This is a reprint of an article published by Blues Revue in December
2000.
Off the Record
by Guy Davis
[Often touted as a member of the new generation of country blues
artists, Guy
Davis is well-versed in the music's traditions. His Red House albums
Stomp
Down Rider (1995), Call Down the Thunder (1996), You Donąt Know My
Mind (1998) and Butt Naked Free (2000) gained him recognition for
his playing
style and lyrical sensibilities. Davis has taken his love of the
blues to the
stage in productions of Mulebone and Robert Johnson: Trick the
Devil, and he
won further acclaim with his one-man show In Bed With the Blues: The
Adventures of Fishy Waters.
Here Davis tackles a subject that
still rankles some fans and performers:
What has race got to do with playing the blues? No matter how
you look at
it, the issue isn't simply black and white.]
Blues Is a Hard Song To Sing
One evening at a folk music
conference in D.C. a few years ago, Dave Van
Ronk told me that he and Roy Book Binder had a conversation to the
effect
that one day, the two of them would be old men sitting on a porch
somewhere
and some black kids were going to come up to them to learn how to
play the
blues.
I chuckled, but inside I was
chagrined. "The blues is not the white man's
music to pass along! Not to black kids", I thought.
"This music is my
birthright! My heritage! My legacy! It's a treasure that belongs to
my people!"
But wait ... am I the judge?
Ninety-nine percent of my audiences are
white. Are there even black musicians who play the blues? Am I
the
authority? The only cotton I ever picked was my BVDs up off the
floor. What
gives me the right to play the blues?
One day I had my grandma listen to a
recording of Taj Mahal singing the
'Track Lining Song.' When it was over, she sang back to me
verses that I'd
never heard. Apparently, my grandfather was once the head man of a
lining
gang. He and his brothers used to play guitars, banjos,
fiddles and
harmonicas. They never recorded. I never got to hear any of their
music, yet
to this day, when I take a new song to my grandmother, she'll
sometimes tell
me it sounds just like my grandpa and granduncles.
Where did the blues come from?
Africa? No, otherwise it would be sung in a West African tongue. The
blues is sung in English. It is American.
I say the blues began in the
belly of a slave ship during the Middle
Passage. Hundreds of bodies lying side by side, stacked together,
inhaling
the smell of their own vomit, lying in their own feces and urine
with
scarcely enough air to breathe.
Picture a pregnant woman lying
prone one night when the sea is calm,
moaning, wondering aloud what will become of her unborn child.
Picture a man
crying, puzzling over what has happened to his wife, his child, his
parents.
To give utterance to such
thoughts must surely have been the first seeds,
the very soul of the blues.
Now, of course, blues songs
range into every conceivable topic; funny,
sad and everything in between. Just like spirituals and work
songs, they're
sung in English. In the first years of the 20th century, they
acquired
12-bar, eight-bar and various other forms. Ethnomusicologists might
describe
the early blues as a form of folk music peculiar to Southern North
American
Negroes.
Picture an old black bluesman,
touching his guitar strings with rough
fingers shaped by hard repetitive labor. Cigarette in mouth, drink
in hand or
nearby. Watch as he drinks more than he should. Listen as he speaks
in poor
English with an accent that makes some words unrecognizable. Laugh
as he
finds some colorful, inventive way to get his point across. There
might be a
girlfriend nearby, an ex-wife and kids all over the map.
Now, picture a white college
boy touching his guitar strings with rough
fingers shaped by endless guitar lessons. Cigarette in mouth, drink
in hand
or nearby. Watch as he drinks more than he should. Listen as he
mimics poor
Southern English. Laugh as he conveys his impression of a bluesman.
When my 102-year-old grandmother, who
has only a fifth-grade education,
managed along with my grandfather to raise four sons and one
daughter to
become prominent professionals in their chosen fields, I deeply love
and
respect her and her thick Southern speech.
Wait a minute. This isn't fair,
talking about generic college boys.
Haven't I learned from watching Scott Ainslie? What about John
Hammond, who plays five notes for every three of mine? What about
Rory Block? How about friends like Woody Mann, Paul Geremia and
Kelly Joe Phelps and on and on? What's the real issue here?
The issue is racism. White folks can
never really know what it means, what
it feels like, to be a nigger.
Racism isn't always violent. It can
be subtle. One of the worst kinds of
racism is the kind that can be imposed on a once proud people who
eventually
get in the habit of hating themselves and each other. Look at the
hair
industry and the millions of dollars spent on products used to
straighten
black people's hair. What's the beef? It's just another hairstyle.
Or is it?
William Faulkner, the great writer of
Southern fiction and close-up
observer of black and white Southern culture, once said something to
the
effect of "Ask a black man a question and you will never get a
truthful,
clear, direct answer." And what is this unspoken truth that a
black man could
never tell a white man, even though he's smiling a pretty smile?
What this means is that black people
have to have a dual consciousness to
make themselves comfortable in a world designed centuries ago to
deprive them
of self-respect. What we say when whites are in the room is
sometimes
different from what we say when they're not there.
Racism is useful to justify the
inhuman treatment of millions of people to
accomplish the purpose of slavery. Black folks were treated by law
as
property. The law said that the master could sell his
"property" just as he
would sell a horse or mule. He could sell husbands away from their
wives,
babies away from their mothers. This to me is the origin of the
broken black
families that exist today.
Back then, if a master wanted to jam
the head of a female slave between
the pickets of a fence, lift up her skirt and invite his friends to
gang rape
her, there was no law saying he couldnąt do it to
"property." Slaves were
not allowed to read or be educated. Any slave caught teaching other
slaves to
read could have fingers amputated.
Back then, outside of the black
church, a slave didn't have any recourse
against such injustice or access to psychological counseling during
the
aftermath. Is it any wonder that alcoholism, drug abuse and broken
families
have followed the generations of slave descendants down to this very
day?
When you disrespect a man and take
away his power to oppose you, you make him invisible. You make him a
nigger. The people who work the poorest jobs are invisible. The
economy created niggers. Slavery was a socioeconomic
system designed to extract free labor from a whole race of people.
This
system was justified by racism. Racism makes invisible all the hurt,
all the
hate, all the rage that have no place else to go, and like
alcoholism, they
can be passed down from generation to generation by genes, by
stories, by the
blues.
Black people resent deeply ever
having been treated as niggers. Don't
expect us to just get over it. The hurt burns deep to the bone and
runs down
the generations. It affects everything we do. The lynchings, the
injustice.
Is it different today? You'd
better believe that my mother told me when I
was a little boy to be wary of police and their guns and their
statistically
brutal treatment of black males.
This is the legacy of racism.
Today you can hear in rap music the same
anger, the same hurt reflected, though more aggressively.
It was Pete Seeger who taught
me Bill Broonzy's "White, Brown and Black
Blues":
If you're white, you're all right
If you're brown, stick around
But if you're black, oh brother, you'd better
Get back, get back, get back!
This is the new millennium. The blues
is known throughout the world.
Whoever loves it and wants to should play it and teach it. If it's
so
important to me that black kids learn their heritage, I guess I'd
better tune
up my guitar and get my ass out on that porch.
But the world, in some ways, still
has not changed. The people for whom
this music was created seem to be those least benefiting from it. I
go to
auditions for commercials that use blues music and have yet to see
one black
session musician, recording engineer, spot producer or product
representative.
The men and women who've lived and
died with the blues, I believe, did so
praying that the world would change into a place where their
children and
their children's children wouldn't have to live the life that
brought about
and sustained the blues.
I enjoy listening to blues
performers of all races and watching them
perform, and that goes double for anyone I call my friend. I
experience a
rare mastery of blues at the hands of those who take their personal
hardships
and put them into blues form. But underneath, I know that blues is a
hard
song to sing, and nigger is a harder word to live.
