Signifying the Blues

The essay offers a philosophical examination of the blues, a uniquely powerful and influential twentieth-century musical genre. The examination is undertaken chiefly with reference to the works of Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis and Martin Heidegger--and to the insightful writings on the blues by Tom Lamont. Overall, the article is an attempt to come to terms with the artistic significance of the blues--in part, as a challenge to traditional aesthetic positions and biases. The blues, the article argues, "signify" not only in having or bestowing meaning, but in the uniquely African-American sense of the term: in a move that "undercuts," that is at once insinuating and subversive, mocking and transformative. The article endeavors to suggest that this transfigurative force--which it argues must be located more in the music than in the lyrics, and not in the music's "form" but in its "matter," its elemental corporeity--can be politically, aesthetically, and even ontologically liberating. Born of suffering and oppression, the blues can offer a profound recasting of the lived world and new possibilities of meaning and expression. ********** Pain gives of its healing power Where we least expect it. Heidegger, "The Thinker as Poet" The blues is a feeling--something out there, that can come upon you, that can come "falling down like rain." The blues is also music, striking for its simplicity, its power, and its pervasiveness. We have all known the blues: Many of us have also been drawn to reflect in wonder at the songs and music called the blues, at this elemental expression of what might be called the "lyrical impulse." Heidegger's brief words above hint at redemption. Veteran bluesman John Lee Hooker sings it this way: "The blues is healing." The blues somehow touches us at the core of our inner-most suffering and hurt--whether from betrayal or a sense of powerlessness, or at the loss of a friend who had become, in some measure, like the mirror of one's own soul. (l) But the healing power of the blues is not so much about feeling better, if by this one means that a weight is lifted, that one feels "happy" instead of "blue." Doubtless it is part of the captivating mystery of the blues experience that it feels good to sing the blues, and to listen; that one is feeling bad, but somehow feeling good about it. As Ma Rainey sings in "Ya Da Do," "It's a no-name blues, but'll take away your pains." Taken away, but not gone; suffering is not forgotten. Ralph Ellison writes: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Shadow 78) And indeed, the blues is not an anaesthetic--but a drive towards renewal. In a word, it is about feeling better--in the sense of more deeply, more fully, more mindfully. As Ellison's words suggest, the blues might be called a moving realization of the lyrical impulse, in a raw but pure form. In making just this identification of blues with the "lyric impulse," Hummer writes that this is music that strives to say "I'll tell you the true story of humankind: I'll tell you your own name" (115). Charles Simic wrote: Like all genuine art, the blues belong to a specific time, place, and people which it then, paradoxically, transcends. The secret of its transcendence lies in its minor key and its poetry of solitude. Lyric poetry has no closer relation anywhere than the blues. The reason people make lyric poems and blues songs is because our life is short, sweet, and fleeting. The blues bear witness to the strangeness of each individual's fate. It begins wordlessly in a moan, a stamp of the foot, a sigh, a hum, and then seeks words for that something or other that has no name in any language and for which all poetry and music seek an approximation. …