Welcome (back) to Sh*t That Makes Me Blue. Not a rebranding but a recommitment to exploration. Stick around for monthly musings on the feeling whose domination of my life I’ve decided to stop fighting - the blues. And other resonant feelings, and maybe what I do about them. Not a soapbox, but a porch stoop.
We’ve got a name for this feeling. This depth of despair that is all too familiar to many of us, this totalizing collective despair. This disabling helplessness that has our bones vibrating in our skin as we witness kin being chopped down at the root near and far. All while we feel our own roots drying up, loose, unable to find solid ground in the rocky landscape of yet another recession, another maliciously incompetent presidency, another crisis always creeping up on us in the night.
We call that the blues, and the blues done come back round. I’d say it never left. Yet a whole new generation of folks are feeling this disorienting turmoil of hope and despair, where they’ve never felt less alone in their pain but never as helpless either. It’s only a matter of time before we see a blues resurgence to match the pace. The blues is what they call it when a people are carrying more than they ever should, trying to share the weight but their knees are buckling and somebody’s mama calling out for her baby and nobody wants to tell her. Surely anybody who’s seen the inside of a baby’s skull ten times over would make a deal with just about any devil to make those memories go away. Take the pain with you when you leave.
They call this thing the blues.
I find myself playing the same couple records these days, well worn favorites in the small but mighty collection I’m growing. Best of Sam Cooke, Little Milton Sings Big Blues, Bobby Blue Bland’s Call On Me, sir Stevie’s Songs in the Key of Life, Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday. I’m my father’s child, so of course there’s Luther’s Never Too Much and Give Me the Reason. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours that I may or may not have accidentally liberated from the public library. And on days when the sun slants a different way and I feel the need to cut away the tune, I’ve got a pressed The Poetry of Maya Angelou, in her voice and truly remarkable. Along with Della Reese’ “what do you know about love” and The ABC Collection, yes they are all blues to me. These and more are all well-loved and scratched thin. I feel like there’s a code between the grooves I’m still tryna crack, like with enough listens I’ll knock loose some wisdom. Something to make the devil’s work on the world make sense, turn us loose.
My fascination with the blues started when I was very young. My parents were born in the sixties, so my childhood soundtrack ranged from Luther Vandross and the Isley Brothers to Johnnie Taylor, Etta James, Otis Redding and the like. Where I’m from, folks tend to leave the contents of their woes between themselves and God. But any chance to swing our heads together to some deep blues swing, we’re all for it. While we may have rituals and traditions we mechanically follow in the wake of loss, many of us don’t really know how to deal with overwhelming, grief, trauma, mourning and the lot. But I come from a generation of blues cafe patrons - hole in the walls that kept the liquor flowing and the juke box going. Over the years I’ve heard countless stories about the tricks and jigs only released in that sacred space. The cafe was next only to the church itself in how intertwined sin and salvation played off each soul in the house. And in its reverence among the poor and broken down, the black ‘n blue. Recently, though, we’ve witnessed a new dance of the devil’s bidding on sacred land in the ongoing genocide of Palestine, notwithstanding all the suffering being inflicted on nearly every corner of the planet. Where’s all this grief to go?
There’s something more to the blues, to being blue, than sadness.
My other earliest memories of the blues are of how they haunt. Younger than I should have had to, I knew what an untended blues looked like - what it could do to one’s soul. The systems that be that keep us in cycles of harm, precarity, and numbing that leave even the best of us with wells of untended grief. Nearly every bit of land has been colonized, and every population touched by the many evils of domination. There’s a million and one ways for darkness to enter a human soul, and on some days there don’t seem to be enough reasons to hold on to any semblance of life.
But there’s always camaraderie to be found even in the most dire, inhumane of times because there are others who have committed such blues, such desperation to memory, to the page, to a tune that’ll forever haunt our souls with sonic remembrance. There is a refusal to abandon found in ghouls, ghost stories and blues songs. A promise that someone before has looked the devil in the eye, crawled away, and come up with a tale in a universal language to let the next folks know - beware, dead end, but you will live on, again.
Haunts, haints, all the dead that walk among us are living history. In some places the veil between here and otherwhere is thinner - New Orleans, St Louis, Memphis, Jackson and Natchez and damn near all of Mississippi. It’s no coincidence that some of the most timeless blues standards were born in these same spiritual towns. Many generations of haunts and hurt still roam here, ripe for translation and expression and experimentation. Where I’m from it’s often your dead that teach you to play the blues.
While many of us spend our lives feeling the blues but not quite understanding what makes it so powerful, some folks do understand - are blessed with being conduits of human connection and human nature. The mode in which these (un)lucky bastards tend to record their gospel is the blues. But being so good at putting to song the muddy waters stirring within the downtrodden is threatening to the very forces that inject this darkness. It’s also at times been threatening to folks who fear the depths of its secular truth, as if the only way one could stare down the ugly parts of their soul and live to tell the tale must be that they sold their soul somewhere along the way.
And yet still, this devil music moves. It moves, and it lives on. In many ways I see the role of the revolutionary artist as blues folk, tasked with vividly expressing the past, present, and future in an impossible harmony. But try we must.
It’s a contradiction, to both revere blues music for what it can reveal about the shared human condition but to also fear its ability to lay bare the feelings and experiences most of us would rather hide away. This is censorship in a nutshell - the fear of what we can learn about each other and the world around us by rolling in the depths together, being unashamed to name all the things that beat us down.
The blues and blue as a state of being are two sites where we get to face the deepest, darkest parts of humanity - and live to tell the tale, to build something new. I’ve learned that having the blues one day is just as much about leaning into the melancholy as it is about what you do the next day. What you do with the life you have and how to spread the gospel of change.
I believe right now calls for new jazz standards. A whole new scale, something that reaches as low and deep as the darkest of humanity we’ve witnessed and sail beyond it with possibility. Yesyes, let’s break the scale. This thing’s brand new we’re building.
We call this thing the blues.