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 Don¹t 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 couldn¹t 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.