Mississippi Delta / Blues

The Blues

blues: “The blues is at once a way of life, a variety of music, a poetic movement, a state of mind, a folkloric tradition, a moral attitude, and even a kind of spontaneous intuitive critical method. Most commentators agree that it somehow repels all efforts to harness it too tightly in any definition. However, this very indefinability, this many-sided elusiveness, is itself revealing about its fundamental character, indicating somewhat its tendency toward universality as well as the emotional heights and depths it is capable of reaching, thus situating it inevitably beyond the grasp of mere ‘ prosaic’ articulation. . . As a living fertile body of creative expression blues and jazz retain today their boundless integrity and provocative flair. . . It should be emphasized, since so many critics pretend not to notice it, that all authentic blues and jazz share a poetically subversive core, an explosive essence of irreconcilable revolt against the shameless limits of an unlivable destiny. . . Those who actually play the blues, however,accentiate its eternal character, its living presence, its poetic action on the human condition. Certainly blues singers, like anyone else, respond to the temporal and temporary demands; but their central focus, as poets, is always on an infinitely wider field of action from which nothing, in fact, is closed off.” Franklin Rosemont, November 1973.

Traveling the “cotton kingdom” of the American South before the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted was taken aback when “Suddenly one raised such a sound as I had never heard before, a long loud, musical shout rising and falling and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle call. As he finished the melody was caught up by another, and then another, and then by several in chorus.” The holler Olmsted heard was the musical cry of black slaves. As slaves and then as sharecroppers when slavery was outlawed following the Civil War, as tenant farmers and finally as day laborers in the service of corporations, black people brought forcibly from Africa have all along provided the muscle and music in the cultivation of the soil of the Yazoo Delta.

While the blues manifest in the Delta Blues the twists, turns and quavers, swooping dips and sudden climbs, the attack and release of notes, and spontaneous embellishments that make the music so elusive, they also give it an emergent, ordinary, everydayness. There are high water blues, boll weavil blues, high sheriff blues, cottonfield blues, dirt road blues, penal farm blues, turtle dove blues, and today, despite pressure by tourists to the Yazoo Delta who want to hear the blues of a past era of cottonpickin’, there are drug blues, talking back blues, cyberspace blues. In the Yazoo Delta, Charlie Patton’s “High Water Everywhere” (Lord the whole roun’ country Lord, river is overflowed / Lord the whole roun’ country, man it’s overflowed (2) / I would go to the hilly country, but they got me barred. . . ) is not merely about the loss of life and property in the disastrous 1927 Flood, nor is it merely about the limits imposed upon him as a black in the South, he is giving voice to a land constructed by a meandering Mississippi, bonded but not bound.