Morning Thanks--the blues

It is--and was--America's only unique art form, at least that's what this white guy learned years ago in a graduate class in African-American literature. It is--or was--predominately an African-American genre, or at least had its roots in the experience of sharecroppers on white man's land in the rural South, a people governed by laws sometimes coded and sometimes not, race laws American history has come to call "Jim Crow."  

The blues--at least traditionally--were not happy songs. White folks loved to make up stories about black folks singing merrily as they skipped along on their way out to cotton fields. But what came from the African-American people, descendants of slaves, was music that rises from distress, something called "the Blues."

B. B. King, who died just last week, said he had only one real hit on the pop charts, "The Thrill is Gone," even though his artistry with Lucille, his guitar (his series of guitars) was not only unquestioned by legendary. King himself reckoned that the reason for his lack of popular success was what he said with his music, because even though the blues are uniquely American they are not the kind of genre that'll do well with millions of people who would, undoubtedly, prefer those smiley-faces going out to work, music that's cute and sweet and, well, a joy.

The blues are not.  What's more, people say teenagers can't sing the blues any way because they simply haven't lived long enough to develop the soul the blues demand. What do they know about life? Nothing. You got have heartache to sing the blues, not just skin irritations--"the thrill is gone." Gone, as is not returning. That level of heartache. 

It's most famous practitioner is gone now, B. B. King, who garnered almost every possible cultural prize America can offer for a lifetime singing the blues.

For some time, even "the blues" fell on hard times; and, oddly enough, it took the Brits to revive 'em, in the Sixties when bands like The Who lifted rhythms and vocal patterns off old 78s and put all of it to use in their own work, altering those patterns in the process, broadening their forms and appeal. 

Once upon a time, years and years ago, I attended a rural Baptist church in the middle of cotton fields in rural Mississippi. That worship service lasted forever as I remember, and multiple offering plates were passed, so many I got the sense that we weren't going to be released until what filled those plates was sufficient to bring on some kind of doxology. 

In the middle of that service, in what my people would have called "congregational prayer," an old man started in to praying in a language that was beyond me. I had no idea what he was saying, but he kept it up for some time, and the others, those around him, kept repeating or embellishing in the open spaces he left for them to do just that. 

I knew it was something special, but I knew absolutely nothing about what I was hearing. I understood that whatever penitent practice was occurring, it was something I wasn't going to see again real quickly because the old clapboard church in the middle of the cotton was like nothing I'd ever visited before. Its sounds, its penitence, its prayer was almost perfectly strange.

But in many ways, I was sitting that Sunday morning in a place that could well have been the very birthplace of the blues, listening to a man praying in fashion that hundreds of people in places like that old church had put to music.  There were no guitars in church that Sunday morning, and the old man who prayed in song wasn't blessed with perfect pitch, believe me. 

But what I heard was special. I wish I'd have known then what I know now. All I knew is that what that man did with the crowd around was like no prayer I'd ever heard anywhere.

A young African-American, a man with whom our youth group was working back then, walked away from that church with me that Sunday morning and shook his head. "Things have to change," he said, meaning that traditional old services like the one we'd just sat through were way, way, way old-fashioned. He seemed almost embarrassed.

Undoubtedly, he was right.

But I've got the memory of being there, and this morning I'm thankful for that gift, the plaintive notes that old man hit in a long prayer whose petitions I didn't understand but whose complaints I now will forever associate with what the whole world calls "the blues."