David Remnick from his book ‘Holding the Note’. (publ. Alfred A. Knopf, 2023)
The unschooled think of blues as sad music, but it is the opposite. “The blues impulse is to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” That’s how Ralph Ellison defined it. Guy (Buddy) puts it more simply: “Funny thing about the blues – you play ’em ’cause you got ’em. But, when you play ’em, you lose ’em.”
Another take. Kevin Young, poet and essayist. “The blues contain multitudes. Just when you say the blues are about one thing – lost love, say – here comes a song about death, or about work, about canned heat or loose women, hard men or harder times, to challenge your definitions. Urban and rural, tragic and comic, modern as African America and primal as America, the blues are as innovative in structure as they are in mood – they resurrect old feelings even as they describe them in new ways.”
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