Don’t let nobody drag your spirit down

Paul Thorn’s new album, Too Blessed to Be Stressed, is a slice of feel-good Southern blues-rock, Americana which will have you singing along, counting your blessings and smiling until the next time you get a chance to play it.

One of the songs is Don’t Let Nobody Rob You of Your Joy, where Thorn considers the trials of life on the road and the precariousness of not having a 9 to 5 job, but concludes that “I live by the words my grandpa always said Don’t let nobody rob you of your joy…” In the face of the difficulties that life throws at us:

Life is so short, none of us are here for long…
Step ut of the darkness, every woman, child and man
Open your window, let the light of life shine in
And don’t let nobody rob you of your job.

It’s hard not to get discouraged at times – many people reading this will be facing financial difficulties, relationship problems, health issues, personal defeats of one sort or another. More than enough to rob us of our joy. Reminds me of that Eric Bibb song, Don’t Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down:

You might slip, you might slide, you might
Stumble and fall by the road side
But don’t you ever let nobody drag your spirit down
Remember you’re walking up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you around.

There’s more than enough trouble in the world to drag our spirits down. Shawn Achor, who works in the area of Positive Psychology and has written an excellent book entitled The Happiness Advantage advises doing 5 things every day to train our brains towards happiness – and this is not simply positive thinking – he dismisses the idea of “putting on a happy face” or pretending your problems don’t exist. The five things are:

Gratitude, Journaling, Exercise, Meditation, Random Acts of Kindness.

He suggests writing down three new things you are grateful for, for 21 days in a row –try it! What happens is that your brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world for the positive, rather than the negative. Thankfulness is a key to personal happiness, and has been shown to lead to increased levels of energy, optimism, and empathy.

One of the other practices Achor highlights is doing random or conscious acts of kindness each day – it could be a simple as sending someone a text or email praising them or thanking them. What this does is to focus our minds on others rather than ourselves, and being kind has been noted by scientists as a valuable attribute which has the potential of altering our negative emotions.

Listen to Shawn Achor’s 12 minute, highly entertaining Ted talk here.

All of which, of course, is not new to those of us familiar with the wisdom in the ancient texts of the Bible. The Psalms are full of thanksgiving, even while the writers are in the most dire circumstances, and the New Testament writers, whose lives were no picnic, are constantly giving thanks and encouraging their readers to do the same. There is something quite powerful and life changing about being thankful. As for being kind and looking out for our neighbours – this is at the very heart of the Christian message.

Trouble is we get so entangled in the grasping, speed-driven, busy, consuming way of modern life, we forget to be thankful, we ignore the plight of others and we end up miserable, unfulfilled and unhappy – most of us with a pile of stuff beside us that we don’t really need.

Eric Bibb’s song advises us to put the focus on others rather than ourselves:

Walk with the rich, walk with the poor
Learn from everyone, that’s what life is for
And don’t you let nobody drag your spirit down
Remember you’re walking up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you around.

In his book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (Simon & Schuster, 2007), A. J. Jacobs  says, “I’ve started to look at life differently. When you’re thanking God for every little joy – every meal, every time you wake up, every time you take a sip of water – you can’t help but be more thankful for life itself, for the unlikely and miraculous fact that you exist at all.”

Be thankful – and don’t let nobody drag your spirit down.

Muddy Waters: taking the bitter with the sweet

Muddy Waters was born McKinley Morganfield sometime around 1915 in  Rolling Fork,  Mississippi. Raised by his grandmother, Della Grant in Clarksdale after his mother died when he was three, he lived in a shack on Stovall Plantation, working as a farm laborer from when he was a boy. Life was harsh, brutal even, with poverty and deprivation part of daily life. Muddy Water’s website notes that blues artists like Muddy “gave vent to…terror, frustration, rage and passionate humanity in a music that was taut with dark, brooding force and spellbinding intensity that was jagged, harsh, raw as an open wound and profoundly, inexorably, moving.”

Muddy began playing harmonica, then guitar and by 17, he was playing at parties, seeking to emulate his heroes, Son House and Robert Johnson. Within ten years he had moved to Chicago, where he became a full-time professional musician, and in due course a huge success and the acknowledged father of Chicago blues.

With all his success, however, and ability to broaden his musical horizon to include new musical sounds and approaches, not least the amplified electric guitar, Muddy’s early years in the Delta clearly remained formative – take his 1959 Single Version of Take the Bitter With The Sweet, where he remembers the struggles and difficulties of growing up in poverty. He sings about the pain of not having any family:

Well I don’t have no mother, father, brother, sister, boy, I ain’t never seen
Well you know sometime I feel so lonesome
Well yes I feel just like I wanna scream..

He remembers the times when “There’ve been nights I’ve laid down, And I didn’t have no food to eat,” and the days he walked around and “I didn’t have no shoes on my feet.”

The song, interestingly concludes with the line “Oh Lord, boy I gotta take the bitter with the sweet,” which is a surprisingly upbeat and positive take on the woes that he’s just been singing about.

Even those of us who are fortunate enough not to live in poverty and don’t have to worry about where we’re going to sleep tonight know that life has a way of throwing some bitter pills at us from time to time. I’m just recovering from a lengthy period of ill health, and many of us know about job loss, bereavement, financial worries, family problems. None of us is immune from the trouble that life brings no matter who we are, no matter how wealthy we are or how strong and fit we are.

We hear a lot about life’s woes in Israel’s blues songbook, the Psalms – we regularly read about “the day of trouble,” “the time of trouble,” about “afflictions” and a whole host of difficulties. What is remarkable, though, is the confidence that the writers of the Psalms had that God would be with them in the day of trouble – “When they call to me, I will answer them; I will be with them in trouble; I will rescue them.” (Ps. 91.15). Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann commenting on these Psalms says that “The songs are not about the “natural” outcome of trouble, but about the decisive transformation made possible by this God who causes new life where none seems possible.” Psalms like Psalms 30, 34, 40, 138 all tell stories of going into trouble and coming out the other side.

Like these Psalms which look for a better day beyond the day of trouble, many blues songs also hit this note of hope for better things. For sure there’s no way we can avoid the bitter – we gotta take it along with the sweet – but the question for all of us is: in the day of trouble, who you gonna turn to? Who are you gonna hope in? The Psalms give us a good steer here – “my help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Maybe we’ll leave the last word on this to Eric Bibb…