Cultural Officer Cam
First published 4th August 2023 on the Sugarfoot Stomp Facebook Community Group.
Part 4: Blues
Hey everyone! This is my fourth post of my thoughts on "The Power of Black Music" by Samuel Floyd. Last time, I focused on African American music and dance forms from during slavery, especially the spirituals. This post is about the spirituals’ direct descendants - gospel and blues. At this point in the book, we also begin to see the earliest dances that Sugarfoot Stomp facilitates - jookin’ blues dance.
Gospel
Around the time of emancipation, protestant christianity became the dominant Black American religion, replacing the African and Afro-Catholic hybrid religions that had dominated previously (although these religions were still hugely popular into the 1900s and still exist to this day). Christianity brought about the sacred-secular dicotomy - a concept that did not exist in African religion. At the same time, spirituals became less relavant - the spirituals’ message of freedom resonated less with an ostensibly free population that was still completely marginalised, and for which “death was no longer a release from slavery.” These forces transformed the spiritual into its new sacred and secular counterparts - gospel and blues.
Gospel largely maintained the spirituals’ call-and-response patterns and musical characteristics. The main changes came with the switch to Christianity. The “common spirits” that possessed Africans in the ring ritual became the holy spirit. The caller in spirituals became an institutional role - the preacher. Lyrically, the songs became less about freedom and more about salvation in the next life as black people discovered that despite emancipation, this life was still full of hardship and sin. As a result, they incorporated many European hymns and choral music into gospel, creating one of the first European influences to Black American music.
Blues
The secular counterpart to gospel music was blues. The musical elements of blues are essentially the same as the spirituals. On the other hand, blues lyrics were a statement against the spirituals - rejecting their sacred quality and twisting them to be secular and profane. Blues musicians “acted as proselytisers of a gospel of secularisation in which belief in freedom became associated with personal mobility - freedom of movement in the here and now, rather than salvation later on in the next.” These values entered the music - the shuffle of feet and clapping of the spirituals were combined with the chug of the railroad to form the blues shuffle - played on the solo guitar of a travelling musician. The twisting of spirituals is epitomised in blues’ call-and-response figures - “oh lord,” “lord have mercy,” “I’m prayin’ baby please” - religious exclamations used in an unabashedly profane context.
The secular counterpart to the gospel church was the jook joint. “In these jooks, dances such as the funky butt, the buzzard lope, the slow drag, the itch, and the grind were danced to rags, to songs of legend and fable (called “ballads''), to early blues, and to prototypes of the music that would come to be called jazz.”
The Role of Blues
The book emphasises that all of these genres are dance music first and foremost. The trope of a miserable African American playing the blues on a lonely street corner is an inaccurate one - blues is “feel-good dance music” which is heavily tied to the jook as an institution. The jookin’ ritual was rooted in the African “party for the gods” ritual - where people would honour the gods by dancing their associated dance. For example, the itch - apparently the basis of jazz dance - was originally danced to honour the trickster god Esu - it emulates Esu’s flea infested horse skipping around on its hind legs and scratching itself.
As I described last time, Esu was reborn in the new world as Legba or the Devil - guardian of the crossroads. This gave birth to the African American legend of the guitarist who sells their soul at the crossroads for the ability to sing the blues. Blues people embraced these African myths where gospel musicians rejected them. “Armed with the elements of the ring and the interpretive gifts of Esu, early bluesmen brought a new music into the twentieth century.”
Their job was to provide “feel-good dance music,” which they did by “exposing [the blues] through forthright acknowledgement of their unwelcome presence.” The often-depressing lyrics of blues music are a backdrop for a cool, controlled, grounded dance that allowed black communities to express an air of nonchalance and control over the “blue devils.” After all, jookin’ is a descendant of the same ritual that built communities in Africa and helped maintain them through slavery. “The blues is a solo manifestation of the values of the ring, possessing similar cathartic, affirming, and restorative powers. For African Americans, Esu’s appearance as the Devil at the crossroads affirmed African custom and tradition, a vital affirmation to their spiritual survival.”
Blues Musical Characteristics
As a result, blues contains the same ring-music elements as I listed last time:
1. Melodic
Pendular thirds (oscillating between the tonic and neutral third of the scale)
Melisma (melodies sung within one syllable)
Trailing phrase endings
Microtonal inflections in a pentatonic context
2. Timbral
Variously sandy, piercing, falsetto, rough, and spoken
Non-textual hums, moans, ululations, and vocables as an integral part of the musical meaning
3. Rhythmic
Influenced by hand clapping, foot patting, and patting juba
Repetition of short rhythmic motifs
Cross-rhythms
Accented second beats
Elision (the practice of shortening and removing English words in an African style to make phrases more rhythmic)
4. Textual
Tales, ballads, stories, and toasts told in metaphor
Figures of speech, indirection, implication, and personification in the form of dialect and call and response
Short phrases that repeat and form larger melodic structures
Listen to any of your favourite blues songs and you’ll hear most, if not all, of these characteristics. One key difference between spirituals and blues is the way the ring traits are brought out. Blues musicians answer their own calls with their instrument or voice, and emulate the polyrhythmic qualities on their own. However, it is a mistake to assume that jook dancers were not actively involved in the music just like they would have been at church. Blues recordings are stripped from their ritual context, and so don’t contain the finger-snapping, stomping and ululations that jook dancers undeniably brought to the music.
Key Takeaways
There are three main things we can learn from the role blues played in the life of post-emancipation Black Americans. Firstly, blues dance is modelled on the same “party of the gods” ritual I detailed in my second post, which means by dancing these movements we are embodying African deities, so we should honour these movements by dancing them committedly.
Secondly, the cool, controlled, grounded aesthetic of blues dance is crucial to the jookin’ ritual’s “cathartic, affirming, and restorative powers.” As guests in black blues culture, we can tap into the same gospel of freedom of movement in the here and now, and the same declamatory “pointing a stern finger” at the blues, by striving towards that aesthetic ourselves. For style inspiration, check out this vintage solo blues clip from some absolute masters of this aesthetic - Sandra Gibson, Al Minns and Leon James.
Lastly, blues is a rhythm dance. We should practise holding multiple rhythms in our ribcage and pelvis as a part of the cool, controlled, grounded aesthetic. We should also incorporate more foot patting and finger snapping into our dancing, keeping in mind that percussive dance is an integral part of blues music. For a more complete description of the blues dance aesthetic, check out this blog post by Damon Stone.
Alrighty, thanks for taking the time to read this post! The next one will be about ragtime and jazz, and the ragtime and jazz dances that eventually lead to the Lindy Hop.
Cam