Those Trans-Atlantic Blues
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Those Trans-Atlantic Blues By Stanley Edgar Hyman The Negro blues are experiencing a revival, after dropping into relative obscurity in the 1940s. In their distorted and...
...harmonically restricted to a simple progression of the tonic, subdominant and dominant seventh, the old hymn chords...
...If his book makes us laugh, it is, in the words of the blues, laughing just to keep from crying...
...Determined to gain independence for her family her labours may eventually become obsessive and in turn a source of anxiety to those who love her...
...Oliver has collected and lovingly transcribed the words of over a thousand blues records...
...That is the standard form, but there are many variants: 8-bar blues that are a simple AB...
...even a 12-bar form that the performers call "fast blues,' in which one of the lines breaks into two rhyming lines of two bars each, filling most of the space usually taken by the accompaniment...
...In their distorted and caricatured form as rock 'n' roll, they acquired an enormous public in the '50s, and since then a vast number of records, at least some of a traditional sort, have been issued or reissued...
...Yes yes...
...I should like to discuss one of them, Paul Oliver's Blues Fell This Morning (Horizon, 355 pp., $4.95), but first it is necessary to make some general observations...
...All that it is the very power of the blues to understate, Oliver overstates...
...Jerry Silverman's Folk Blues appeared in 1958 and Samuel B. Charters' The Country Blues in 1959, but the first is a songbook and the second a history, so that neither is what we most need, a detailed and knowledgeable discussion of the songs themselves...
...After at least 70 years of performance, the first studies of the blues are just beginning to appear...
...rhythmically 4/4 with offbeat phrasing...
...With a charming innocence, he assumes that his love will furnish all the insight he needs...
...Unfortunately, Oliver is an Englishman who had never been to America when he wrote the book, and his ignorance of American Negro life is appalling...
...Only the mud remained to greet them...
...The blues are a mysterious folk song that seems to come, not from a Negro "folk" in any of the familiar senses of the word, not from solid citizens, as do work songs and spirituals, but from a declassed semi-underworld, a world of brothels and honky-tonks, or, at best, of failed farmers and blind beggars...
...Oliver says: "Her arms still feel the warmth of her husband's love, and his fond words even as he betrayed her love still remain in her mind, their sweetness now turned as bitter as gall...
...He quotes Robert Petway's "Cotton Picking Blues": She's a cotton-pickin' woman, Lawd, she do's it all the time, (twice) If you don't stop pickin' cotton now, baby, I believe you sho' gwan to lose your mind...
...Whistlin'" Alex Moore's "Ice-Pick Blues" tells of his woman coming at him with an ice-pick, and Oliver explains: "Among the railroad and telegraph men, the street cleaners and builders, the ice-picks which are used to break up the accumulations of freezing snow during the hard Northern and mid-Western winters become tools of murder, and the small size of some of these, coupled with their excellent balance and penetrating bills, make them a favoured weapon...
...He reprints the following stanzas of Ida Cox's "Worn Out Daddy Blues": The time has come for us to part, I ain't goin' to cry, it won't break my heart, 'Cause I'm through with you and I hope you don't feel hurt...
...The way to learn about the blues is to hear them sung, most easily done these days from records, and to hear enough of them to get a sense of the possibilities inherent in the tight form and the traditional stanzas, of the sophisticated emotional ambivalence, the complex combination of misery and high spirits, that characterizes them...
...Billy Bird sings poetically in "Down in the Cemetery": I don't want me no woman with hair like drops of rain, (twice) Every time she combs her hair you can hear them hard nails ring...
...Thus he hears "Memphis Slim" in "Jive Blues" announce his intention of going on Riverside Drive, and never having heard of the place, Oliver gets it as a "riverside dive...
...The lyrics are a rhyming couplet with the first line repeated, AAB, each line in four bars, with the words characteristically ending in the middle of the third bar, leaving the accompaniment to fill out the remainder...
...The first and for a long time the only book on the blues, W. C. Handy's A Treasury of the Blues, with historical and critical material by Abbe Niles, was issued in 1926 and reissued enlarged in 1949...
...The song (it is Bessie Jackson's "Man Stealer Blues") says: I went to bed last night and the blues wouldn't let we rest, (twice) 'Cause I ain't used to sleepin' by myself...
...In this book he gives the lyrics of 350 of them in whole or in part, with elaborate analysis and commentary...
...As anyone familiar with the blues knows, this is one of the stock euphemisms for deviant heterosexual intercourse (Blind Lemon Jefferson sings it as "She crochet all the time...
...You're like an old horseshoe that's had its day, You're like an old shoe I must throw away, I'm through with you and I hope you don't feel hurt...
...and others...
...16-bar blues often AAAB...
...Husband and wife labour side by side until all energies are sapped and the wife who spends her days in the fields and her nights at the wash-tub has little time for the expression of love...
...Bellies swollen with pellagra, his children watch him solemn-eyed, whilst his woman now cooking the grits in the skillet loudmouths' him for his laziness, for his uselessness...
...Despite the variations, the melodic line is always immediately recognizable, the harmonies are always the same fixed sequence, and all of the thousands of blues that have been produced fit into a form as tight and perfect as a Petrarchan sonnet...
...Oliver's typical comment on a tough-minded and mocking blues will begin: "Perhaps he has taken her love for granted, perhaps he has given rein to unreasonable anger and thought little of her feelings, but he still cannot believe that the woman that he has admired and on whom he has depended so much...
...Now we have Paul Oliver's Blues Fell This Morning, claiming to be precisely that...
...He writes: "With gruesome imagery Billy Bird sings that he cannot love the body of a woman on whom rigor mortis has even touched her hair...
...But even a few bars will do...
...Oliver sings: "With aching hearts, and red-rimmed eyes, bereaved persons scanned the rows of huddled, homeless figures or with ungainly steps picked their way to the places where they used to five...
...A major difficulty is that Oliver does not understand the private language of the blues, the sexual double-talk, and that what he takes to be sociology is quite frequently sexuality...
...Here, complete, is Oliver's gloss: "Returning home when the sun has gone down, his pockets empty of all save his calloused hands, the share-cropper pauses before his clap-board shack, with its patched walls and crumbling piles...
...In Oliver's world, "Well, well, just lay down your brake and feed the gas, eeh yeah, and the stuff is here" is a tribute to the Model-T Ford, and "Doc" Clayton's "Root Doctor Blues" ("My remedy is guaranteed to cure you," he tells women) is a comment on folk superstition...
...In short, Oliver does not understand his subject matter and should never have dared write about it...
...Technically—and as a musical illiterate I simply parrot my betters—the blues is usually a song in 12 bars: melodically peculiar in that the third and seventh intervals, and sometimes the fifth, are flatted...
...He takes them to be melodramatic sociology...
...She curses him in her own helplessness for bringing them to such misery and turns him from the door...
...His explanations are as far as is conceivable from the stripped eloquence of the blues...
...Robert Johnson singing a single line of "Kind Hearted Woman Blues," She's a kind-hearted mama, studies evil all the time, tells all one needs to know about the blues...
...Since its interest is in the composed rather than the folk blues, it is not much to our purposes...
...Oliver's interpretation hits a high point here...
...Barbecue Bob" sings in "Mississippi Heavy Water Blues": I'm in Mississippi with mud all in my shoes, My gal in Louisiana—with that high water blues...
...You ain't got no money, you're down and broke, You're just an old has-been like a worn-out joke, So I'm through with you and I hope you don't feel hurt...
...Yet they are true art, perhaps with the skyscraper the only true art of American origin, and they are or should be our pride...
...Oliver explains: "Undoubtedly the strain of continual work 'from sun to sun' in the endeavour to gain freedom from debt and serfdom can kill the love in both heart and body...
...She pickin' so much cotton, she even don't know where to go, (twice) She's leavin' in the mornin', sweet mama, honey, she gwan' from do' to do...
...Here are some examples...
...She does not understand why his work never seems to get them out of debt, but she knows that she has to bear children, raise, clothe and feed children and try to keep a home together...
...Worse than his ignorance is Oliver's absolute misunderstanding of the tone and tendency of the blues...
Vol. 44 • October 1961 • No. 35
