What Comes Out When You Wail?

Reflections on the Blues

Sexy and Sad

I am a beautiful, sexy, sad person. When I cry any available light reflects off the water flowing down my cheekbones to create the twinkle of a dream in someone’s eye. My lip quivers with the rhythm of a taut rope when flicked. Oh but when I sob, the sounds of my melancholy melody are so unique (I’m perfect). My lung capacity hits new thresholds when the weight of the world tumbles like a landslide out of me.

The sounds of our own pain are individual, yet universally understood. I feel someone’s sorrow when they have no choice but to exude it. When an infant cries you understand, if nothing else, that their discomfort is present. Whether your mind agrees, your body is likely jolted into a position ready to act. You really feel it don’t you?

That’s the Blues. Songs of sorrow for sorrow’s sake.

As I watched Sinners I couldn't help but to reflect on the difference between the Blues and the other types of songs that come from our rhythmic oral traditions. What makes the Blues different from the work song or the spiritual?

Motivation and Purpose

The anguish of the Blues reflects a constant battle with white supremacy from the enslaved and/or formerly enslaved classes. We get a peer into the raw feelings sprouted from the turmoil of constant violence most Black people were facing at the time. Stories told, incidents recounted, situations shared through the pain of it all, because it hurt far too much to keep inside. Feelings bursting at the seams, coming as naturally as any other exhale.

Songs of the Blues ask for nothing but a witness.

Those work songs I mentioned earlier, they served a functional purpose. Sung by laboring Black bodies, the songs were motivation to continue. Just as the body is working the mind and soul are moving through the collective melodies of the group. On top of that, the songs invoked a working rhythm; rhythm serves as a drive to continue with the steady pacing of sounds and silence. You know exactly how long the note will last before you can rest and you know the in between won’t last forever, only until it’s time for the next beat of the rhythm to come to fruition. Work songs explain the instinct to create music when faced with consistent violence. If you can’t catch the wacky beats of oppression you must make your own viable rhythms.

There were those spirituals too. The messaging of imposed Christianity mingled with the pain of endurance and the melodies carried from the African continent. Longing for better days. If better days won’t come, longing for relief through the eternality of life after death in the kingdom of God. Amen. Invoking the new understanding that suffering is necessary for relief, if only to justify what they were going through. Amen. Spirituals, like work songs kept people going, but not to swing a hoe or pick a prickly plant, no. Spirituals kept the soul hopeful for a purpose outside of service to white overseers and gave Black laborers a direct channel to want. They wanted for peace, rest, resilience. They sang because what better way to reach God? Amen.

This is unlike the Blues. The Blues grieves and surrenders power only to the feeling itself. It gives power to sitting in the direct injustices experienced. OUCH IT HURTS!!! And that’s it. Only acknowledgement of the pain.

Bill Steber photo of guitar evangelist Cora Fluker

Does Being Sad Make You a Sinner?

I love how the Blues finds itself unfolding in Sinners. The music IS the disparaged cries. It IS the cadence of a fist banging against the nearest surface in the anguish of memory. The melodies and rhythms created are moving, they’re worth stepping to. In the movie we see many jigs created from the injustice of not having control, control of one's labor, control of one’s life. It is only in the pressure of the diaphragm where some relief may come if the tension has been built to sufficient levels.

Ooooo and don’t get me started on the generational aspect of it all. Too late! I’m already doing it. When the sorrow is swallowed it has no choice but to continue, if not through you, through all that you create. Dem kidz included. In the film Sammie inherits a situation, a responsibility because of the systems that placed his ancestors in bondage. He is forced into field labor by those systems and forced into the church by his father who has seemingly found respite in his role as a spiritual leader in the community. Sammie does not feel the same. He does not want to hold the same role that the people around him do. Thus, he is immersed in the Blues, the sad songs of anguish. I wonder if his father could stomach his role in handing it to his son.

It makes sense that Delta Slim would question Sammie’s ability to participate in the tradition of Blues. You ain’t lived enough life to be blue yet. I understand the sentiment. The Blues can ONLY come from experience. For me, this intensifies the sadness of Sammie’s participation in the Blues, because the Blues IS in him. In his little twenty years of living he can wail with the best of em. It’s a shame, it really is.

I see why the churches were scared. They continue to be threatened by the Blues and its’ iterations. *Don’t get it twisted, Hip-Hop ain’t nothing but the Blues revamped. Before Sammie started singing in the lor juke joint, he was rapping about who he is and where he came from.* The Blues has no desire, no need to worship. How can the church help you if you are willing to sit in a feeling and flesh it out instead of rapidly yearning to resolve it? Mmmmm, if I was a pastor looking to lead your life to the God I believe in, I’d sure as hell be wary too!

Puddles of Tears Create Reflections

The Blues is in us like it or not. There have been countless shapes seen in the reflection of released tears. Music about the hardships of living under a white supremacist capitalist system is endless! Hip-Hop was created in the image of sorrow. Club sprouts from the hardship and creativity of queer people on the East Coast. The new mechanical sounds of Techno spring up as a reflection of the arduous manufacturing industry in Detroit. All of these, extensions of those solemn blue colored ballads. Thank God for the Blues.

I am grateful for the space I have been given to feel. I am grateful for the music that it makes. I am grateful for the roads paved by those brave enough to let their sadness be known before me. The sounds are trapped in us until we allow their release. Ask yourself and find out: What comes out when you wail?

~ Carma <3

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