The Hidden Muse of the Delta Blues
The history of the Delta Blues is steeped in mythology, and to tell it properly, we got to begin with Robert Johnson: now if you can forgive the heresy, Johnson’s mysterious transition to master bluesman was somewhat like Jesus’s transformation from carpenter to the Christ. No one knows quite how or when it happened…the truth is shrouded in secrecy. Johnson, like so many great blues musicians before and since, was born along the banks of the Mississippi Delta to poor sharecropper parents. He was expected to be a farmer, but there was a twist in his destiny: he encountered the blues and it took hold of him. He disappeared for a year and resurfaced a blues virtuoso, transforming the seedling blues tradition into an art of its own, with a style that sounded ‘like three men playing at once’. Rumors spread that Johnson met with the devil himself one dark night at some old crossroads deep in the Delta, and that the devil had offered him a deal: the secret of what makes the blues unique for the price of his soul. And there began a tradition that has carried on through rock ‘n roll, with how many musicians claiming they sold their soul for the gift of music. Whatever happened, Robert Johnson was a young blues master of the Delta tradition and in the mid 1930’s he recorded 31 songs for the Vocalian label. He was dead a year later, at age 27, the first in a cursed lineage of great musicians who didn’t live to be 28, all of whom, I believe carry within them the sound of the blues as a thread held in common…but that is an argument for another time.
The history of the blues really is the history of misery of the African American people, and it parallels the history of slavery in the deep south. The Delta refers to the fertile floodplains along the banks of the Mississippi River, and the dirty little secret of the great American past is that the slave trade was organized to import Africans and force them to farm the Delta. Constitutionalized racism kept them segregated, and the Black Codes kept their culture suppressed. But tradition lives on inside of us, and as the slaves were released, the suppressed artistic expressions held within began to emerge from deeply African roots, now refined by the crucible of American torment, as system of structure improvisation branded ‘the blues.’ Nominally free but now held captive by the shackles of poverty, denied their entitled 40 acres and a mule, some struggled to break free from sharecropping, or ‘debt slavery’. As the guitar become available and affordable, the Blues provided a way to escape this fate. And the tradition of the traveling musician was born in the Delta, forced by the fight for a better way of life. Among them were Son House, Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Johnny Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Charlie Patton, and BB King. Delta blues made it possible for them to leave the Delta and migrate north: first stop Beale Street, in Memphis, TN. Now the books are written to keep an idea stuck in the past, and claim that any permutation of the original inspiration should be rebranded as a new style of music; but I argue the faults in this logic are obvious: every genre is, for the musician, both a lineage you inherit and a path that you pursue. That is why we trace the roots of the blues back past slave days to Africa, and likewise the lineage that carried the Delta blues in their souls snakes through time as bluesman moved north, to the cities. We must recognize this movement from the seedlings that sprouted in the Delta from a field of improved field hollers and ancient African rhythms, to Beale Street, where the Delta blues became a structured poetic style that could be easily improvised: emotional vocalization presented as rhythmic talk: 3 lines, the first two repetition of each other, followed by a third line, to bring resolution. The accompaniment, initially steel string acoustic guitar, allowed the artist to demonstrate his musical prowess: the best could play some combination of a bottleneck slide rhythm guitar with either a overlapping melody or underlying bass line, while keeping time with their feet. And this 12-bar format standardized the Delta blues: 4 beats per bar, influenced by Native American drumming patterns, and a dance style called the Blues [which is a sexualized slow dance] emerged alongside, creating the black club scene—called juke joints—on Beale Street. Delta bluesman BB King, the undisputed King of the Blues, says ‘the blues were born on Beale Street’, and Congress names Beale Street as the official home of the Blues, from the Delta country to urban Memphis. But the story does not stop there, and it would be a crime to confine the Delta tradition to this point in time. Enter Chicago and the advent of the electric guitar, and the traditional blues were reincarnated. Add in a harmonica, made possible by amplification, and while the poetic form remained more or less intact, the electric guitar made possible the riff that defines the blues guitar solo: creating tension and then playing with that tension inside the loosely-defined blues scale until it is finally resolved. Usually branded as Chicago blues, I argue that electric blues are not a new style, but a natural evolution of the traditional Delta form. Other styles have emerged as offshoots from this lineage, suck as jump blues [blues infused with swing brass band] and boogie-woogie-blues [scales played up-tempo] ; styles driven by the desire for more up-beat blues. But blues is by definition an expression of depression, adopted as from the idiom ‘the blue devils’, meaning a time of melancholy. And the blues has always been demonized as ‘the devil’s music’, at odds with the church, though many bluesman learned music in church. From the true blues, has come R&B, some blues-inspired jazz, and all the good rock ‘n roll. Production techniques were defined by poverty; note the stripped quality of the original recordings and the crackle of vinyl. And Alan Lomax’s original recordings for the Library of Congress were not recorded in a studio at all but on some ramshackle porch down in the Delta. But the Delta blues has kept pace with the evolution of technology, utilizing what is available, and continues to be defined by the quality and depth of emotional expression rather than the use of specific equipment.
Gill Scott Heron, who was steeped deep in jazz and blues, is posthumously considered the Godfather of Rap. And as a student of the blues myself, I would like to make a prediction about the future of Delta blues surfacing within hip hop. Hip Hop and the Delta blues share much in common, both emerging under disturbing conditions in an arena of poverty and offering the possibility of a better life. Hip Hop is also poetic rhythmic lyricism, though it has become mostly an expression of anger or arrogance, and could benefit from the soulful emotional depth expressed in the blues as a means to connect with the grief that often underlies anger. As an example, I would like to end with a piece from a personal project entitled: And then Hip Hop got the Blues…
Hip Hop I heard you got the blues—truth is I got ‘em too.
See what they don’t say—is what most don’t know:
that when the blues takes hold it possess your soul and wont let go.
Like they say of rock ‘n roll…
the gift of the blues demands its dues and takes its toll.
And the crossroads is a metaphor, for sure…
meta for the time to act; think twice and its ready past.
And with the devil’s pact still intact,
it’s a mandate that you watch your back…
the blood of the fallen can attest to that.
The road is no joke, baby it’s a fact…subsisting out in no man’s land
existing there where no man can as a contemporary muse here’s the news:
its true: freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose.
