and subtlety of emotion with which it is infused. It’s lyrics centre not on the happy, shiny, blissful parts of human existence, but on the inevitable and ineradicable pain of life. As Leroy Carr put it in ‘Blue Night Blues’:

Survey the song titles of all the great blues artists and you’d think they’re all on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Elmore James’s, ‘It hurts me too’. John Lee Hooker’s, ‘It serves me right to suffer’. Son House’s ‘Death Letter Blues’ or Skip James’s ‘Devil Got My Woman’. Such dejection makes sense when you look at the tail of woe that is African American history. This is 300 years of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, sharecropping, oppression, poverty, lynching, prison camps, and worry. The history of the blues is a history of an outcast people fighting to be someone, battling for a small shred of joy and community against overwhelming odds.

As has has been well documented by historians, slavery was social as well as a physical death. It left the enslaved person not just powerless and and without honour, but alienated from his natal rights - i.e shorn of all familial connections and ancestral claims, including his own name. One way to fight against this was through spirituals (religious songs), work songs and field ‘hollers’. By sharing and externalising their pain they built up a mutual solidarity. Music took on a reparative and transformative function by reminding slaves that they did not suffer alone.

The blues that took shape in the ‘juke joints’ of the post-emancipation decades stayed true to these roots. Set up on the outskirts of town, often in ramshackle, abandoned buildings or private houses, they offered food, drink, gambling and music to weary African-American workers. They became places where performers and their congregations staged a sacred ritual of unburdening. Blues, as one historian put it, became a sort of ‘secular spiritual’ and the bluesman its minister. Just as it does for millions today, listening to raw, authentic blues music wringed out the emotions and cleansed the soul. It was catharsis. It, in short, made their lives worth living.

It’s creators certainly did not follow the self pitying, ‘woe is me’ grumbling we so often hear today. They realised that whining just wasn’t an effective long term strategy. Nor did they deny or hide from their pain. Rather, they wholeheartedly acknowledged it as an essential fact of life, they said it, they sang it, they shared it. They got it out by all means. The very act of turning pain into music, something to dance and sing to, radically disarmed that pain. As Abrol Fairweather has said, ‘the blues isn’t about overcoming, it is overcoming’. Such is the power of music to transcend adversity.

Listening to a blues record it’s astonishing how it turns the worst and grossest parts of life into something artistic and actually very positive. Elmore James in ‘Sky is Cryin’ sings how ‘my baby don’t love me no more…the tears rolling down my door’. In his raspy voice there is undoubtedly a deep anguish and distress. Yet this is not mopey, melancholic distress, it’s strong, assertive, triumphant. His tone is rich, full and impassioned. Usually when a person feels ‘blue’ or depressed, they feel nothing matters, nothing is worth getting excited about. ’Sky is Cryin’ criticises delightfully this state of mind. It takes that feeling so many of us are prone to, ‘feeling blue’, and gives it an energy and liveliness that definitely contradicts the mood of what is being said.

Elmore James’s raw, growling, voice; the bent, wailing cry of the electric guitar. The song is raucously sensual, it exudes passion, feeling and fervour. Indeed, to me it sounds like an exultant, even celebratory, affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope. ‘What is ultimately at stake’, writes Murray in Stomping the Blues, ‘is morale, which is to say the will to persevere, the disposition to persist and perhaps prevail; and what must be avoided by all means is a failure of nerve’. The blues captures poignantly this stoic ethos, beneath the doleful lyrics is stoic persistence, a refusal to give up, a dogged resilience in the face of adversity. 

Certainly a teenage middle class white boy’s pain in being unable to get together with his girlfriend is a far cry from the pain Elmore James describes. But pain is pain, whatever be its causes or implications. The blues reminds us powerfully that we are not the first to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It tells us to embrace, even celebrate our sorrow. It sings what is widely proclaimed today, ‘It’s okay to not be okay’. 

But the spirit of the blues is also to pick ourselves up. Here is a music that demands the question: What do we do with our sadness, pain and disappointment? Do we use them to grow and learn, to see more meaning in things and other people? Or do we let them dispirit us and make us bitter about the world? The blues compels us to choose the former. As Lightnin Hopkins sang, to go get that ‘mojo hand’.