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Starting the Conversation
KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY BLUES
Speaking very broadly, people who have emotional investments in the blues—people who like, play, think about, talk about, and identify themselves with the blues—have two diametrically opposed ways of configuring the blues in ideological terms. An ideology is simply an idea-set: an intellectual orientation that governs the way one sees the world and thinks through the problems it presents. One way of ideologizing the blues is to say, “The blues are black music.” They’re a black thing. When you look at the history and cultural origins of the blues, when you look at who has a right to claim the social pain expressed through the blues—what you might call the “I’ve got the blues” element of the blues—and when you look at who the most powerful performers and great stylistic innovators have been, it’s black people who have a profound, undeniable, and inalienable claim on blues in a way that whites just don’t. The history, the feelings, the music: they’re a black thing. And when whites get involved, as they always do, black people suffer.
This ideological position, a form of black cultural nationalism that I term “black bluesism,” is expressed with great clarity and power by Roland L. Freeman, an African American photographer and cultural documentarian, in a poem titled “Don’t Forget the Blues.”1 Freeman composed his poem in 1997 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival—the oldest black-run blues festival in the country—and he read it out loud to the crowd. “Do you see ’em,” the poem begins, “here they come”:
Easing into our communities
In their big fancy cars,
Looking like alien carpetbaggers
Straight from Mars.
They slide in from the East,
North, South and West,
And when they leave, You can bet they’ve taken the best.
Listen to me,
I’ve been drunk a long time
And I’m still drinking.
I take a bath every Saturday night,
But I’m still stinking.
This world’s been whipping me upside my head,
But it hasn’t stopped me from thinking.
I know they’ve been doing anything they choose,
I just want ’em to keep their darn hands off ’a my blues.
After directing a verse at his female lover and repeating the chorus, the poet continues his litany:
There they go, with our gold.
They drug us out of Africa
By our heels,
They slapped us down in their
Tobacco, rice and cotton fields.
They’ve fashioned our rhythm ’n blues
Into their rock ’n roll.
And now they have the nerve to come back
Looking for our souls.
The poet repeats the chorus, ending with the refrain, “I know they’ve been doing anything they choose, / I just want ’em to keep their darn hands off ’a my blues.”
That aggrieved “I,” demanding our attention, is an avatar of the blues, his blackness unmarked but evident, who refuses to say die: drunk and stinking, beaten down by the world, he is still “thinking,” still conscious and resistant. The poem’s omnipresent “they” is white people—more specifically, white blues tourists, fans, producers, musicians, anybody who seeks pleasure and profit from the music. “They” is the oppressive white world, an all-points barrage (“from the East / North, South and West”) that surrounds, exploits, and unmakes black people (“us”) and their (“our”) world, body and soul. Playwright August Wilson evokes both worlds in his “Preface to Three Plays” (1991) when he talks about how the blues gave him “a world that contained my image, a world at once rich and varied, marked and marking, brutal and beautiful, and at crucial odds with the larger world that contained it and preyed and pressed it from every conceivable angle.”2
Like Wilson, Freeman sees the blues as an art form that contains an image of his humanity, but, unlike Wilson, he sees the blues themselves as something that the white world has purloined and profited from, an expropriation anticipated by the earlier refashioning of rhythm ’n’ blues into rock ’n’ roll. “How can we stop ’em,” he cries as the poem rolls on, “or will it ever end?”:
Mama’s in the kitchen
Humming her mournful song.
Sister’s moaning in the bedroom,
Crying some man has done her wrong.
Papa’s in the backyard sipping on his corn-n-n-n … liquor,
He’s just screaming, hollering and yelling.
And the old folks on the front porch keep saying,
“There just ain’t no telling
How long it’ll take ’em to leave us alone.”
They have taken our blues and gone.
“I know they’ve been doing anything they choose,” he repeats one last time as the poem ends, “I just want ’em to keep their darn hands off ’a my blues.”
“Don’t Forget the Blues” speaks to the blues from a beleaguered black nationalist perspective. At the heart of the poem is a contemporary black folk community in crisis. There’s mama, there’s sister, there’s papa and the old folks, and there’s the poet himself; the family is a microcosm for Black America, and everybody is hurting. Freeman’s black family has the blues at the very moment when the surrounding white world is consuming and capitalizing on the blues. That white world, these days, is populated by self-styled blues aficionados who claim to love the music and who shout things like “Keep the blues alive! Let’s drive on down to Clarksdale, Mississippi, and listen to the real blues at Red’s Lounge! Let’s pay five thousand dollars and take a blues cruise to the Bahamas! Let’s fly our Dutch blues band to Memphis and compete in the International Blues Challenge. Let’s go to Adam Gussow’s website, Modern Blues Harmonica, and purchase video lessons and tab sheets so we can learn how to play the blues.” Freeman’s poem articulates the pain created by the juxtaposition of, and the power differential between, two radically different blues worlds: an immiserated but tightly knit black community on the one hand and, on the other, a widely dispersed mainstream blues scene that takes pleasure and profit from the music. When Freeman cries, “There they go, with our gold,” he is, at least implicitly and with prophetic foresight, taking aim at my viewers, my customers, and me—millions of blues harmonica players from 192 countries and territories around the world who enjoy the hundreds of free instructional videos I’ve uploaded to YouTube since 2007, a modest percentage of whom visit my website every year and sometimes buy my stuff.3
Freeman’s poem speaks, in other words, to the transformations that mark our contemporary blues moment, even though it was composed in 1997, before the full extent of those transformations had become evident. It evokes the alarm felt by one particular black community advocate at the fact that blues music has moved outward from his community into the larger world, even while black people in those communities are still suffering, still hurting. Black people still have the blues. Young black kids may not particularly like or play blues music. But they and the old folks still have the blues. And something vitally important is being lost, Freeman’s poem insists, as blues music floods outward into that surrounding (white) world. Not just lost: something is being taken away from black people in an old, familiar, hurtful way. “I know they’ve been doing anything they choose,” he says repeatedly. “I just want them to keep their darn hands off of my blues.”
This primal sense of expropriation, of something valuable being spirited away from you by the white folks, is an enduring trope of black economic and cultural life in America, one that links contemporary African American listeners back to those who were “drug … out of Africa” and enslaved. But for many in Freeman’s audience, the most vivid and proximate source of such feelings would have been sharecropping in the cotton fields. (Freeman, a Washington, D.C., native who had spent considerable time documenting black life in Mississippi in the late 1960s and early 1970s, knew that world well.) Three or four generations of black Mississippians knew that you might work all year long for somebody, and at the end of the season, the cotton would be harvested, you’d give the white man half of your crop as agreed, and then he’d subtract from the proceeds for your half of the crop the cost (as he tallied it) of everything he had provided you over the winter and the long growing season: food, seed, miscellaneous supplies. He’d say, “You know what? You worked all summer long for me and you’ve come out only $100 behind. You didn’t make any money this year, but you’re $100 behind.” You couldn’t argue with him. If you argued with him, you could end up hurt or dead or forced to move to another town or state. Your labor power was being used to accumulate profit for somebody else. The white man owned you, in effect, and used you; he profited from the sweat of your brow. That seemingly inescapable historical situation was bad enough. But now, adding insult to injury at this late moment, the white man isn’t just profiting from the song you were singing while you were laboring and sweating in his cotton fields, but he’s singing his own corrupted version of the song, and profiting from that! That, in essence, is Roland L. Freeman’s vision of the blues. It’s one side of the contemporary blues conversation.
NO BLACK, NO WHITE
The black bluesist vision certainly has its virtues, and I’ll explore them by and by. It is confronted, in any case, by a second and diametrically opposed way of ideologizing the blues, one that holds somewhat more sway in our contemporary moment, at least among denizens of the mainstream scene. I’ll call this second orientation “blues universalism.” The epitome of blues universalism is a phrase—a T-shirt meme—that the Mississippi Development Tourism Authority has put up in the waiting rooms of the welcome centers as you enter Mississippi: “No black. No white. Just the blues.”
As problematic as that phrase is, I understand and appreciate the antiracist message that it believes it is conveying. One nation under the sign of the blues! No segregation, no overt disrespect, no “If you’re black, stay back.” All that race-madness is behind us now. Blues can be a place—or so the slogan suggests—where blacks and whites and, by implication, a whole bunch of different people, come together. Gay and straight. Men and women. Working-class and middle-class. Americans and foreigners. That’s a good thing, right? Certainly it is a huge improvement over the bad old Mississippi of the Jim Crow era, a place known over the years as “the lynching state” and “the closed society,” where blues was “nigger music” and got no respect whatsoever from white people. Now, an irritable black bluesist might point out that since an overwhelming majority of the greatest Mississippi blues performers, historically speaking, have been African American, and since Mississippi’s contemporary blues tourism industry is anchored in the reputations of those celebrated performers, there’s something disingenuous about welcoming blues tourists to your state with a slogan like “No black. No white. Just the blues.” Doesn’t that formulation tend to underplay the hugely disproportionate black contribution to the blues—the very reason, in fact, why so many white blues tourists flock to Mississippi in the first place? Wouldn’t a phrase like “Welcome, white blues tourist, to the home of real black blues” be more accurate? But at least the welcome mat has been thrown out, and at least Mississippi’s blues are being celebrated in Mississippi. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?
Before addressing those questions, I want to talk about a Mississippi blues performer who visited my blues literature class at the University of Mississippi several years ago. His name—his stage name—is Muleman. He’s from Clarksdale, a Delta town that, like Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago, styles itself as a “birthplace” or “home” of the blues. He frequently plays Red’s Lounge, the same juke joint where Ike Turner used to play. And he’s a heck of a player. He’s got the groove, the sound, and the attitude.
His family grew up on the edge of the cotton fields. Muleman’s father used to hang out in the Delta juke joints, and Muleman spent time learning his trade at Junior Kimbrough’s old juke in Chulahoma, up in the hills. He was attracted to the blues in part because his family situation was so unstable. His brother was a junkie; at one point, trying to defend himself, Muleman shot his brother three times with a pistol. The police gave him a break and let him go because they knew he was from a troubled family. Then he got busted for dealing pot and the system had no mercy. He was tried, sentenced, and thrown into the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. A young Mississippian, Parchman Farm. It’s a familiar blues story. What makes it almost surreally perfect is that Muleman actually began singing and playing the blues, on guitar, while he was in prison. He joined the prison band, in fact. He ended up serving four years, and it was the blues—the feelings inside of him and the music he made out of them—that got him through. He was released nineteen years ago and he’s still singing and playing his blues. He runs a wheels-and-tires shop in Senatobia during the day and drives a huge old Cadillac limo; his debut album was called Mississippi Lockdown. Last time I saw him at Red’s Lounge, his foot had been accidentally stomped on by one of his mules and he was sipping moonshine from a fruit jar in an effort to kill the pain.
What do he and I have in common? Nothing, you might think, except the music we both love and play. But we’ve got something else in common, and perhaps you’ve figured it out. He’s a white guy. Mark “Muleman” Massey has an impeccable blues pedigree, but he’s white, not black. The contemporary blues world is full of such paradoxes. One problem with viewing the blues through an ideological lens is that ideologies tend not to leave much breathing room for the human complexities and unlikely scenarios that often characterize contemporary blues lives.
Yet it is the ideologies, a potent and compelling pair of them, that currently hold sway. On one side of the divide: “Blues is black music.” Blues, in this view, is an inalienably black cultural resource. Whites can’t really play it, haven’t lived it, don’t understand it—yet they’ve somehow managed, as they always do, to weasel their way into a near monopoly of the means of production. They run the blues societies, book the festivals, and craft the historical narratives that make Joe Bonamassa, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, and Stevie Ray Vaughan seem like the natural inheritors of a tradition forged by Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, and B. B. King. Even as they profit like thieves from the whole corrupt and exploitative cultural edifice they’ve created, they view themselves as saviors, crying “Keep the blues alive!” all the way to the bank. Or so the black bluesists would have us believe.
On the other side of the divide is blues universalism: “No black. No white. Just the blues.” The Blues Foundation in Memphis, sponsor of the International Blues Challenge, the Blues Music Awards, and the Keeping the Blues Alive Awards, is a key placeholder for this ideological position. It has affiliate blues societies in virtually every U.S. state and more than twenty-five other countries. In the last ten years, although African American men such as Mr. Sipp and Selwyn Birchwood have triumphed in the band portion of the IBC, white winners and runners-up in various categories have come from Canada, Germany, Spain, France, and Australia.4 Over the past decade or two, and with the help of the Blues Foundation, blues has become the world’s most beloved and widespread roots music: a global American success story.
Why do so many different kinds of people around the world not only listen to blues but sing and play the music? Why is it so receptive to their embrace, so adaptable to infusions of local flavor, even while maintaining its identity as blues? Perhaps the music’s distant African origins offer a clue. Many enslaved Africans in the antebellum South, especially in Louisiana, were brought from Senegal and Gambia. One thing that made that part of West Africa distinctive was the trade routes: a lot of Arab traders coming through, bringing along their Islamic religion and its melismatic vocal music. Melisma is a vocal technique that takes one word or cry and runs it through a long series of pitches; it often takes the form of what ethnomusicologists call a “descending vocal strain.” Melismatic singing—also known as “riffing” in black cultural contexts—lies at the heart of the blues tradition, and black popular and religious music more generally. Field hollers are melismatic. B. B. King is a wonderfully evocative blues singer because he brought gospel melisma into the blues. In other words, one core element of the blues isn’t African per se but Arabic: this is the argument made by German ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik in Africa and the Blues (1999).5 Senegalese musical culture made a space for Islamic melisma, absorbing and transforming that influence even while maintaining its core values. People who live on trade routes need to be quick on their feet, culturally speaking: taking what they like and mixing it into the local stew, even while maintaining that stew’s brand identity. Senegalese culture, in turn, became the generative matrix of blues culture after the crucible of slavery brought Senegalese musicians to the southern United States.
Mark “Muleman” Massey
(photograph by Ron Modra)
One reason why blues music has such universal appeal, I suggest, is because it’s got this Senegalese DNA. It has certain core elements that give it an immediately recognizable flavor—the three-chord harmonic structure and AAB verse form, the shuffle and breakdown grooves, the epic or dramatic black vernacular language tinged with hoodoo (mojo hands, black cat bones)—and beginners can learn the basics fairly quickly. But it is also uniquely adaptable to local conditions. I became aware of this when, for my book Journeyman’s Road (2007), I interviewed a Brooklyn Jewish harmonica player named Scott Gold about his experience with the Guam Blues Scholars, a quartet based on that Micronesian island in which two of the players were native Guamanians, members of the Chamorro tribe. “Yeah,” he said, “we do songs like Baby, Please Don’t Go … Back to Tokyo” and “One Room Coconut Shack.” Gold and his bandmates season the African American stew with Guamanian spices.6
Are the Guam Blues Scholars, with their audible debt to Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, their multicultural background, and their playful South Seas references, a laudable embodiment of the blues universalist message? Or are they, in the way they epitomize the promiscuous worldwide spread and ceaseless mutation of the blues, the crux of the problem evoked by Roland L. Freeman—cultural interlopers who need to be confronted head-on by the fierce black bluesist assertion, “Blues is black music”? Have they taken the blues and gone, in a way that merits criticism, or censure?
FLIPPING THE SCRIPT
One way of appreciating why Freeman might have felt the need to write his angry poem is to engage in a thought experiment that I call flipping the script. What would the present situation involving whites, blacks, and the blues look like if we picked a “white” folk music—bluegrass, say, rather than blues—and flip-flopped the races, so that blacks, suddenly an overwhelming numerical majority, were the larger world, in August Wilson’s terms, that preyed and pressed on a beleaguered “white” folk-musical community from every conceivable angle?7 What would that situation look like? It’s a fanciful scenario, one that traffics in stereotypes and exaggerations in order to make a point, but I’d like to play it out, much the way that African American author George Schuyler envisioned the chaos wrought on America by a drug that could turn black people white overnight in his satirical novel Black No More (1931).
Imagine that you’ve got not just black Americans but also musicians and fans from all parts of Africa, trekking up to the mountains of Kentucky, wanting to hang out with bluegrass banjoist Ralph Stanley, Man of Constant Sorrow. This isn’t Jon Spencer and a bunch of white punk rockers hanging out with bluesman R. L. Burnside in Mississippi, this is Jamal and Dewayne and Ibrahima heading up into the hills and hollers to hang out with Ralph—and Imani and Jada, too, all of them wanting to party with, and document, the mountain man. Imagine that over a fifty-year period, the situation had evolved from a few black folklorists and fans tracking down Ralph, Bill Monroe, and Flatt & Scruggs, to a situation in which hundreds of thousands of black kids are buying banjos, guitars, fiddles, and learning how to play bluegrass, to a point where now, at this late moment, black people actually have a monopoly, or near monopoly, on the means of production. The record labels—Motown and Boogie Down Productions—are up in the hills. They’re doing field recordings of Ralph Stanley and his family, and the hardcore black bluegrass aficionados are publishing a magazine called Keeping the Mountains Real. It’s the analogue to Living Blues, but instead of being written and published by whites, with lots of blues album reviews by white reviewers, it’s written and published by an all-black staff, with lots of bluegrass reviews by black reviewers. Keeping the Mountains Real has a certain number of white subscribers; a handful of them even come from the Kentucky hills. But most subscribers are black urbanites, and, as aficionados, they engage in fierce debates about the music they love. Some of them, the “purists,” argue that black bluegrass players just can’t sing bluegrass with an authentic twang; this invariably produces cries of outrage from another cohort of black bluegrass lovers and performers who insist that it’s not about color, it’s about the high lonesome feeling in your heart. They’ve got a slogan: “No white or black, just some bomb-ass ’grass.”
Imagine that this contemporary bluegrass scene has developed to a point where it’s completely dominated, on every front, by black people. Their dominance isn’t just numerical, it’s institutional. There is a Mountain Music Foundation, for example, based in Hazard, Kentucky, and although a few local white musicians and businesspeople are invited to join the board of directors, most of the directors are black folks from Memphis, Chicago, New York, and L.A. They’re promoters, DJs, scholars, and of course businesspeople—hustlers of every sort, but truly passionate about, as they say, “keeping the ’grass alive”: growing and profiting from the worldwide audience for bluegrass among black people. They’ve got Keeping the Mountains Real Awards, of course. These often go to the few remaining celebrated white elders, but as those elders slowly die off, younger black urban recipients are starting to claim their share, a demographic shift that causes black aficionados in the purist camp a great deal of consternation.
Given this situation, do you think it’s possible that Ralph Stanley and the white bluegrass players who still live in the mountains might occasionally decide to show up at a mountain music festival, shake their fists, and read angry poems that ask, “What in tarnation has happened to my bluegrass?”
The contemporary situation of the blues, as evoked by Freeman, is sort of like that. Of course this little thought experiment has an element of fun-house exaggeration, but only enough to make a point: something weird and unsettling has happened to the blues—at least when viewed from a certain kind of skeptical black community perspective.
FOREPARENTS AND LEFTOVERS
I’ve already suggested a way I find myself, as purveyor of a popular blues harmonica instructional website, ethically implicated in the present discussion. But I’m interested in having the conversation for a different reason: as the interracially married father of a black/biracial son, I dwell in a family circle where there is no racial “they.” There is only “we.” At the age of thirteen, Shaun’s musical talents have already made themselves vividly obvious—he plays trumpet and half a dozen other instruments—and I’ve taught him the rudiments of blues tonality, along with the heads for “Watermelon Man” and “Doozy.” At some point in the future, if he realizes his promise, it is entirely possible that he will be able to tell an interviewer that he learned to play the blues from an old white man down in Mississippi. The marvelous absurdity of that statement makes me want to think these issues through. If I’m a member of a troubled, unsettled blues community—a white-and-black community, a world community—I want to understand where we are as a community. I don’t see Freeman, with his black nationalist perspective, as a “they” who is stirring up trouble but as a member of my extended family, as it were, who is doing his best to speak the truth as he sees it. If there’s no black and no white, just the blues, then I want to understand where we, as blues people, really are at this moment in history.
One of my allies in this process is playwright August Wilson. He and my son have something in common: both are the products of interracial marriages. August Wilson’s father, Frederick August Kittel, was a German-born baker and pastry chef; his mother, Daisy Wilson, was an African American cleaning woman, a southern migrant who’d moved from North Carolina to the Hill District of Pittsburgh. His father abandoned the family when Wilson was a boy, a fact that caused the son great pain—as though his father had used his mother and then thrown her away. In 1965, the year his father died, after he’d dropped out of high school and moved from his mother’s house into a rooming house, Wilson put on a record by Bessie Smith and found his life transformed by the sound of her voice and the world of meaning opened up by her song. What’s curious about the song, a double-entendre blues titled “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine,” is that it signifies on his absent father’s occupation, implicitly downgrading him and the culture he represents. The recording, in any case, precipitated a conversion experience: not simply a rejection of his white father but a whole-souled embrace of the black blues world that southern migrants like his mother had brought with them to Pittsburgh and other northern urban locales.8 Wilson embarked soon after on a grand plan: he would write one play for each decade of the twentieth century, exploring the dreams, struggles, triumphs, and tragedies suffered by the black people he’d known in the Hill District and beyond.
One of his earliest plays, and his first big hit, was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984). The play is set in a Chicago recording studio in 1927; its subject is Ma Rainey, one of the greatest African American blues singers from the so-called classic blues era when such women were culture heroes and pop stars. As the play begins, two white men—Sturdyvant, a record producer, and Irvin, Rainey’s manager—are sitting in the recording studio engaged in an anxious conversation about Ma, who is overdue for her scheduled recording session. Where’s Ma? That’s the focus of Sturdyvant’s concern. We need to get in, get out, and make the record, he says; let’s get what we need from her, and quickly, before she has a chance to make trouble. Irvin, meanwhile, reassures Sturdyvant that he’s got everything—and especially Ma—under control. So the mise-en-scène of the play, the given with which it begins, is white anxieties about how to control and extract profit from black blues people who are viewed as a kind of troublesome property. Sturdyvant and Irvin represent the greedy, exploitative white world that preys and presses on blues people from every conceivable angle.
After introducing these problematic white men, Wilson introduces Rainey’s band: a quartet of black musicians named Toledo, Cutler, Slow Drag, and Levee. They are fully individuated characters, evoked with the help of Wilson’s extraordinary ear for the intimate, jousting, self-dramatizing way that such musicians speak among themselves. Each of these men has a flaw, a weakness; each is less than fully self-actualized. Wilson makes this clear in his stage directions. But he also makes clear, lest we’re inclined to judge them harshly, that their insufficiencies are as much social as personal: they’re the unsurprising harvest reaped by African American men forced to grow up in racist America. One of these men, an older blues piano player named Toledo, is the play’s organic intellectual: as a thinker, he’s a product of the community, not somebody who has just parachuted in, and he’s trying to make sense of the troubled, oppressed condition in which black people find themselves. Wilson tells us that Toledo’s thoughts aren’t perfectly formed. He has more ideas than he knows what to do with and they don’t all fit together. But at least he’s trying to be conscious. At one point, halfway through the play, he delivers a remarkable monologue, a down-home parable about African American history. He’s trying to convince his bandmates that in order to make good choices about their lives, they need to see their actual historical situation as clearly as possible. The operative word is “leftovers.” “That’s what you is,” he tells his bandmates, “that’s what we all is. A leftover from history”:
A scene from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the Mark Taper Forum, 2016
(© 2019 Craig Schwartz Photography)
Now, I’m gonna show you how this goes … where you just a leftover from history. Everybody come from different places in Africa, right? Come from different tribes and things. Soonawhile they began to make one big stew. You had the carrots, the peas, and potatoes, and whatnot over here. And over there you had the meat, the nuts, the okra, corn … and then you mix it up and let it cook right through to get the flavors flowing together … then you got one thing. You got a stew.
Now you take and eat the stew, you take and make your history with that stew. All right. Now it’s over. Your history’s over and you done ate the stew, but you look around and you see some carrots over here, some potatoes over there. That stew’s still there. You done made your history and it’s still there. You can’t eat it all. So what you got? You got some leftovers. That’s what it is. You got leftovers and you can’t do nothing with it. You already making you another history … cooking you another meal, and you don’t need them leftovers no more. What to do?
See, we’s the leftovers. The colored man is the leftovers. Now what’s the colored man gonna do with himself? That’s what we waiting to find out, but first we gotta know we the leftovers. Now, who knows that? You find me a nigger that knows that and I’ll turn any whichaway you want me to. I’ll bend over for you. You ain’t gonna find that. And that’s what the problem is. The problem ain’t with the white man. The white man knows you just a leftover. ’Cause he the one who done the eating and he know what he done ate. But we don’t know that we been took and made history out of. Done went and filled the white man’s belly and now he’s full and tired and wants you to get out the way and let him be by himself. Now, I know what I’m talking about and if you wanna find out, you just ask Mr. Irvin what he had for supper yesterday. And if he’s an honest white man … which is asking for a whole heap of a lot … he’ll tell you he done ate your black ass and if you please I’m full up with you … so go on and get off the plate and let me eat something else.9
When I teach Wilson’s play in my blues lit classes, students love this speech. They understand immediately that Toledo is offering a parable about slavery and its aftermath. Three years after Wilson’s play was first produced, a black scholar named Sterling Stuckey offered essentially the same vision in Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987), arguing that black culture first begins to take shape on the slave ships and in early New World slave communities when African people from widely dispersed origin-points find themselves crammed together, forced to find common languages and discern common goals. “Everybody come from different places in Africa … different tribes and things … they began to make one big stew.” The stew is Wilson’s metaphor for slave culture, for early black culture, for a beleaguered black community in formation, one incapable of resisting exploitation and dazed by the horrible turn of events that has thrown them together.
When Toledo says, “You take and eat the stew,” who is “you”? “You” is the white slavemaster and by extension the entire historical process—the slave trade and New World slavery—that he represents. “You” is the reason why people were enslaved and transported in the first place, which was to eat up, devour, their labor-power. Slave labor was needed to grow tobacco and cotton. Slavery organizes labor in a way that makes a lot of money for the people on the top and no money whatsoever for the people on the bottom. The people on the top own the people on the bottom; they buy and sell them, trade them—and then, when the Civil War is over and slavery has been outlawed, they say, “I’m tired of you. Go away.” They don’t say “Go away” right away; it takes a while for that process to work itself out with the help of the mechanical cotton harvester in the 1940s and ’50s, but by the mid-1960s, white plantation owners in Mississippi were literally driving their black workers off of the land.10 Many of those workers moved north to Chicago and Detroit; some moved into southern towns and did their best not to starve. That’s the history of America. It’s a history that black people feel deeply. And it’s a history that Wilson, through the mouthpiece of Toledo, brilliantly sums up in a folksy little tale with deadly implications.
What does Toledo’s parable of black history have to teach us about the blues? One thing to remember is that there were continuities between slavery and what came after slavery. In his autobiography, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing (1997), bluesman Honeyboy Edwards says, “They treated us like we was property,” meaning the white people in Mississippi in the 1920s and ’30s.11 He talks about his grandmother, a former slave. She was sold like a mule from hand to hand, he says. So you may be a young black Mississippian growing up “free” in a world filled with blues music, but you know former slaves—they live in your house—and you yourself are out there, at a young age, sharecropping in the same fields that they used to slave in. You’re not owned—you’re not legally owned—but then again you’re thoroughly trapped in a system designed to keep you working compliantly in the fields. There’s lynch law, there’s vagrancy law, there are all these things pressing down on you. So for some blues people, “freedom” felt like very much like an update of slavery, and the blues felt like an enduring, inescapable condition. John Lee Hooker claimed that the blues came “not only [from] what happened to you” but from “what happened to your foreparents and other people. And that’s what makes the blues.”12
As tempting as it is to insist that slavery is the origin point for the blues, there is a significant strain of thought within black intellectual circles that views blues as a novel, innovative music, one evoking a distinctively postslavery, “leftovers” condition. “The blues ain’t slave music,” insists Kalamu ya Salaam, a poet and performance artist from New Orleans. “Didn’t no slaves sing the blues. We,” he continues, meaning African Americans,
we didn’t become blue until after reconstruction, after freedom day and the dashing of all hopes of receiving/attaining our promised 40acres&1mule. in essence, the blues aesthetic is the cultural manifestation of former slaves expelled from the land, promised a new land, and ultimately and callously, turned into an easily exploitable surplus, unskilled and semi-skilled, migratory, landless, politically unenfranchised, labor pool. even when we left the plantations under what we thought was our own steam, it was really an expulsion from the slave/agrarian plantation society into the emerging urban/industrial society. our so-called great migration should be seen specifically for what it was: mass urbanization. this social process, this dispossession of the formerly possessed, set the stage for the two basic blues music forms, country and urban.13
Toledo’s claim in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom that black people are leftovers is essentially identical with Salaam’s claim here about the dispossession of the formerly possessed. When you become a surplus, when you realize that you are part of an easily exploitable labor pool—migratory, landless, politically powerless—then you’ve got the blues: that is Salaam’s claim. Slaves weren’t free to travel, after all, but sharecroppers were free to move at the end of the season if they thought they could find a better deal somewhere else, and bluesmen (and women) were defined by freedom of movement and a hunger for love. It’s not hard to find blues songs that evoke this condition, often as a kind of profound loneliness or unwantedness. “I’m a poor boy, long long way from home.” (If home is a dimly recalled African homeland, of course, this line evokes the shattering dislocations of the Middle Passage.)
The blues tradition arises in part out of the decision made by many African American men, musicians and nonmusicians alike, to ramble rather than remain tied to the cotton fields and subject to the will of their bossmen. The paradox of that rambler’s freedom was that it brought them that much more quickly into conflict with a system that viewed rambling black men as wasted labor-power and potential rapists. “In the South, they had that vagrancy law,” Honeyboy says,
That hog law. I got pulled in for that a number of times. That means better have a job or don’t be seen on the streets. The police pick you up on the street during the day when everybody’s working. “What you doing walking around here? Get in the car.” They carry you into jail and they give you four or five days and at that time, was spent out in the fields working the cotton. “Don’t you know so and so out there? His cotton growed up with grass and he can’t get nobody to work it.”
You could be out there working, but he didn’t want to give nobody but a dollar a day and nobody wanted to work all day in the hot sun for a dollar.14
Black people may have been leftovers, in Toledo’s terms, but when the cotton needed to be chopped or harvested, white southerners still believed that a black man’s duty was to labor in their fields. “They treated us like we was property,” Honeyboy complained. “Come all through slavery time and they still wanted us to be slaves. If them farmers couldn’t get nobody to chop their cotton, they’d have the police enforce that vagrancy law and get you to work for a few days.”15
YOU’RE REALLY BLUESY THEN
At this point, if you’re a certain sort of earnest white blues fan, you may be saying to yourself, Okay, I get it. Life was hard for black people in the South and the blues comes from that. You know what? Right on. I understand that, man. I get it. Blues is the voice of oppressed black people. It’s all the bad shit that The Man threw down on them, especially in the Deep South. It’s that pain and despair and hopelessness, put into musical form.
My answer is, Sort of. But it’s much more complicated than that. And at least one blues scholar—I’ll explore his views in Bar 4—says that blues music isn’t about that hardship stuff at all.
I won’t criticize you, though, if you see the blues as the musical expression of the collective burden borne by African Americans, in the South and beyond. That is a familiar idea, it clearly has some validity, and it’s an idea that I embraced wholeheartedly during my years as a graduate student. The first academic panel I ever put together, at the 1995 American Studies Association meeting, was called “Singing Black Pain, Birthing a Blue Nation.” I’d had a conversion experience in a seminar the year before; I was just discovering the scourge of lynching suffered by black southerners between the 1890s and 1940s, and my shock and outrage led me to connect that violence with the emergence, development, and spread of blues music during that same period. Although I’d had a career as a touring blues performer by that point, following a five-year stint as a Harlem street musician, in some ways I was still an innocent white guy suddenly being confronted by vicious, ugly things that were old news to black people. But as I began to digest the bad news and let it reshape my understanding of the blues, I began to encounter resistance from some white blues lovers to the very idea that there might be a connection between lynching and other forms of white violence, on the one hand, and blues song, on the other hand. This was my first encounter with whites who held fiercely to what I’ve come to think of as a pastoral idea of the blues—the conviction that blues music, although it sang of “hard times,” was really more about lusting after women, losing your lover, and rambling widely in the hope of hooking up. It certainly wasn’t about politics or protest: white blues aficionados and a fair number of white blues scholars were sure of that.
I wasn’t so sure. So I went looking for evidence. And I found dozens of examples—not just in blues song but even more pointedly in blues autobiography—where black blues musicians talked about it lynchings they had witnessed or heard about and the way those events had hurt, scared, and scarred them.
The violence that preoccupied me, so-called spectacle lynching in front of large crowds, had emerged not during slavery but several decades after Emancipation. And this helped me understand a key distinction between the condition of a slave and the condition of a sharecropper. When you were a slave, somebody owned you. You were somebody’s capital, somebody’s investment. Usually the owner was a white man, although there were black slave owners in Louisiana and a few Cherokee slave owners in North Carolina. But by and large slave owners were white men, along with a few white women. Although only 5 percent of white southerners actually owned slaves at the dawn of the Civil War, far more white people who didn’t own slaves, particularly wives and children, lived in slaveholding households, and this was especially true in certain Deep South states. In 1860, for example, almost half of white Mississippians lived in slaveholding households.16 And according to historian Walter Johnson in Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999), many southern white men who didn’t own slaves were hungry to get them.17 Buying a slave was a big, expensive investment, like buying a new car. If you could scrape enough money together to buy a slave, you’d taken a big step up the social ladder. The key thing is, slaves were an investment. So most slave owners took at least minimal care of them, the way most people take care of their new cars. Just as important, no white man would think of killing another white man’s slave. That would be like trashing somebody’s car with an axe. It was a crime against property. So slaves, curiously enough, had a measure of protection against white violence, or at least violence administered by somebody other than their master.
Emancipation changed all that. Suddenly black people—black laborers—were free, not owned. White southerners found it extremely difficult to rid themselves of the reflexive need to control these ex-slaves and their children. Many white men were filled with rage at black property, so to speak, that had escaped from their control, and they did their damndest to reassert control, so that the bossman, although he didn’t actually own you, quickly took on the role of master in the post-Emancipation world. As long as you lived and worked on his land, he had the power to command and punish you. Just as important, whatever value you’d once had as somebody’s slave, whatever cash value had once been put on your body, had suddenly been erased by Emancipation. Now you were nobody’s investment. You were simply the labor power you were capable of delivering. This meant that no white man was protecting you. Unless you were an extremely strong, capable, and productive worker, you were entirely expendable, vulnerable to violence at the hands of almost any white man who cared to cultivate a grievance against you. The criminal justice system in the South looked the other way when white men killed black men. “They had to have a license to kill everything but a nigger,” Mississippi Delta juke joint owner Shelby “Poppa Jazz” Brown told folklorist William Ferris. “We was always in season.”18
The “freedom” experienced by black southerners during the blues years, in other words, was in some ways worse than slavery. And the blues reflected this grievous condition, this open season on black men. B. B. King, for example, told an interviewer the following in 1968:
Where I lived, a little place between Itta Bena and Indianola in Mississippi, the people are practically the same way today, they live practically the same way, and that is under the fear of the boss in a manner of speaking. Because so many Negroes down there have been killed many, many different types of ways if you said the wrong thing at the wrong time. … So when they use the word frustration, I don’t think that really tells the whole story because a guy get to feeling a lot of times he’s afraid, he’s actually afraid. … If you live under that system for so long, then it don’t bother you openly, but mentally, way back in your mind, it bugs you. … Later on you sometime will think about all this and you wonder why, so that’s where your blues comes in, you’re really bluesy then, y’see, because you are hurt deep down, believe me, I’ve lived through it, I know. I’m still trying to say what the blues is to me. So I sing about it. The next thing, which is relatively minor compared to living like I have, is your woman.19
Fear of the boss. Fear of the violence perpetrated by “that system.” This, according to King, is where is his blues come from. Woman troubles are strictly secondary.
This is an astonishing claim. Most blues lovers I know would insist that woman troubles (and women’s troubles with men) are the central theme of the blues. But no, King says. It’s the deaths of fellow black people, and the possibility that something similar might happen to you, that produces the “deep down” hurt that you sing to get off your chest. This doesn’t mean that you sing a song that is overtly about lynching, or fear of the boss—although such songs certainly exist. King never sang those sorts of songs. Still, he insists, that is the feeling that he was working off in his music. And it was this claim about the blues-generating capacity of white violence, more than any other single piece of testimony, that convinced me there was something worth pursuing here—some huge but hidden stream of blues feeling that white blues players, scholars, and fans like me had ignored at our own peril.
I made this argument linking blues and violence in my dissertation, and when I submitted it my book manuscript to the University of Chicago Press, one of the referees was a well-known professor of African American studies, Trudier Harris, author of a Exorcising Blackness: Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), a bracing, honest, scarifying study of the way black writers had responded to violence against black bodies in the South. Her book had helped shape my own vision of the situation, so she was in some ways an ideal reader. But while she generally approved of what I’d done, she offered one major critique. “Gussow,” she wrote, “needs to find some way of denuding his manuscript of the sense that African Americans spent this [post-Reconstruction] time period in their songs, texts, and LIVES simply reacting to white folks. Certainly there is no denying that reaction is relevant, but must Gussow make black folks mere automatons to white folks’ cruelty? There is at times a prevailing spiritual helplessness and despair … that overshadows almost everything else. That is not a view of African American life and culture that I can accept.”20 And she was right. In focusing so pointedly on black abjection, black fear and misery, I had significantly underplayed the way the blues tradition shows black people living, loving, and fighting among themselves without much regard for the white man’s world. I took her critique seriously and revised my manuscript with that in mind.
I think it’s important to get real if we’re going to talk about the blues, doing everything we can to avoid myths, clichés, and polemics. Even that phrase—to “get real”—can become an affectation rather than a path to the truth. But there are pitfalls to be avoided: ways that even the most passionate and best-intentioned people get the blues thing wrong. That’s why I began by sketching the black bluesist and blues universalist approaches. Each approach has something to offer—the claim “blues is black music,” in particular, has an undeniable baseline validity—but each is also an oversimplification grounded in an understandable yearning for clarity and justice. My own current approach to the blues highlights paradox; it takes pleasure in the two-sidedness of apparently clear-cut issues. I’d like to think that this approach, a kind of trickster’s ethos, is itself grounded deeply in the blues tradition. “You can’t tell a book by looking at the cover” might serve as my slogan, warning us as it does against leaping to conclusions based on surface appearances—including the skin color of the blues purveyor.
So here are two pitfalls for those who would speak truth about the blues. One mistake is to argue that blues music is nothing but African American social history. It’s the accumulated pain that black people have felt when white people oppress them, given musical form. That’s all it is, finally, and that’s why white people can never really play the music, own it, or have a deep, creative, and enlivening relationship with it. If you’re tempted to make this claim, please remember Mark “Muleman” Massey, the white blues musician from Mississippi who grew up in a shack next to the cotton fields. He shot his junkie brother, dealt drugs, spent time in Parchman penitentiary, learned how to play the blues as an inmate; he owns mules, sips moonshine, and plays juke joints. When he visited my class at Ole Miss, he spent the first twenty minutes testifying about the disaster-filled life he’d lived. “I’m gonna tell you guys,” he said. “You don’t want to play the blues. You don’t want to live the life I’ve lived.” But he survived that life, he paid his dues as a working musician, and he can indeed sing, and play, the blues.
By the same token—and here’s the second pitfall—please don’t imagine for one moment that the example of Muleman and the spread of blues music around the world means that race no longer matters when we’re talking about the blues. Whether you’re a player who wants to master the music or a fan who wants to appreciate it fully, it is your duty to educate yourself about the world in which the people who created the music actually lived. Become a student of African American culture and history; keep ideas about black oppression in constructive tension with ideas about black agency. Blues isn’t just the “ouch!” that black people groan when white people do bad things to them: that was the point Trudier Harris impressed on me. Blues people made creative choices about how to respond to what oppressed them; one of the choices they made, especially after Emancipation, was not to spend every waking minute worrying about the White Man. “Who the hell wants to go hear something that reminds them of a lynching?” said Albert Murray, author of Stomping the Blues (1976), arguing that blues music and the culture that embraced it was far less concerned with protest than with pleasure, elegance, and purgation of bad vibes.21 Yet Murray was not arguing that the blues were a pastoral retreat, an art form entirely divorced from the painful realities of black people’s lives. Quite the reverse: the Saturday night blues ritual he celebrates was a fiercely energetic repudiation of all that sought to hold black spirits down. The slogan “No black. No white. Just the blues,” laudable as it might seem, is far too quick to render the historical burdens and achievements of black blues people invisible. It also severely discounts the way the political economy of the contemporary blues scene, with whites dominating both the audience and the institutional superstructure, sometimes works against the interests of African American performers. Race still matters when you’re talking about the blues. It matters in the same old way—and in brand new ways. The challenge of our postmodern moment is to discern and embrace the paradoxes rather than pretending they don’t exist.