The Blues.
What an unfortunate appellation.
Why not the ‘Reds’ as in ‘Got Tamales and They’re Red Hot’?
To most people mention of ‘the Blues’ conjures up an image of an old Black man slumped on a stool, groaning regretfully about a life of mis-treatment and abuse to a sparse guitar accompaniment. The Blues of that stereotype represents just one rather uncomfortable emotional state. But the music which is regretfully called ‘the Blues’ covers the whole spectrum of emotions and life situations.
One of its particular strengths is that the Blues conveys a wide range of human emotions by telling a compelling story. While most pop songs attempt to evoke an emotional response with the music, the lyrics play a secondary role. The lyrics of the Blues, on the other hand, often offer a vignette or a series of narrated scenes that are joined by a common theme. The emotions which the music elicits are put into the context of a descriptive narrative. The most cursory of investigations will bear this out.
The third-person narrative of Billy’s fatal encounter with Stagger-Lee or the first-person visit to the St James Infirmary are well-known examples of the story-telling aspect of Blues lyrics. The topic of Blues lyrics is not restricted to affairs of the heart but deal with many areas of the human experience; biographical, socio-political, philosophical, satirical, spiritual and meta-physical. And when taken all together, the corpus of Blues lyrics relates the story of human society from a most personal perspective.
‘The Blues’ is the name that stuck, however. So it goes. No matter the name, one can hear the broad spectrum of emotions and observations on the human condition conveyed on nearly every Blues recording and in every masterful Blues performance.
1 comment:
You have found one of my pet peeves. Many persons tend to categorize and label music based on what they perceive to be its defining traits. Those labels suffer the fatal flaw of ascribing extramusical characteristics to purely musical phenomena. For example, borrowing references from Jazz, to call one one music hot and another cool obfuscates their similarities and dissimilarities because the terms hot and cool are inherently extramusical. They lie beyond music's grasp. The evidence of the differences and similarities between two examples of music lies within the music itself and therefore must be examined in purely musical terms. The grim reality of retail marketing, however, guarantees any CD that doesn't scream "Put me in this category!" will be returned to the distributor because the stores won't know where on the salesfloor to put it.
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