He called yesterday and asked, "Have you read 'Blues People' by Ralph Ellison?" It is an essay from the collection, Shadow and Act, discussing (then named) Leroi Jones' work of the same name. This was, as my friend Radhika would say, a bit of kismet, as we just finished reading James Baldwin's "The Uses of the Blues" in my composition class a couple of weeks ago. I've since re-read some other responses to blues music, and I am going to let James Agee, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and a student from my class discuss the blues alongside the photos my father took of this summer Blues festival, to lend a bit of historical context.
In preparation for one of the most beautiful books of nonfiction ever written, (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939) James Agee and Walker Evans went to the homes of sharecroppers in the South to see how people lived. At one point, an impromptu serenade is arranged on their behalf. They watch with discomfort as three black men in their twenties are ordered to sing. After the singers finish the first tune, Agee asks them to sing another, and writes, "I had a feeling, through their silence before entering it, that it was their favorite and their particular pride; the tenor lifted out his voice alone in a long, plorative line that hung like fire on heaven, or whistle's echo, sinking, sunken, along descents of a modality I had not heard before, and sank along the arms and breast of the bass as might a body sunken from a cross; and the baritone lifted a long black line of comment; and they ran in a long and slow motion and convolution of rolling as at the bottom of a stormy sea, voice meeting voice as ships in dream, retreated, met once more, much woven, digressions and returns of time, quite tuneless, the bass, over and over, approaching, drooping, the same declivity, the baritone taking over, a sort of metacenter, murmuring along monotones between major and minor, nor in any determinable key, the tenor winding upward like a horn, a wire, the flight of a bird, almost into full declamation, then failing it, silencing; at length enlarging, the others lifting, now, alone, lone, and largely, questioning, alone and not sustained, in the middle of space, stopped; and now resumed, sunken upon the bosom of the bass, the head declined; both muted, droned; the baritone makes his comment, unresolved, that is a question, all on one note: and they are quiet, and do not look at us, nor at anything."
In "Blues People," published in The New York Review in 1964, Ralph Ellison writes, "Bessie Smith might have been a 'blues queen' to the society at large, but within the tighter Negro community where the blues were part of a total way of life, and a major expression of an attitude toward life, she was a priestess, a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group and man's ability to deal with chaos."
In a 1964 issue of Playboy Magazine, James Baldwin wrote, "Gin House Blues is a real gin house. Backwater Flood is a real flood. When Billie says, 'My man don't love me,' she is not making a fantasy of it. This is what happened, this is where it is. This is what it is. Now, I'm trying to suggest that the triumph here-- which is a very un-American triumph-- is that the person to whom these things happened watched with eyes wide open, saw it happen. So that when Billie or Bessie or Leadbelly stood up and sang about it, they were commenting on it, a little bit outside it: they were accepting it. And there's something funny-- there's always something a little funny in all our disasters, if one can face the disaster."
After we read "The Uses of the Blues" out loud, I asked my students to find quotes from Baldwin's text and respond to them. One young man picked out this quote: "People who in some sense know who they are can't change the world always, but they can do something to make it a little more, to make life a little more human." The student responds, "I believe that if everyone does this the world can be a lot more human. But to do that you must have some sense of who you are and I don't think its just me but I sometimes feel as if I don't even know who I am so how can I do my part?"
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