The Blues
Notes On Music, with reference to:
Rambling On My Mind – Robert Johnson
In My Time of Dying – Trad.
The Blues is the quintessential American music. The form, the harmonic language, the lyrical themes; the very essence of blues has had the most profound impact on American music and culture. The twelve bar form is present, and indeed prominent, in jazz, country, folk, rock and roll, soul, pop, all musical forms which have had a massive impact on the 20th century. The themes; pain, love, sin, redemption, loss, beauty, hunger, the open road, are amongst the defining themes of American history. The blues was there when the African homeland slipped over the horizon, when the slave whips cracked, and when the pressures of an economy they did not understand forced the migration of a million sedentary peoples. The blues was there when institutionalized agricultural enslavement became subjugated urban poverty. Throughout the social, economic and political history of America, the blues was there.
Robert Johnson is a name that conjures admiration, respect and veneration seemingly out of keeping with his 28 years of life and 29 recorded songs. His life, born the son of poverty-stricken sharecropping parents before spending the rest of his life on the road, playing music at parties and in bars to fund his gambling, drinking, carousing ways, is the epitome of the life of the stereotypical bluesman. He was neither the first, nor the most original bluesman, but he was one of the most talented. His guitar prowess, garnered from the devil at a midnight crossroads, in exchange for his immortal soul, is distinctive; playing bass line, chordal pattern and melody line simultaneously, the fullness of his sound, and the passion of his delivery, is remarkable. Unfortunately, so was his sexual prowess. He live only until 28, when he slept with a woman after a gig in a bar, only for the woman’s enraged husband – the proprietor of the bar – to lace his beer with cyanide, leaving him dead within hours. If the blues is the quintessential American music, then Robert Johnson is the quintessential bluesman.
Rambling On My Mind is one of his finest lyrics. It speaks of that finest and deepest of American traditions, the road. In this case, it is a man who has “mean things on his mind”, driven out by an unkind lover. He runs down to the train station, jumps on the first train which comes along, and speeds into the western sunset, escaping his past, ambivalent about the future, and desperately seeking the peace of mind he craves in his turbulent present. It is a fabulous tableau, and a not unfamiliar one to those with even a passing interest in American folk culture.
In My Time of Dying is a melancholic, dark, brooding song. It is not strictly of the blues form, but, in subject matter – sin, redemption, a religious craving for the sublime desperately incompatible with a character addicted in every sense to the joys of this world – and in stylistic device, particularly the use of the slide and the minor feel to the melody, it is utterly rooted in the blues tradition.
Musicians, and artists generally, often talk about the development of the art form - the strange, semi-mystical notion that drives all creative endeavours. The concept of development, however, implies the necessity of a starting point, a foundation, somewhere from which to develop. Usually that point is beyond definition, the memory of it muddled in the depths of history and a thousand different imaginations pulling in different directions. But not in America, where the beginning was powerful enough, recent enough and profound enough to still be remembered; in America, this place is the blues.
Rambling On My Mind – Robert Johnson
In My Time of Dying – Trad.
The Blues is the quintessential American music. The form, the harmonic language, the lyrical themes; the very essence of blues has had the most profound impact on American music and culture. The twelve bar form is present, and indeed prominent, in jazz, country, folk, rock and roll, soul, pop, all musical forms which have had a massive impact on the 20th century. The themes; pain, love, sin, redemption, loss, beauty, hunger, the open road, are amongst the defining themes of American history. The blues was there when the African homeland slipped over the horizon, when the slave whips cracked, and when the pressures of an economy they did not understand forced the migration of a million sedentary peoples. The blues was there when institutionalized agricultural enslavement became subjugated urban poverty. Throughout the social, economic and political history of America, the blues was there.
Robert Johnson is a name that conjures admiration, respect and veneration seemingly out of keeping with his 28 years of life and 29 recorded songs. His life, born the son of poverty-stricken sharecropping parents before spending the rest of his life on the road, playing music at parties and in bars to fund his gambling, drinking, carousing ways, is the epitome of the life of the stereotypical bluesman. He was neither the first, nor the most original bluesman, but he was one of the most talented. His guitar prowess, garnered from the devil at a midnight crossroads, in exchange for his immortal soul, is distinctive; playing bass line, chordal pattern and melody line simultaneously, the fullness of his sound, and the passion of his delivery, is remarkable. Unfortunately, so was his sexual prowess. He live only until 28, when he slept with a woman after a gig in a bar, only for the woman’s enraged husband – the proprietor of the bar – to lace his beer with cyanide, leaving him dead within hours. If the blues is the quintessential American music, then Robert Johnson is the quintessential bluesman.
Rambling On My Mind is one of his finest lyrics. It speaks of that finest and deepest of American traditions, the road. In this case, it is a man who has “mean things on his mind”, driven out by an unkind lover. He runs down to the train station, jumps on the first train which comes along, and speeds into the western sunset, escaping his past, ambivalent about the future, and desperately seeking the peace of mind he craves in his turbulent present. It is a fabulous tableau, and a not unfamiliar one to those with even a passing interest in American folk culture.
In My Time of Dying is a melancholic, dark, brooding song. It is not strictly of the blues form, but, in subject matter – sin, redemption, a religious craving for the sublime desperately incompatible with a character addicted in every sense to the joys of this world – and in stylistic device, particularly the use of the slide and the minor feel to the melody, it is utterly rooted in the blues tradition.
Musicians, and artists generally, often talk about the development of the art form - the strange, semi-mystical notion that drives all creative endeavours. The concept of development, however, implies the necessity of a starting point, a foundation, somewhere from which to develop. Usually that point is beyond definition, the memory of it muddled in the depths of history and a thousand different imaginations pulling in different directions. But not in America, where the beginning was powerful enough, recent enough and profound enough to still be remembered; in America, this place is the blues.
posted by My Back Pages at 11:12 pm
