This entry may seem to meander.  It does.  I’ll let it.  But it is all totally related.

Last spring, I decided do something on my “bucket list” (things you want to do before you ‘kick the bucket’, i.e., die).  I decided to see where the blues was born.  I love, love, love, Mississippi Delta blues.  The kind of blues where you can hardly understand what the singers are saying because their accent is so thick.  The kind that sounds like it’s being played on a guitar on its last leg and a harmonica that sounds more like a kazoo, its been played so much.  The more meager the better, for me.  It’s all the blues.  No electric stuff.  That’s something else again. I’m talking about the blues before it moved away from its birthplace and was brought by those lucky enough to escape the circumstances of where it was born.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love it.  I’m not quite sure why.  Being born in Washington, DC,  I didn’t come from a rural environment, and I can’t even remember when I first heard blues or why.  I just know that it is as much a part of me as my eyelashes and unruly eyebrows.  There is just something about it that speaks to me.  There is something so real, so raw, so informative, so basic about it.  It sounds like a simple type of music that virtually any musician can technically play, but there is something on a whole different level that belies that.  I love that the blues artists took what little they had in their lives, both in terms of musical instruments as well as what they had materially (pretty much nothing) and created music that, for some reason, people the world over can relate to, regardless of their background or experience.

Maybe I love it because, like the dialect poetry of my all-time favorite poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, it captures something unloved by me, but nonetheless familiar.  Dunbar lived and wrote his poetry at a time when slavery had ended decades before, but he was surrounded by people who had lived it and shared their memories.  Dunbar learned to capture those memories in lines that speak to us still, while also writing what would be more “acceptable” poetry to the masses he was trying to attract.

Dunbar moved comfortably between writing one of the first poems my mother taught me (Dawn)

“An angel robed in spotless white,

bent down to kiss the sleeping night.

Night woke to blush and sprite was gone.

Men saw the blush and called it dawn.”

 

to one of my favorites, his “In the Morning”

‘LIAS! ‘Lias! Bless de Lawd!
Don’ you know de day’s erbroad?
Ef you don’ git up, you scamp,
Dey’ll be trouble in dis camp.
Tink I gwine to let you sleep
W’ile I meks yo’ boa’d an’ keep?
Dat’s a putty howdy-do-
Don’ you hyeah me, ‘Lias -you?

…

I will never forget the day I stood in the local Carnegie library, at age 11 or 12, flipping through a poetry book and came across the latter.  I had no idea what the strange language was, but I kept reading it until I realized I was listening to my grandparents speak!  In a book! I LOVED books!!  If it was in a book, it must be OK! It must be special!  It must mean something!

It was the first time I can remember really thinking of myself as part of something bigger than myself.  My old-fashioned (to us city-bred kids) grandparents who had been sharecroppers in North Carolina until the boll weevils came through and devastated the crops and forced them to move north to Virginia where they lived when I knew them, weren’t just poor, old people who couldn’t speak proper English.  There was a community of such people and Paul Laurence Dunbar had captured them on a page.  A community of people to whom I was related by a common cultural background that I never participated in, but that was without a doubt, mine.  And they had value.  They may seem to be poor and without education or material things, but they had something far richer and deeper—a culture borne of that deprivation.  I was ecstatic.  It was a moment I have never forgotten.

Blues speaks to me the same way.  A great blues song that tells me about how awful the singer had it on Parchman Prison Farm or how he was cut up in a fight at the local juke joint Friday night, or how his baby left him because she found him with another “gal”, or how he was tired of working for nothing with no prospects of things ever changing, gives me another little piece I can put in the puzzle of what it was like for my grandparents and those who came before them to live their lives in such dire circumstances, yet pave the way for me to be where I am today.  Those ancestors are such a part of everything I do. I constantly dedicate my books to them. It enriches every single experience I have knowing what they went through so that I could be here.

The blues tells me about that.  It doesn’t matter how mundane the event being sung about.  It doesn’t matter than I can barely understand their words.  What matters is that they are singing their lives for me and it gives me part of my own.  It is the one thing they have and they have shared it.

When my three daughters were growing up, I constantly sang blues for them.  I made up blues songs about whatever was going on and sang to them in the car as we drove to school or work or the grocery store or to visit family.  Poor things.  When they came to me with a booboo, they knew a blues song was headed their way.  “My baby Annie told me, I hurt my leg today, do do do do do do do do do do, Oh, my baby Annie told me, I hurt my leg today,  do do do do do do do do do do.  Well, Mama’ll make it better, make the pain go ‘way, do do do do do do do do do do.” Bless their little hearts for merely rolling their eyes and sighing, rather than running completely away.  🙂  But, it was a way for me to pass on my love for the blues and the stories they told about the lives of those who had come before them. Weaving them into their every day experiences gave them an immediacy and connection that saving the blues for playing on a tape, or CD did not have.  I won’t go into how I woke them up each morning by reciting the above opening lines of Dunbar’s “In the Morning” quoted above…

When I was growing up,  it had been poetry that was woven into our lives.  Not in quite the same way, but woven nonetheless.  My parents didn’t make it up the way I did the blues for my girls, but my Dad graduated from college and he and my mother, who had been valedictorian of her class, came from a time when rote memorization of classic poems was an important part of the curriculum.  So, at the dinner table (or wherever), they dramatically recited remembered lines to each other from Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabelle Lee” or William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” as we discussed the events of the day.  Their lines from Shakespeare are still with me and my siblings today. Robert Frost’s “I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep…” from “Stopping By the Woods on A Snowy Evening” was always my Dad’s refrain when we came across him late at night working on his sermon for Sunday.  It was only later that I realized that not everyone recited poetry at every turn.

When my daughter Tess was born, she was very light in color, and I used to recite Dunbar’s “Little Brown Baby” to her all the time.

Little brown baby wif spa’klin’ eyes,
Come to yo’ pappy an’ set on his knee.
What you been doin’, suh — makin’ san’ pies?
Look at dat bib — you’s es du’ty ez me.
Look at dat mouf — dat’s merlasses, I bet;
Come hyeah, Maria, an’ wipe off his han’s.
Bees gwine to ketch you an’ eat you up yit,
Bein’ so sticky an sweet — goodness lan’s!

…..

One day when she was about 3, I began reciting the poem as usual.  Much to my surprise, she picked it up and recited it on her own!!!  I guess it made sense since she’d heard it probably every day of her life, but it was such a wonderful moment for us both.

So, with all this in my head, I headed to the Mississippi Delta to find the blues.  I had no idea where to look, where I was going, or what, exactly, I would do when I got there, but I knew I had to go.

I ended up finding much more than I bargained for (that’s another post), but what I found in those long, vast stretches of rich alluvial soil told me why this place was the birthplace of the blues.  The blues as I love it, could only have been born here.  The vast stretches reaching uninterrupted for as  far as the eye could see gave me some understanding of how plaintive, haunting, and desperate the blues was.  There was no way any black person bred to pick cotton, intentionally without means, was going to be able to escape the clutches of King Cotton.

If I could still see echoes of it today (a high school biology teacher/bus driver told me she still picks up kids from plantations), you can imagine how it must have been in its true heyday.  I could also see how those who managed to somehow escape on that rail line headed due north to Chicago or over to Memphis, would have brought their music with them.  What was a lament in one place about being there, became a history lesson and reference in another once they managed to leave.

Having seen the Mississippi Delta and where the blues was born, I can now listen to it with an even greater intensity and appreciation than I had before.  I truly understand how a place and circumstances can coalesce to create a response that helps you cope with it; live through it.

Seeing it for myself, I truly understood why the blues could have come from nowhere but this place, at this time, under these circumstances.

That, was pretty profound….and well worth my making the effort to see it for myself.