At the very core of our beings, humans simply want to be understood. Even in situations in which the acts of either understanding or being understood are not precipitants to some sort of solution or tangible gain, two people merely communicating with each other to the point of emotional empathy is one of the most desirable person-to-person interactions that one can fathom. Of course, there are a vast amount of ways humans attempt to communicate their feelings and intentions and, as we know from both personal experience and observation of others, this is not always a successful venture. A common psychological belief suggests that when relationships are broken down and analyzed, most agree that some of the leading causes of strife and eventual demise of relationships are a lack of communication, a failure to comprehend said communication or simply the ignoring of another’s attempt at communication altogether.
Due to its transcendent and esoteric nature music emerged early on as an important form of communication amongst humans, as it allowed for the expression of ideas and emotions that might otherwise be difficult to convey through traditional speech. Highly respected and award-winning composer Hans Zimmer has said regarding this concept “Sometimes with two little notes, I can hit an emotional target with more precision than could ever be possible with words.” (Varkas) Indeed, some of the earliest historical examples of music being used to express an abstract thought to a large amount of people, or to excavate an emotional layer that lies beneath the surface of consciousness, are the epics of ancient Greece, namely Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, both which date back to the 8th Century B.C.
Written in a purposeful manner with the intention of being sung with musical accompaniment, these long-form poems of ancient Greece and their performances were not only meant to entertain the listener but also added an extra dimension of catharsis to the storytelling process that would be not be present with say, a simple recital of the text. Essentially the idea was that in order to fully grasp and comprehend the mythological history of their time and place, an observer of these performances in that particular historical context would not only need to understand the general facts and timeline of the story intellectually, but would also need to feel the more visceral aspects of the oration: the tragedy and heartbreak the Trojans undoubtedly experienced and what it meant for the trajectory of the war thereafter when the famed warrior Hector was physically bested by the mighty Achilles, or trying to imagine what the siren’s song might have actually sounded like and how it was so powerfully — almost supernaturally —alluring to Odysseus on his voyage homeward following the end of the Trojan War. (Dalby 196-200) When commenting on the true comprehension of these ancient epics and why they were sung rather than recited, author D.J. Snider believed in order to fully understand what was at hand, “one must penetrate to the spiritual principle of the work, reach down into the very soul of its maker and commune with the same.” Snider believed this was achieved by using music rather than basic speech.
In an attempt to be clear, direct and inoffensive in our communication, as people we often forgo revealing our deep-seated emotions or how we really feel about things. In this context music can act also as a form of personal therapeutic release, a basic cognitive belief being that it is healthier to disclose abrasive though authentic thoughts and ideas rather than to hide or repress them. The famed father of psychology, Sigmund Freud, believed that “unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” When the benign essence of traditional speech seemingly fails to illustrate or truly drive a point home, the abstract combination of music and poetic lyrics can be an important tool in achieving such an expressive nature. It is no question then that music has long been one of the many escape routes humans have taken throughout history in reaction to hardship or oppression, when straightforwardly stating your protest is simply not quite enough, or worse, when it is blatantly ignored.
The historical development of general human communication, more specifically the way people express their most primal, deep seated emotions to each other in hopes of achieving some sort of common ground, has undoubtedly been made possible, in large part, by the concept of music and the ubiquitously vital role it has played in almost every society throughout history. No matter the time period or geographical location, music has proved to possess a quality of universality that can be harnessed by any person regardless of race, religion, age or gender and used as a vehicle for the evolution of one’s self-identity or sense of individual expression. In many cases, as well, history has shown that music can go beyond simply aiding a single person attempting to explain their feelings but can actually come to represent the disposition of an entire cultural group.
The “grunge” and “disco” movements, for example, at their beginnings were simply original and innovative forms of new music, perpetrated and patronized for the most part by the younger people of the time, marinating in the burgeoning countercultural underground long before eventually being accepted or even heard by a wider audience more representative of the general population. Quite quickly, however, these movements became about a lot more than just music. Disco in the 1970’s spawning an entire culture of perpetual good times, dancing until the early hours of the morning (sponsored by cocaine and alcohol) and of course the unofficial uniform of bell bottoms, gold chains and silk shirts promiscuously unbuttoned to a questionable depth. (Frank 282) After all, what’s the use in purchasing a gaudy jewelry if no one ever gets to see it? In the same way, “Grunge” in the 1990’s inspired the plaid flannel shirt and ripped blue jean clad youth across the nation to adopt a more apathetic and almost post-modernly nihilistic way of viewing the world, complete with aloof objections and hip skepticism. (Serrianne 142-146) Toward the end of the twentieth century, music had become such an effective tool of persuasion and indoctrination in the United States, sociologist, author and professor Serge Denisoff once stated in a 1985 Newsweek article, ‘if you want to reach young people in this country, write a song, don’t buy an ad’ (54).
When attempting to comprehend any cultural phenomenon throughout history, in this case ones that manifested themselves in an artform, it’s equally important to delve into its roots and what societal issues led to its incarnation as it is to study the movement after its initial emergence and the influence that it possessed when it was at its strongest. It would be impossible to break down and fully grasp an artistic concept as anomalous as “blues” music, for instance, without of course examining the plight of African-Americans in the early twentieth century, the racial oppression that persisted even in a post-slavery United States and what that reveals about society as whole in the grander scheme of things. Blues music came about early on as a primitive reactionary method and eventually evolved into the blueprint for what we now know as protest songs. Whether it was personal protest against mistreatment by individuals, or individual protest against government and societal exploitation, the African-American community in the south took this abuse and turned it on its head, creating songs with subject matter that expressed dissatisfaction and a simple desire for equal treatment and respect.
Monetary ventures of African-Americans in the early twentieth century were almost exclusively related to the cultivation, harvest and sale of crops in addition to, of course, the labor that is necessary to carry out such an endeavor. Additionally, considering that in 1900, ninety percent of the African-American population resided in the southern United States, it is no surprise that cotton represented a vast majority of these crops and served as a painful reminder of the malevolent, ongoing enslavement African-Americans had endured only decades earlier. The most prevalent forms of farm related work at that time were essentially short term, task-oriented labor and/or sharecropping, in which an individual would rent a piece of farmland, tools and supplies in an effort to grow crops, hoping eventually to pay this rent with a portion of the profits from each year’s harvest. A risky undertaking indeed as outside factors such as weather or insect infestation, completely outside the control of the farmer, often dictated the success or failure of these crops and their growth. (Maloney)
In what is known as the Mississippi Delta the only other occupational options for members of the working class besides farming were grueling and exploitive forms of manual labor which included tasks like loading and unloading commercial vessels in a freight yard, constructing civil infrastructure like roads or bridges and even more dangerous and arduous tasks like coal mining or logging. Though not exactly a better alternative, these manual-labor based jobs became more favorable than farming or sharecropping to some, perhaps in part due to the fact that they were at least a change of scenery and did not resemble traditional slave labor. The stress and unpredictability that would surely come with such occupations would, in and of itself, possess enough stress to drive a person to madness. (Evans 32)
Unfortunately, African-Americans not only had to suffer through the trials and tribulations of this brutally instable economic period but had to do so while also being considered subhuman by their white counterparts, hindered and abused by an extreme form of racial discrimination, segregation and injustice on a deeply systematic level. Despite being “free” from slavery for over four decades, in the early twentieth century African-Americans were still legally restricted and isolated to an abhorrent extent, especially in the South, due to inherently racist concepts like the “separate but equal” doctrine and Jim Crow laws. The former stemming from the infamous 1896 supreme court case Plessy v. Ferguson, attempting to skirt the Fourteenth Amendment and provide an ideological justification for racial segregation, and the latter being the actual laws that were subsequently formed to legally enforce the separation of blacks and whites in everyday life. This included separate restaurants, schools, bars, churches and public water fountains, to name a few.
Acts of extreme violence perpetrated by whites, including lynching and race-based homicide, were also among some of the brutal and savage forms of hatred and disenfranchisement African-Americans were forced to withstand in this era. Lynching, an almost exclusively southern phenomenon, seemed especially to occur in a more frequent manner and grow more prevalent in this time period. The increasingly troublesome climate of the south for the entire population at this time, caused in large part by the unpredictability of an economy that almost solely relied on farming and sharecropping, saw white and black relations diminishing even more than it had in previous decades. Still viewed as a lower form of human, the southern black community of the time found it virtually impossible to even attempt to advance their culture and political stature in society without being met with extreme disapproval, opposition and physically violent hindrances from the majority white population. An unfounded and universal fear began to grow around that time as well that as the black community thrived, progressed and became more ingrained in general society, the long-held power and influence whites had in the U.S. as a whole (though especially in the south) would begin to wither. One could argue that lynching and other violent actions were a direct reaction to that fear and were yet another attempt at suppressing the African-American community to quell uneasiness of a shifting status-quo. (Hair 88-89)
As is often the case with cultural shifts, a perceived abuse and injustice that is incurred by the cultural group in question is what actually fuels the social dissent itself and what brings about the cessation of complacency in favor of an active protest of some kind. (something about cause and effect relationship) Before it became dumbed down and minimized into a mere genre of popular music or simply a term used to describe song lyrics that denote sadness or personal tragedy, blues music emerged as a primitive, emotional expression of dissatisfaction in an attempt at some sort of catharsis. The “Negro spirituals,” “work songs,” or as famed sociological writer and activist W.E.B. Dubois referred to them, “sorrow songs” of African-American culture in the mid-to-late nineteenth century are generally considered to be the first examples and earliest forms of what would later transform and come to be known as blues music. With titles like “Soon I Will Be Done with the Troubles of the World,” “No More Auction Block for Me,” and “We Don’t Have No Payday Here,” these acapalla tunes, typically sung in unison by large groups in the context of field work, can be seen as an emotional venting of sorts — an outcry of angst within a sociological climate in which, outside of violence, there was virtually no way to rise up against the despotism of the situation or to alleviate the suffering that chipped away and deteriorated the psyches and spirits of these people.
Seemingly, the purpose of these songs was, whether conscious or unconscious, to alleviate the pain and pressure caused by persecution in an attempt at perseverance in the face of racial affliction. Dubois stated in his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk that there was a “faith in the ultimate justice of things” that existed in the poetry of these songs, and that “the minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence.” Dubois believed that the ultimate hope of African-Americans at the time, as exhibited through the lyrics of sorrow songs, was “that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.”
As African American culture progressed in the first few decades of the 20th century, the poignant essence and grander cultural significance of these songs transformed into a style of music that, while still retaining a similar, basic form as the tunes that came before them, were this time around more structured, more articulate and set to more advanced instrumental accompaniment. While still not “free” in the true, all-encompassing sense of the word, the post-emancipation artistic African-American in the U.S. finally had more time, effort, mental capacity and emotional strength to develop these songs into an artform. In his book The Spirituals & The Blues, author James H. Cone says that, “The blues are a lived experience, an encounter with the contradictions of American society but a refusal to be conquered by it.” (124)
Though difficult to track down a specific date or singular person, modern-day blues music in its earliest form is said to have come out of the Mississippi delta around the turn of the century. Of course, keeping in line with its mysterious and obscure nature, much folklore exists regarding the genre of the blues in general. Arguably the most well-known legend tells the tale of Robert Johnson, one of the most famous and influential blues artists in history, and how he, in a fatal, Faustian move, met Satan at a crossroads and made a deal with the devil himself: complete mastery and proficiency of “the blues” in exchange for his eternal soul. (Gussau 197)
Legendary African-American composer W.C. Handy is most often given the accolade of being the “father of the Blues” not because he invented the genre, but because he is considered one of the few to notice the developing musical style at its beginnings, incorporate it into his own tunes and perform these songs live with his already established, travelling band. Handy is considered, however, the first to publish a version of blues music in the form of sheet-music around 1912 in Memphis, Tennessee, popularizing the southern town in the context of the musical style with proper compositions like “Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” “St. Louis Blues” and “Memphis Blues.” (Malone 35) Arguably the most popular of Handy’s work, “Beale Street Blues” describes a destitute strip of bars and juke joints in a mostly poverty-stricken Memphis, where men go to drown their sorrows. The song contains quintessentially bleak blues lyrics like:
“If Beale Street could talk, if Beale Street could talk
Married men would have to take their beds and walk
Except one or two, who never drink booze
And the blind man on the corner
Who sings the Beale Street Blues”
Handy ends the song with a stanza referencing the lyrical characteristics and subject matter of the pre-blues, quintessentially black music that came before him, in which he tells the listener: “I’m goin’ to the river, maybe by and by. I’m goin’ to the river, and there’s a reason why.” This is a clear and obvious allusion to popular Negro Spirituals like “Down to the River to Pray,” “I’ve Got Peace like a River” and “As I Stood at the River Jordan,” showing that, even decades later, one of the many distinct approaches of the Negro Spirituals was still being used in blues music in the south. In his book Jim Curtis “Rock Eras: Interpretations of Music & Society” claims that “The major solo acts, both black and white, in fifties rock “n” roll came from the South, and the south had something to do with the way they performed.” (51) Undoubtedly, citizens from the south, particularly African-Americans, had a uniquely different view of life given what history shows regarding rampant oppression, racial discrimination and societal climate of the lower half of the United States in that time and and the major players responsible for creating that atmosphere: Jim Crow, the Klu Klux Klan and the American government.
