Do the blues represent suffering or progress

Do the blues represent suffering or progress?

By Don Wilcock , The Record

Do white people hear blues music differently than blacks? African American blues artist Guy Davis appearing Friday night at Mother's Wine Emporium, describes the reaction to a play he wrote called "In Bed with the Blues, The Adventures of Fishy Waters."

"I tell a couple of stories that have to do with lynching and threats of violence. There is one story that ends humorously with a black man running a train to get away from possibly being lynched.

"Black audiences will laugh their asses off, and the white audiences will be kind of sensitive. It's just something I don't know how to explain."

The liner notes to Guy's seventh album, "Legacy" on Red House Records, includes a 10-page comic book depicting Guy's trying to sell his soul to the devil in an attempt to reclaim the legacy of the blues the same way Robert Johnson is purported to have done.

The devil shows Davis a version of hell full of fat, faceless, white blobs in an endless line going into a fast-food burger place. He tells our would-be Robert Johnson protege, "Don't see how you're gonna do it when less than two percent of your audience around the world is black."

It is true that about 40 years ago, the blues audience suddenly flip-flopped from mostly black to almost entirely white. Davis is one of a handful of black "new traditionalists" including Corey Harris and Alvin Youngblood Hart who are resurrecting the acoustic blues of the early 20th century.

They are a distinct minority performing for a white audience that listens out of both academic interest and an emotional charge that often is quite different from the black perspective on the same songs.

The devil tells Davis, "The blues legacy belongs to the white man now. Maybe you should take up rap." What he says next is indicative of the differences in perception between black and white audiences. "Hell is crowded full of slick n*ggers like you who tried to make deals."

Guy says he inserted the asterisk in the "n" word because, "I knew that word can be offensive to many people."

He recalls a couple of young white rappers who used the word when referring to each other. "I had to fight the urge to keep from bustin' out laughing," he says, "and also the urge to keep from bustin' out crying.

"Oh, God, has it come to this? To think the word that represents the greatest of the misery of my people in this country now is just a friendly epithet."

Like any ethnic or racial slur, the "n" word has very different meanings to people within the group it represents than to those on the outside looking in.

"Amongst my own folks, I can use that word in one way 'cause it's got a perspective to it. It has an unspoken understanding that we can all relate to as I'm speaking.

"But if I see a Caucasian who is a stranger, it's not so easy for any of us to accept that word from him. And I think only with a little bit more familiarity would it be easy to use that word in front of him as if to say, 'OK, it's a word we brought to the floor, now, so we can now use this a little more easily.'"

Many whites tend to look back on history with a sense of wistful nostalgia and view the catharsis of the blues as a positive discharge of emotion. Some blacks, on the other hand, tend to look at blues as a reminder of slavery and its effect in keeping their progress as a race down.

Guy Davis is the son of actors/writers Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. He spent his youth rubbing shoulders with intellectual activists, artists and singers the likes of Harry Belafonte, James Baldwin, Paul Robeson and Malcolm X.

"The first place I heard the blues was from white college boys," says Davis. "Hell, I thought they invented it. At that time (the 1950s and '60s) it didn't make sense to try to recreate that in a progressive home. Folks were looking forward to much more social acceptance as opposed to getting off into our own thing at the time I was growing up."

One of the saddest ironies of the 20th century is the attitude by a majority of African Americans that blues and other artistic trappings of the period are merely reminders of a tragic legacy of slavery.

In reality, blues (and jazz) are America's most important contribution to world culture, and it was and is the black artists' work that set the American standard that has been followed by white musicians who got the roadmap from their black brothers and sisters.

"The blues that I heard being sung by the Caucasian musicians was 'Rollin' and Tumblin,' " recalls Davis, "and I only vaguely remember it. I think it might have been at the summer camp where I got my first dose of live folk music."

The new album "Legacy" will remind older listeners of the folk blues of the '60s. It owes more to the sweeter Piedmont style than today's more popular delta blues and includes material by such seminal artists as Lightnin' Hopkins and Sleepy John Estes.

"A lot of that is pre-blues music," says Davis, "like 'Run Molly Run' which I got from Henry Thomas. It's the music that was around that the men drew from in order to create the blues. So, yeah, there is a lot more of a Piedmont sound.

Maybe I'm more of a Piedmont kind of guy. I'm not sure."

The opening cut, "Uncle Tom Is Dead" is a running dialog between Davis and his son, who calls blues "old fashioned" and "trash."

Dad returns the volley, offering a litany of contemporary problems such as urban violence, unprotected sex and welfare checks as the subject of hip hop, which is supposed to present a more positive, progressive image - at least in the eyes of the younger generation.

"I can't say it's so much the way (my son) feels," admits Davis. "He sort of pretends to feel that way because maybe his generation is the happening generation, and the music I play is no longer cutting edge, but as my roadie, he's been to all my concerts, and he's heard me.

"He's heard many other blues musicians and, as a matter of fact, his favorite blues musician is not me. It a close friend of mine who he calls Uncle Roth, Roth Patterson."

So Guy Davis is an anomaly. He's an educated African American who grew up in a cultured home that never looked back on painful history. He thought blues was white-folk music, and his acceptance of the form in a classic context can be viewed as selling his soul to the devil on many levels, both musical and cultural.

"As a performer, I think the older style of song is what I like, but if I like something else, that would be OK, too," he says. "That's how I feel. I'm not a purist, yet my sound tends to lead more toward the traditional. It's rare to hear something from me that sounds much more modern than Muddy Waters."

Do whites hear something different from blacks when they listen to the blues? People of both colors tend to put their own scabs on the wounds that inspired the music.

But those of both races who love this African American contribution to world culture recognize the best of the genre for its ability to exorcise the most horrible experiences with a sound that lifts us up together and gives us hope for a better tomorrow.

9/30/04

Source: TroyRecord.com

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