Wry Melancholy

Twenty Years Listening to The Blues

Robert Johnson, legendary bluesman, in Memphis, TN circa 1935.

Listening to “The Blues” has always felt like playing with fire. Did I always know that, did I always feel that? Of course not. Some things, most things, can only be understood with age. The blues, for my part, is one of them. Even now, since my first real brush with the blues more than twenty years ago, it’s less understanding of the blues as the blues and now just seeing the blues for everything it is not. 

When I was a teenager — more like barely a teen, think fourteen or fifteen — I remember sitting in the secretary’s office of my private Christian school. That last matters, for reasons even now I can’t fathom, but that I hope (like the blues) will be understood for what it is not. This was back in the early aughts, when the worst thing I’d had to deal with was math class and the early twinges of romance.

It’s odd the things we remember, as odd as the things we forget. But I remember talking music with one of the secretaries, a middle-aged woman who spoke apocalyptically about the War on Terror. I told her I liked the blues, that it was one of my favorite genres, and to that she made a face. Her whole countenance seemed to be, in hindsight, one of naivete; as if she did not quite understand what I was talking about — The Blues? What do you mean? Even now I wonder what I meant by saying that.

I may still wonder, but now I think I have an idea.

There was an old webpage back then — when the Internet was young and still full of potential — that had a (mostly) humorous list of what the blues was, and what it most certainly was not. If you can believe it, I think this is the exact page and everything. For example, one rule asks: “Do you have the right to sing the Blues?”

To answer yes, you had to be or have done some of the following: 

• older than dirt

• blind 

• have shot a man in Memphis

• can’t be satisfied

One rule, probably the most important at the time and still (even now) the funniest, was also the most clear: teenagers absolutely and unequivocally cannot sing the blues. To quote the rules themselves, teenagers can’t sing the blues because “they ain't fixin’ to die yet. Adults sing the Blues.” Furthermore, in the world of “The Blues” adulthood means “being old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.” As you can no doubt tell, a big part of the blues is gunplay and in very specific parts of Tennessee.

Obviously, the list is jesting; but it also, in some strange way, is not. It’s being almost completely genuine in what does and does not make up The Blues, at least according to the maker. A little jokey, sure, but the point about the blues being an experience only found in adulthood raises a valid question: if a teenager cannot sing the blues, can he at least listen to them?  I say emphatically: Yes. Any teenager worth their salt would probably say the same. If there is one thing teenagers excel at, it's melancholy. 

The Blues — for all of its “love, hate, sex, violence, hope, superstition, religion, and protest” — shows that it deals with a veritable cornucopia of subjects in a variety of ways. According to Bluesologist Steven Tracy: “When blues are performed, they often provoke laughter from an audience that identifies with the experience being described or that appreciates the novel way the experience is described.”

The blues, then, is about life experience. Well, obviously. Duh. 

But it’s about life experience in the negative, of those who graduated magna cum laude from the School of Hard Knocks. The blues are about the bad mostly — the pitfalls and foibles of living — but it never sounds, or feels, all that depressed. To me, even when the core of blues music was hard-times, poverty, strife, and being misunderstood, it never sounds, at its lowest, more than wryly melancholic. As if the blues is a sadness both felt and performed; like being depressed and then wearing a sad clown mask atop it. It becomes, in the act of doubling, almost amusing. Two wrongs, sort of, make a right.

Photo by Kaitlin Duffey on Unsplash

Of course, all of this is to intellectualize something that can only be heard, felt, experienced. I can’t think my way into understanding The Blues. I’ll never be the child of a sharecropper, I’ll never make a deal with the devil at a crossroads, and I’ll (probably) never shoot a man in Memphis. There is a core deep in the heart of the blues that I will never feel or “get,” in its purest form. Nor will I ever understand it in its original context. All I can do is peek at it through a crown glass window; I can feel the guitar string’s twang, read the lyrics as words on a page, hear a song's deep, deep melancholia. But that’s it. I am locked away from ever getting it, from understanding; I am forever on the other side of a window that, no matter how much I might try, will forever sit placidly between me and the blues. The best I can do is rub my sleeves on the glass and hope for a slightly clearer view.

But if you’ve ever been in love, full of sickening longing for someone else, and Robert Johnson sings in Honeymoon Blues: 

Little girl, my life seem so misery
Baby, I guess it must be love, now, Lord that's takin' effect on me.

That’s feeling the blues. So, even if stripped of its context, there is still a strong, lingering vibrancy to it that transcends the years. That’s Robert Johnson letting you know that he gets it, and that’s you telling him, all the way back in 1937, that nothing’s changed and being lovesick is still misery.

The blues, for all that we write about them or consider them, can not be studied. The blues can be analyzed, its data points plotted, its songs cataloged. But to think that’s it, that’s everything, is like looking up at Van Gogh’s Starry Night and never once thinking to look up at the night sky. You listen to the blues, you live a little, you listen to the blues again and finally, if you’re lucky, start to understand them.