Christmas: hope for a better world

You might well be forgiven for asking what the blues have got to do with Christmas. For many of us, Christmas is about having a good time, partying, too much to eat and drink. We’re not sure what we’re celebrating, but hey, it’s the middle of winter and we could do with a few parties! For those of us who see Christmas as all about the coming of God to us in the form of a baby, it’s a time of great joy and celebration. The world turned decisively on that day in Bethlehem in the first century, and the possibility of a new way of being human and a hope for a better and just world was born. That’s not the blues – that’s joy, laughter, hope and love.

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”

Tribute to Hubert Sumlin

Hubert Sumlin, one of the last great Chicago blues artists passed away last Sunday, 4^th December, aged 80. I feel honoured to have shared a birthday with him – November 16. He had come to prominence as guitarist for Howlin’ Wolf in Chicago in the 1950s, with a distinctive bare fingers technique, playing edgy and distinctive riffs. He worked as Wolf’s guitarist for 23 years. In later life, as a solo artist he was recognised by numerous Grammy nominations and a 2008 Blues Foundation award. Bands such as the Rolling Stones, Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan were all influenced by Sumlin’s playing. He became something of a living legend and prominent guitarists wanted to play with him or have him guest on recordings – the excellent 2004 recording, About Them Shoes, featured Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Levon Helm. In its most recent edition, Rolling Stone magazine listed Sumlin as one of the 100 greatest guitar players. Elvis Costello said of him, “Hubert’s a great man, and again, you know, I don’t play the guitar very good, but when I’m playing this kind of music, I always have him in my mind. I wish I could play like Hubert”. The esteem in which he was held is witnessed by the fact that Stones Richards and Jagger contributed to his medical bills and funeral expenses. Mick Jagger said, “Hubert was an incisive yet delicate blues player. He had a really distinctive and original tone and was a wonderful foil for Howlin’ Wolf’s growling vocal style. He was an inspiration to us all.”

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

Welcome to Down at the Crossroads!

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.