The Blues and the Myth of Redemptive Violence

In the places where the blues were regularly performed in the early days, the juke joints, there was a considerable amount of violence. “Wherever the blues is played,” said Charles Love, ragtime jazzman, “there’s a fight right after.” A great deal of “cutting and shooting” went on in the juke. These could be very dangerous places; violence was widespread in country “frolics,” where blues were played. Memphis Minnie said that at juke joints she and her husband would “have to run at night when they start cutting and shooting.” Minnie herself was not averse to resorting to violence – Johnny Shines recalled, “they tell me she shot one old man’s arm off, or cut it with a hatchet…Minnie was a hellraiser, I know that!”

The mixture of letting your hair down on a Saturday night after a long week of hard labour, freedom from white supervision, alcohol and the music was an explosive one. The violence of the juke is evident from many of the blues songs – Mississippi John Hurt’s Make Me a Pallet, which talks about his “good gal” who might turn up and catch his new lover to “cut and shoot” her; Little Walter’s Boom Boom, Out Goes the Light, where the singer says “I’ve been looking for my baby all night, If I get her in my sight…Boom Boom! Out goes the light”; a popular early blues number, See See Rider 44, which says, “I’m gonna buy me a pistol, just as long as I am tall, Gonna kill my man and catch the Cannonball” – are just some examples.

Even as late as the sixties, there was violence associated with the blues. Paul Oscher was a white harmonica player for Muddy Waters for a while and recalls that everybody carried guns. He claimed that Muddy Waters always carried a .25 automatic and a .22 in his shirt pocket, not to mention the .38 in his car. Even with the band, it was said that the only reason everybody didn’t get killed was that everybody knew everybody else had a gun. Paul Butterfield, a white blues guitarist in the 60s said that many times in the Chicago blues clubs he was scared – “I saw knifings and shootings…It was a very violent scene, man.”

Violence, of course, is pretty much part of the fabric of life, and has been since Cain killed Abel. The bad guys use violence to get what they want and the good guys then need to defend themselves using violence. And so the spiral continues. There seems to be an inexorable logic about it – it’s a pity, but there it is, violence is needed to quench violence. It’s an idea that is played out night after night on our TV screens and in cinemas around the country. One of my favourite TV dramas at the moment is Justified – cool customer and lawman Raylan Givans can be relied on to sort out whatever ruthless, psychopathic criminals he comes across and it’s entirely right and proper that he pulls the trigger in order to do so, without a moment’s thought. I watched Man of Fire (2004) recently, starring Densel Washington as a retired CIA operative who, at great personal cost goes after the kidnappers of child. He gets the job done – of course – but leaves a bloody trail of mayhem, explosions and shot-up bad guys behind him. Well, that’s what’s needed, right?

The continual diet of violence that we are exposed to, moulds our thinking, even if we don’t realize it. Quoting recent studies in the Lancet and other journals, and organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, an article in the New York Times recently concluded that, “The weight of studies supports the position that exposure to media violence leads to aggression, desensitization toward violence and lack of sympathy for victims of violence.” At the very least we are convinced that violence is a legitimate means of bringing resolution and peace.

The myth of redemptive violence. That’s how theologian Walter Wink describes the paradigm which is reinforced in popular entertainment but which also underpins the very fabric of the modern nation-state. Wink says this is “the real myth of the modern world…the dominant religion in our society today.” Wink explores the primordial myth of ancient Babylon where creation is essentially an act of violence played out amongst the gods, where order is brought out of chaos by violent disorder. He suggests that this same myth prevails across a wide range of cultures, resulting in a view that violence in itself is not wrong, it is simply a fact – the social order depends critically on violence to suppress the powers of disorder.

He then goes on to discuss the way the Bible tells its creation story. Here we have a good God who creates a good creation, where good is prior to evil. Neither evil nor violence is part of the creation, but enter later, as a result of the first couple’s sin and the connivance of the serpent. He says “A basically good reality is thus corrupted by free decisions reached by creatures. In this far more complex and subtle explanation of the origins of things, violence emerges for the first time as a problem requiring solution.”

While we must reckon with the troublesome way violence is portrayed in the Old Testament as God-sanctioned – and easy, spiritualizing ways won’t cut it – the way of Jesus seems quite clear: love your enemies, pray for them, go the extra mile, turn the other check. All of which is followed up by the earliest Jesus-followers – St Paul, for example, with “bless people who harass you…don’t pay back evil for evil…live at peace with everyone…don’t try to get revenge for yourselves.”

Why have Jesus followers so easily made peace with war, when the New Testament and the early history of the church shows a strong commitment to peace and non-violence? Well I guess it’s not easy to disengage with the prevalent, assumed value of the need and the right of violence that is all around. Wink says that “the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the simplest, laziest, most exciting, uncomplicated, irrational, and primitive depiction of evil the world has even known.” He goes on to suggest that violence has become “pleasurable, fascinating, and entertaining,” in such a way that we are deluded into” compliance with a system that is cheating [us of our] very lives.”

The old blues songs merely reflect the violence that was and is part of society, whether as part of the oppression by whites on blacks during the Jim Crow era or within the juke. More recent songs kick back at the need for violence. Check out blues woman Caroline Wonderland’s powerful song about peace, Only God Knows When. The first verse has the great line “violence is no solution when life ain’t like you planned”, which Carolyn tells us applies to individuals and nations alike. Despite the appetite for war we’ve seen over the past ten years in the US and Britain, “There’s a hollow victory in winning, when everybody pays the cost, With retaliations by the hour, lives and generations lost”.

Or Walter Trout’s Brothers Keeper, which asks, “Are we supposed to be our brother’s keeper, Are we supposed to catch him, Catch him when he falls?” It recalls the murder of Abel by Cain, where Cain cynically asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Trout answers the question by taking us to the words of Jesus – “Jesus said to feed the hungry, Jesus said to help the poor.” Violence is not the answer to the anyone’s problems – there is another way; there is a better way. Time to see the myth of redemptive violence for what it is – destructive, life-sapping, false.

You have heard that it was said, You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who harass you. Jesus (Mat 5:43)

Blind Willie Johnson – Lamps, weddings and justice

Blind Willie Johnson is one of the most influential of the early bluesmen, with his songs , covered down through the years by Rev Gary Davis and Fred McDowell, but also by more recent rock bands like the Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen and the White Stripes.

Johnson has the distinction of having one of his songs feature on a special recording sent aboard the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 to head beyond the outer solar system into deep space – the Voyager Golden Record also contains music by Beethoven  Mozart and Stravinsky. What any other intelligent life in the universe might make of Willie Johnson’s Dark was the Night is anybody’s guess.

Born in 1897 in Texas, he was blinded at an early age, supposedly caught in a fight between his father and step-mother, who threw a handful of lye, a strong alkali used for cleaning, into his eyes. His life was one of poverty and he died before he was fifty in the most pitiful way imaginable, contracting malaria after sleeping rough in the ruins of his Texas home which had burned to the ground. Reports vary but it seems he was refused admission at hospital either because he was blind or because he was black.

Willie Johnson recorded 30 studio songs for Columbia Records during 1927–1930 and outsold the likes of Bessie Smith with his first 78, I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole / Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed. The Great Depression, however, just about killed Johnson’s recording career and he spent his life mostly busking and preaching on street corners. He was an accomplished guitarist, playing with a rhythmic picking style or sometimes slide with a brass ring or a knife. Eric Clapton called Johnson’s playing on Nobody’s Fault But Mine probably the finest slide guitar playing you’ll ever hear.”

He is best remembered for his gospel blues songs. Well known gospel blues from Johnson include Nobody’s Fault But Mine, John the Revelator, Soul of a Man, God Don’t Never Change and Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning. His song If I had My Way I’d Tear The Building Down landed him in jail – apparently he was busking in from of a Customs House and it was thought he was using the song lyrics to try and provoke a riot. The song, of course, is a spirited retelling of the biblical story of Samson and Delilah. It later became a popular in the civil rights movement.

Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning became a standard of Mississippi Fred McDowell but has been covered recently by Ashley Cleveland, Luther Dickinson and Luke Winslow King.

The song refers to the parable told by Jesus in Matthew 25. 1-12, of ten young women – bridesmaids – five of whom ran out of oil for their lamps. The scene here is the Jewish Palestinian wedding of the first century. Wedding processions from the bride’s to the groom’s home, accompanied by singing and dancing, normally happened at night and hence required light. The lamps in these weddings were probably torches, perhaps sticks wrapped with oiled rags. Women torchbearers led the bride to the bridegroom’s home, joined by the groom and his male friends. In the story that Jesus tells, the bridesmaids are waiting outside the bride’s home for his coming, to escort her to his home. In these traditional weddings the bridegroom’s arrival could often be delayed for hours while the bride’s relatives haggled over the value of presents given them, as they emphasized the bride’s great value. The torches, meantime, typically needed more oil every 15 minutes or so. Half the bridesmaids in the story had made sure that they had enough oil with them and so are ready when at last the groom arrives. The other half end up having to go off to buy oil at the last minute and miss the arrival of he groom, the wedding parade and the wedding. 

The Titus Arch in Rome, destruction of the Temple in 70 AD

The crux of the parable comes in Jesus’s warning to his disciples, “Therefore keep alert because you don’t know the day or the hour.” Christians have interpreted this in a number of ways – as a reference to the final judgement, our own deaths or Jesus’s prediction of God’s judgement on Israel because of her rejection of him, which Matthew saw as the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of Israel in A.D. 70. In a sense, it does not matter how we take it, the imperative is to be ready for the day of crisis. Jesus specifically says that the story is about the now-arriving rule of God, so we can take the story to be illustrative of how Jesus followers are to act, against the backdrop of God’s rule, whenever crisis hits.

Skipping down a bit in Matthew 25, we get the story of the Great Assize, where Jesus talks about how God will judge on the last day – and, perhaps to our surprise, it’s on the basis of how justly we lived. How did we treat the poor, the imprisoned, the sick, the homeless? Here we get to understand what “being on the alert means” – it means not just drifting along, comfortable in our own little worlds – “amusing ourselves to death,” as Neil Postman has starkly put it. Rather, we are actively to involve ourselves in working for justice – making sure, in the first instance that the hungry are fed, that people have clean water available to them, that the homeless are looked after and the sick are tended to, and then seeking to address the conditions that cause these things – the injustice, the war, the vengeance, the corporate vested interests.  Jesus’s “kingdom of God,” was not confined to the private, the inner, the personal. It is nothing less than justice, peace and wholeness for the world. And it’s to this that Jesus followers are called.

After evoking the story of the wise and foolish bridesmaids, Willie Johnson’s song tells us not to “get worried,” but rather to “see what the Lord has done.” In a world desperately in need of justice, it’s understanding that what God has done through Jesus has begun God’s world-transformation project, and that we can be involved in that, which will enable us to face the “worry” of the hour of crisis and instead to live in a way that demonstrates the peace and justice of God’s kingdom,.

“Keep your lamps trimmed and burning,” growls out Willie Johnson – the imperative is not to just drift along, hoping that somehow the oil won’t run out, or that the day of crisis will somehow pass us by. Rather we’ve got to keep alert, keep ready, demonstrate God’s new, just way of being human and, as we do so, trust in “what the Lord has done.”