Child soldier, DRC

One thinks of the indiscriminate violence against civilians and children in Fallujah in 2004, which resulted in thousands of deaths and untold suffering to many more; or the planet’s deadliest conflict since World War II in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has claimed the lives of an estimated 5.4m people, 50% of which have been children and has seen hundreds of thousands of women and girls raped; or the conflict that has raged in Dafur in the Sudan where two million people have died as a result of war, famine and disease and four million people have been displaced at least once (and often repeatedly) during the war.

Problem is, of course, everybody thinks they’re in the right and, often, that they’ve got God on their side. “Everybody thinks that they’re righteous, or they never even would have fought” – or as Eric Bibb put it in his song Got to do better, “Hatred’s a luxury, the price is too high”. Too often war is not the last resort and the cost is not properly counted – which is usually in the lives of innocent women and children.

Funny, isn’t it how quickly Christians have been, all too often, willing, or even keen, to support military actions. Particularly when you think that Jesus’ birth was announced by the shepherds as heralding “peace on earth”; when he said things like “love your enemies” and “blessed are those who make peace”; and when he offered no resistance to his torturers prior to his execution. Jesus’s good news proclamation was that the kingdom of God was arriving through his own life. This was the same good news that the biblical prophet Isaiah talked about, which was that the result of God coming to reign would be peace. (Isaiah 52.7).

The word “peace” occurs over 100 times in our New Testaments and at our peril we relegate this to some notion of “inner peace”. More often than not it’s about God wanting peace among God’s creatures. In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he says (chapter 12) that Christians are never to take vengence, should live in harmony with one another, should bless those who persecute them, should serve and help their enemies, repay no one evil for evil and live peaceably with all. Not much wriggle room there then, is there? Peace was central to Jesus’s mission and that of the first Christians – it ought to be just as crucial for modern Jesus-followers.

As Willard Swartley says in his book “Covenant of Peace”, the “New Testament consistently not only supports nonviolence but also advocates proactive peacemaking, consisting of positive initiatives to overcome evil, employing peaceable means to make peace”.

Duke scholar Richard Hays challenges Christians about their commitment to peace, “one reason that the world finds the New Testament’s message of peacemaking and love of enemies incredible is that the church is so massively faithless…only when the church renounces the way of violence, will people see what the Gospel means…The meaning of the New Testament’s teaching on violence will become evident only in communities of Jesus’ followers who embody the costly way of peace”.

But perhaps the last word to Carolyn Wonderland. The final line of her song reminds us that we are all God’s children, there’s no difference,  “that we are all brothers, there never really was no “them””. Well said.

Lyrics of Only God Knows When

What I know of peace, it ain’t hard to understand

Whether it’s shared by nations or individuals that stand

Toe to toe with each other, an olive branch in hand

Because violence is no solution when life ain’t like you planned

Only God knows when, only God knows when

We’re gonna get ourselves together, come up with the perfect plan

Only God knows when

There’s a hollow victory in winning, when everybody pays the cost

With retaliations by the hour, lives and generations lost

Everybody thinks that they’re righteous, or they never even would have fought

Why don’t you ask yourself when you’re starving, my brother,

“Just how easily can I be bought?”

One morning you might wake up, find yourself in your enemy’s bed

I pray that you don’t slay them, have that weight upon your head

How will you explain to your father all your brother’s blood that’s been shed

When we realize that we are all brothers, there never really was no “them”

The song was first recorded and made popular by Bessie Smith in 1929 – just as the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the New York stock exchange lost four billion dollars, resulting in panic in the days that followed, the further collapse of markets, the failure of numerous banks and the loss of the life savings of many ordinary individuals. It was the start of the Great Depression. The success of the song shows how well it resonated with what was going on in society as a result of the disastrous economic crash. Everybody could imagine beginning “to fall so low”, losing all your friends and having “nowhere to go”.

Cox’s song was a huge success for Smith, but has been covered by virtually every blues artist of note in every decade ever since, including Leadbelly, Janis Joplin, the Allman Brothers, Derek and the Dominos, Rory Block, B B King and Big Joe Williams. And, of course, famously by Eric Clapton on his Unplugged album of 1992. Why has the song  endured for so long and been enjoyed by so many? Well, it’s just a great song – a good story, lyrics well put together and a good tune. But as well as that, the song’s enduring appeal is that we all know that the story of the song could very well be our story – there but for the grace of God go I. Especially in these days of our own economic collapse, if could be us “falling so low”.

The problem with such a fall is that “nobody knows you when you’re down & out”. You become invisible. You’re nobody, you’re seen as having no contribution to make. You don’t count. This is one of the problems for the world’s poor. In the large cities of developing countries, slum communities sit side by side with 5 star hotels. The wealthy go about their business, often completely ignorant of the daily struggle for survival that goes on in these communities. On a visit to San Francisco last November, I watched people carrying their branded shopping bags out of the up-market stores in the Union Square area, making their way obliviously around street people living rough on the streets, many of whom were mentally challenged. It really is true – nobody knows you when you’re down and out.

This is not, however, the way that Jesus lived. The poor, the sick and those considered social outsiders because of their state of mind, their disease or their position in society were all drawn to him. Those who were well had no need of a doctor, he once said – it’s those who are sick. His concern was for those whom others considered “the least”. And if someone was to follow him, then that was to be their concern as well – “as much as you did it to the least of these brothers & sisters of mine, you did it to me”. In fact, he said that this was to be the basis of the judgement at God’s great assize at the end of all things.

Curious how often Christians have let focusing on things like the rights and wrongs of theology or internal discussions about how this or that should be organized distract them from noticing the great mass of people who are down and out and acting in a way that truly reflects the spirit of Jesus. “I said it’s true now, there ain’t no doubt, nobody knows you, when you’re down and out”.  It should never be true for Jesus followers.

Eric Clapton: Nobody Knows You Unplugged

Once I lived the life of a millionaire,
Spent all my money, I just did not care.
Took all my friends out for a good time,
Bought bootleg whiskey, champagne and wine.

Then I began to fall so low,
Lost all my good friends, I did not have nowhere to go.
I get my hands on a dollar again,
I’m gonna hang on to it till that eagle grins.

Cause no, no, nobody knows you
When you’re down and out.
In your pocket, not one penny,
And as for friends, you don’t have any.

When you finally get back up on your feet again,
Everybody wants to be your old long-lost friend.
Said it’s mighty strange, without a doubt,
Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.

When you finally get back upon your feet again,
Everybody wants to be your good old long-lost friend.
Said it’s mighty strange,
Nobody knows you,
Nobody knows you,
Nobody knows you when you’re down and out

By the time she was 15, in the mid-50s, Etta was recording hit records and was marketed as a  an R&B and doo wop singer. She signed for Chess records 1960, becoming a traditional pop-style singer, covering jazz and pop music standards on her debut album, At Last! Although her career started to suffer around 1965, after 1967 she became an in-demand concert performer, albeit not reaching the heights of her earlier successes. She enjoyed something of a revival after 1987 and her music began to incorporate more soul and jazz elements. Over the years her contralto voice deepened and coarsened, enabling her blues singing to become raw and powerful. In the early 1990s, James began receiving major industry awards, being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001, and the Grammy Hall of Fame in both 1999 and 2008.  Rolling Stone ranked her 22^nd on its list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time and 62^nd on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists. She also won six Grammy Awards.

In 2000 she released the blues album Matriarch of the Blues, Rolling Stone magazine hailing it as a “solid return to roots”, where Etta was “reclaiming her throne”. She released her final, critically acclaimed album, The Dreamer in 2011.

Etta James was given the worst of starts in life and in consequence suffered from bad relationships, drug abuse and discrimination from both the music industry and society. The fact that she became a successful singer, recording powerful and critically acclaimed material until last year, speaks of her courage and intense determination. You can hear the pain and raw emotion of her life and, at times, the rage at injustice, in her legacy of recordings. These included many songs that have stood the test of time -  I’d Rather Go Blind, If I Can’t Have You, At Last, All I Could Do Was Cry, Trust in Me to name but a few.

The title song from her recent album The Dreamer, captures the heartache of Etta’s life – “like a fool I thought that it could be, Dream on, dream on, So that someone will understand me”.

For much of her life it seems that there was no one to really understand Etta James – there were too many people who were just there to exploit or abuse. Etta sang the Otis Reading song, Try a Little Tenderness, on Matriarch of the Blues – “But when she gets weary, you try a little tenderness”. Too bad there were too few along the way to do that for Etta.

Interestingly, Matriarch of the Blues also has Etta singing Dylan’s Gotta Serve Somebody – “it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody”. Perhaps not so unusual, considering that Etta recorded many gospel songs throughout her career, including the spiritual I’ll Fly Away – poignant to consider in the light of her recent passing –  “just a few more weary days and then, I’ll fly away; To a land where joy shall never end, I’ll fly away”.

Rolling Stone Picture Gallery Tribute

It started in Tunisia, in December 2010, where a street vendor finally cracked at police harassment of him, symptomatic of more wide-scale regime abuse, walked straight to the provincial capital building, then drenched himself in paint thinner and lit a match. The revolt that subsequently took place in Tunisia then spread to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria, being resisted all the way by their corrupt dictatorships with brutality and murder.

Mannoubia Bouazizi, the mother of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi,

The courage of the protestors of the Arab Spring seemed to galvanize citizens across the globe, who, while not having to deal with cynical dictatorships, were sick of corruption and crime in governments and financial systems. So we saw ordinary people – disproportionately young, middle class and educated – on the streets of Moscow, Athens, Madrid, London, New York and other major US cities, protesting about the dysfunctional political and financial systems that have wreaked havoc with the world’s major economies. Time called the object of their ire, “the failure of hell-bent, megascaled, crony hypercapitalism”. Nicely put.

Cairo, February 2011

The blues at their very roots are protest songs. From the beginning they have railed against the injustice experienced by the black community in the US. B B King said “The blues is an expression of anger against shame and humiliation”  – because at heart the essence of the blues is rooted in human suffering, in grief, in distress. And of course, that’s not all, because the blues is not simply a wallowing in all of that – it’s an expression of anger & hope that protests against the problems facing us and that enables us to get to a place where we can rise above them.

W C Handy

W C Handy, the man credited with discovering the blues said, “The blues were conceived in aching hearts”. Songs like Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Broke and Hungry”; Leadbelly’s “Pick a Bale of Cotton”; Leroy Carr’s How Long Blues (I ain’t seen no greenback on a dollar bill, How long, how how long, baby how long?); Victoria Spivey’s T B Blues (I got a tuberculosis; Consuption is killing me. It’s too late, too late Too late, too late, too late) – and many, many more, all speak of the hardships of life for African Americans when the blues were growing up. Suffering that was the result of poverty and discrimination and which led to personal degradation and social disintegration.

People of faith, too, have long protested about the injustice in the world. In the 7th century BC, the prophet Habakkuk railed against the cruelty his people had suffered from the Assyrians when he said:

“Oh Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not hear?

Why do you make me see wrongs and look upon trouble?

…Justice never goes forth,

The wicked surround the righteous

So justice goes forth perverted.”

The writer of the 55^th Psalm complains of similar woes:

“I am distraught by the noise of the enemy

Because of the oppression of the wicked

For they bring trouble against me”

Centuries later, Mary, the mother of Jesus would anticipate the birth of her special baby by declaring that because of this birth, God “ has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. (Luke 1:52, 53)

Protest about the ways things are and hope for the world to be different is inherent to both the blues and Christian faith. Those of us who are into one or other (or both!) are part of protest movements. Maybe you wouldn’t think it, to look at us sometimes. But both the blues and faith in the God of Jesus Christ are – or should be – a howl of protest against injustice, corruption, brutality and greed, no matter where we find it. Maybe we need to howl a little louder. Let’s join the protest.

David Honeyboy Edwards plays Leroy Carr’s How Long Blues

But the blues are a continual reminder of the sorrow and the injustice of the world. B. B. King said “The blues is an expression of anger against shame and humiliation”. One of his songs is “That’s why I sing the blues” which reminds us of the roots of the blues in the injustice suffered by African Americans from the seventeenth century onwards in America:

“When I first got the blues, They brought me over on a ship…

I’ve laid in a ghetto flat
Cold and numb…

And every people, all the people
Got the same trouble as mine”

No wonder BB says:

“I got the blues, Mm, I’m singing my blues
I’ve been around a long time, Mm, I’ve really paid some dues”.

The blues are a window into one experience of injustice in the world and remind us of all the other experiences of hardship and suffering endured by many, many other groups in the world to this day. They remind us of the way the world is, with all the pain, suffering and injustice that goes on.

The Christmas story, of course, is not blind to this reality – it’s the story of a baby, born to a peasant family, with considerable social stigma surrounding the circumstances of the pregnancy, and put to bed in a feeding trough. A baby who is supposed to be a king, and yet whose ancestors include a prostitute, an asylum seeker and an adulterer, and whose arrival was announced to a group of poor men minding animals on a hillside. And a family who very quickly found themselves refugees, seeking protection in a foreign country.

The story surely resonates with the majority of our fellow humans in our world today who suffer the tragedy of poverty, hunger, preventable disease, lack of shelter, discrimination and lack of education and opportunity. Those of us who live comfortable, relatively prosperous lives in the developed world often miss the desperation in the world for the Christmas message and Christmas action, because we are too consumed by our own little worlds and petty concerns.

The story reminds us not just about human need, though – into the lives of the poor, ragged shepherds, huddled on a Palestinian hillside, broke a dazzling heavenly choir, singing about a new day of peace coming to the earth, somehow all bound up within the swaddling cloths of a new born baby in the local town. Into the bleakness breaks hope and because of that hope, joy. Things are changing, we find out as we read the Christmas story – the arrogant are going to be routed, despots thrown down, the hungry filled with good things and the rich sent away empty handed. In the birth of this baby lie the seeds for changing the world, for bringing peace and setting things right.

The blues, of course, often have this aspiration breathing through them; in many of the songs there’s a yearning for justice, for things to be put right, a hope for a brighter future. Willie King, Mississippi bluesman, talking about the early Delta blues said, “the good Lord in his spirit had to send somethin’ down to the people to help ease they worried mind. And that where the music come in – it would work in what you tryin’ a do, what you strivin’ for, to help give you a vision of a brighter day way up ahead, to help you get your mind offa what you are in right now…and the blues, like John Lee Hooker says, is a healer”.

So the Christmas story reminds us, as do the blues, of the desperate state of the world. But it gives us hope that change is possible and change will happen. And it challenges us to take seriously the song of Mary in Luke 1 and the announcement of the shepherds of “peace on earth”. Jesus followers believe that one day God will bring all this to pass in a fulsome way – but for now we are called to anticipate this coming day in the way that we live; to point by our actions to the hope of a better world ahead – a world of love, a world of fairness, a world of satisfied minds, a world where injustice is a thing of the past. We’ll leave the last word to a comment on the blues by W E DuBois, historian & sociologist – “Through all the sorrow songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things”. Because of the Christmas story, that hope & faith can be well-founded.

Watch Over the Rhine perform “All I Ever Want for Christmas is Blue”

Hubert Sumlin was said to be quiet and unassuming off stage. Keith Richards
called him a “gentleman” and Chicago blues guitarist, Dave Specter, said, “Hubert was just the sweetest guy”. That combination of being successful and recognised as highly influential in one’s field and at the same time wearing all that lightly is rare and to be appreciated. The word “inspiration” has been used to describe Hubert by many people – which of us could wish for more to be said about us at the end of our lives?

Hubert Sumlin plays “Sittin’ On Top of the World” with Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

Hubert Sumlin  reminisces about Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters

The legendary crossroads, where 49 and 61 intersect in Clarksdale MS

Welcome to Down at the Crossroads! What’s the name all about? The simple answer is that the blog is all about the meeting of the blues and faith – finding connections between the music of the blues that we all love so much and Christian faith.

Of course such connections haven’t always been made or welcomed. Going right back to the 2nd century, before the blues had ever been thought about, early church father Tertullian considered how his faith related to the culture of his day and asked, famously – what has Jerusalem to do with Athens? Athens, of course had been the centre-point of Greek philosophy and Tertullian wanted to make sure his Christianity was untainted by any contact with it. Since the blues were born in the early years of the twentieth century, Christians have been asking a similar question – what has Christian faith to do with the blues? Often the answer was – nothing! The blues was thought to be sinful, unrighteous music and there were plenty of blues artists who either fled back into the church or vacillated between the two worlds.

So just what has the blues to do with faith? Well, actually quite a lot and this blog will attempt to explore this over time. The crossroads, then, is where the blues and faith meet.

But we might attempt a slightly longer explanation of “down at the crossroads”. The crossroads, of course, is famous in blues lore. It was the place where Tommy Johnson and then Robert Johnson claimed they had sold their souls to the devil in exchange for a prodigious ability to play the guitar. LeDell, Tommy’s brother, asked him how he had learned to play so well and Tommy said,

Tommy Johnson

“If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little ‘fore twelve o’clock that night so you’ll know you’ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece…a big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.”

This story is as old as the blues Aside from the fact that some of these artists just wanted to build some mystique and notoriety around themselves, there’s a deep-seated myth here about the meeting of the worlds of good and evil, and the need to cross over to the dark side in order to gain the know-how and ability to improve yourself. There were, of course, completely natural explanations for Tommy and Robert’s increased guitar skills. But the legend of the crossroads reminds us that there is a deep built-in desire in us all to take a short-cut and find the easy way to the thing we really desire (if only that were possible for an enthusiastic, but pretty inadequate guitarist like myself!). The crossroads story isn’t so far from that other well-known story of the garden of Eden, where the serpent’s temptation is for Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit so that they might gain extra knowledge and become like God. The easy option and the one which leaves God out of the picture often looks attractive.

So, I guess, down at the crossroads is that place of encounter – maybe the natural with the divine, maybe the place, the doorway, according to Dylan, where we “face temptation’s angry flame”. But for us, in this blog, down at the crossroads is the place where the blues meets faith. Sometimes there’ll be compatibility, sometimes there’ll be an uneasy tension – but always it’ll be a chance to go deeper – into the blues, into faith.

Watch  Robert Johnson’s Crossroads played by Eric Clapton, Doyle Bramhall, Derek Trucks & Steve Winwood.