Blues, Spirituals and Gospel

The spirituals, the blues and gospel music underpin most of American roots and popular music. There follows a brief introduction to each with some listening suggestions. The QR codes at the very bottom give you an extended 20-song playlist containing songs from each genre. Enjoy!

The Blues

Blues music began to emerge in the early years of the twentieth century. These were the years of the Jim Crow laws, where black communities were disenfranchised and discriminated against; where there were so-called sundown towns where a black person was not permitted to be on the street after dark; where men and women were regularly tortured, lynched, burnt alive for alleged crimes or no crimes; where systems of forced labour confined black men to years labouring in mines, labour camps and plantations. Where poverty was endemic, children and mothers died in child-birth, sickness was rampant and life expectancy low.

The period of slavery in the United States had ended after the Civil War, but after a brief period of reconstruction, Southern States reverted to form, enacting discriminatory laws and treating black communities with contempt, creating poverty and suffering.

Although the blues are mostly about romantic love, they do reflect the despair and hard times that black communities endured. And many of the songs were explicit about what life was like: Big Bill Broonzy in I Can’t Be Satisfied sings, “Starvation in my kitchen, Rent sign’s on my do’.” Having enough food to eat for many families could not be taken for granted. Poverty is a common topic – e.g., Mississippi John Hurts sings, “I‘m a poor old boy and a long ways from home / Feel like I ain’t got no friend” in Poor Boy.

Other songs like Jimmy Rodgers’ TB Blues, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Pneumonia Blues or Tommy Dorsey’s Terrible Operation Blues all testify to the ill health and poor health care that black communities had to deal with.

The remarkable thing, though, is that the blues have always managed to strike a note of hope in the midst of suffering. According to Willie King, Mississippi bluesman, the good Lord himself had sent the music down to help ease worried minds. The music, he said, would “give you a vision of a brighter day way up ahead, to help you get your mind offa what you are in right now”

John Lee Hooker, another very famous bluesman says in a song he did with Carlos Santana, “the blues is a healer”. The blues are partly about suffering and partly about hope.

The blues express a belief that one day things will not be like what they are today. This becomes much more pronounced in a strand of the blues which has run like a golden thread over the decades and right up to the present. There is a long history of what we might call “gospel blues,” songs performed in the blues idiom by blues artists with Christian faith. For some artists, their Christian faith gave a sense of a God who walked with them in their troubles and to whom they looked for deliverance. There is a rich seam of this sort of music, running from the early Delta blues right through to the present.

Artists like Blind Willie Johnson, Rev. Robert Wilkins, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Rev. Gary Davis all gave expression to the hope of their faith through their blues-inflected music. Right up to the present you’ll find artists like Lurrie Bell, Keb’ Mo’ and Kelly Joe Phelps carrying on this tradition.

The Spirituals

The hope that we find in blues music despite the bad circumstances and suffering they reflect is partly because the blues have their roots in the black spirituals. These were songs that had their beginnings in the humiliation, the exploitation, the suffering that was black slavery in the United States. There are about 6,000 of these spirituals or “sorrow songs.”

Slavery, as most of us know, in America began in the seventeenth century, and slavery was a dreadful situation for any human being to endure. You were a piece of property to be used and abused as your master required.

Slavery was an accursed system of dehumanization. After being taken from your home and then to an unknown land in a fetid ship, you were worked 15-20 hours a day under a blazing sun, and beaten for showing fatigue; you were driven into the fields three days after giving birth; and you were sexually and physically abused as a matter of course.

Although the odds were stacked against them, black slaves were often not quiescent – they resisted in a whole range of ways. One of these was the sort of religion they developed. And the Christian faith embraced by many of those in slavery was not just that of their masters. They eagerly asserted an idea of Christianity where freedom and liberation were to the fore and where black humanity was affirmed, despite everything that slavery and white people said.

As we listen to the spirituals, we find the aspirations for crossing over Jordan, reaching the promised land and meeting those who have gone before. At first sight, these would appear to be simply a simple longing for a home in heaven after death, faith that there could be freedom and rest beyond the suffering of the here and now.

Talk of “glory” and “heaven,” for many slaves was not simply a spiritual freedom – it was a hope for God to be at work for them in the world. And people like Harriet Tubman, a former slave risked life and limb to free other slaves, often using the spirituals for communication in here daring raids.

The faith of Harriet Tubman and that which the Spirituals attest to shows the hope offered by Christian faith is not just for the future – it is also a hope for the present.

Gospel

Much of what we know as gospel music is black gospel music, and there is one man who stands towering over that, and that is one Thomas Andrew Dorsey. In Chicago in the 1930s, Dorsey set in train an approach to gospel music that has endured to this day and has been a major influence on all of modern music. He made a name for himself as a composer, arranger and performer in Chicago as a young man; he also performed as bluesman Georgia Tom, singing his own bawdy, double-entendre songs.

When his wife died in the early 1930s, Dorsey turned from writing and performing regular blues music to gospel music. He took the improvisation and the blues notes and the syncopation he was so familiar with in the blues and applied it to music in the church. Dorsey referred to the blues he had known as “low down” music – not that it was bad or unworthy, but that it touched people right down in their soul. He knew the power of music to touch people and that’s what music in church ought to do.

The gospel blues were born.

The lyrics of much of this early gospel music were about feeling God’s presence or about making it home to heaven. But that changed as the decades passed and people like Mahalia Jackson and the Staples Family became involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Just before Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic I have a dream speech, he asked Mahalia Jackson to sing I Been ‘Buked and I’ve Been Scorned, which gave voice to the discrimination and injustice she and her people had been subjected to.

Mahalia Jackson, Shirley Caesar, the Commissioners, the Clark Sisters, Andrae Crouch, the Winans and other gospel singers realized that faith was about more than the personal. Yes, that was an important part of it – a sense of God’s love and presence and hope beyond the grave. But faith also looks for God’s love and presence in the world now, bringing his hope and justice to all.

Blues, Spirituals and Gospel Spotify playlist of 20 songs on Spotify with QR Code following

Amazon Music playlist

https://music.amazon.co.uk/user-playlists/7587d9af0c1b4f3a9504ca939fc03778engb?ref=dm_sh_f746-8c7a-6989-4878-90d9a

Vika & Linda – bringing some joy to iso(lation)

Vika and Linda Bull are two roots artists that may not have come across your radar. You ought to remedy that straight away! They are two sisters, based in Melbourne, who have been singing, harmonizing and rocking for many years, delighting audiences in their Australian homeland. Along the way, they’ve supported the likes of Billy Joel and have performed with Iggy Pop. The sisters are members of Paul Kelly’s band – Kelly is a hugely successful Australian rock music singer-songwriter and guitarist, whom a Rolling Stone writer claimed to be “one of the finest songwriters I have ever heard.”

Vika and Linda released a new album this year, called Sunday (The Gospel According to Iso, a fabulous album of rootsy, bluesy gospel songs and we got chatting to Linda about it.

But first of all, because a lot of people in the US and Europe may not be familiar with Vika and Linda, despite their success in Australia, I asked Linda how she would characterize their music?

“Well,” she said, “we’re very hard to pigeonhole. We love harmonizing together and singing together and we cover a lot of different genres. We don’t like being pigeonholed. But I think it’s basically roots music is where our heart is – and harmony. Vika and I have got very different tastes, Vika is more rock and I’m a bit more country. And in between we can cover blues, soul, R&B and gospel. And we love to do that. We love to just sing together – regardless of the genre, we just love singing together.”

Turning to the new album, I wondered what “iso” means. Turns out it’s Australian slang for “isolation.” Linda told me:

“Because we made the album in isolation in the first phase of lock-down in Melbourne, not knowing then that we would have two. The background of the record is that we’ve been singing gospel music for probably about 35 years now.” She and Vika have made a few gospel-tinged recordings along the way, but “this one in its entirety is kind of the next step. We had restrictions with lock-down, so we made it minimally. And I think gospel music actually works really well like that. It works really well when you have very few instruments.”

The album is something of a gem, really pared back, largely featuring the wonderful harmonizing of the two sisters, and backed mostly by piano with those lovely sort of gospel chords that you get with the piano.

“We have piano all over it, in every track, and our musical director, Cameron Bruce, is a beautiful piano player. We’ve worked with him in Paul Kelly’s band, and he took charge of everything with us, helped to select the songs with a lot of zoom meetings. Cameron arranged the songs and then sent them back to us as files and we sang over the top.”

The Gospel According to Iso has 13 gospel songs (with a bit of latitude, we’ll count Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water and Chuck Berry’s Downbound Train as gospel!), mostly old traditional songs or spirituals like Sinnerman, Walk With Me Lord and Jesus on the Mainline. The album kicks off with a rockin’ version of Claude Ely’s Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down, and once you hear these two sisters harmonizing, and the bluesy vocals, you know this is an album you want to hear. The high quality is sustained throughout, and even though the arrangements are relatively sparse, there’s a nice variety to the way each of the songs is handled.

The album, Linda told me, all sprang from a weekly Sunday sing-song that she and Vika started to do when everything stopped in Australia early in the year. “I went out on Facebook and Instagram live every Sunday morning at 11:00am and we did one gospel song. That grew in popularity to the point where we thought we could make a record. We’d just ring a friend, they played guitar, we’d sing over the top, and we thought we could make a record like that.”

Why, I wondered, did they choose this particular selection of songs?

“We had lots of gospel songs in our back catalogue that we’ve been singing over the years, but we wanted to do something new. So I dug into the gospel collection that I had amassed over the years and we had about 70 songs from all different sources. Then we whittled it down and the focus was mainly just to do something that meant something to us and bring a bit of joy because it was pretty sort of sad over here – and everywhere.

“But we wanted also songs that people knew. So we have Bridge Over Troubled Water and Amazing Grace. But then there are other songs that we thought, we’ll just throw those into the pot because we love singing them – songs by Mahalia Jackson and so on. That’s how it came together.”

It’s a great selection of songs, but I particularly like Rosetta Tharpe’s Strange Things Happening Every Day. It’s got a very distinctive Rosetta Tharpe feel about it, with both the piano and guitar work echoing her original version. Linda said she liked Rosetta’s “rock and roll attitude. That’s kind of right up our alley.”

The other song I asked about was Elder Curry’s Memphis Flu. Curry was a singing preacher and guitar player who preached fiery sermons through his songs, backed by the barrelhouse piano of Elder Beck, and featured the stomping feet and clapped hands of his congregation. Recorded in 1930 for Okeh Records, Memphis Flu refers to the flu’ season of 1929 which was the worst since the 1919 pandemic. Death rates were very high, particularly in the Memphis region. The song is often thought of as the first rock’n’roll record and the original is a toe-tapping rocker all right. But Curry’s lyrics are pretty harsh. For Curry influenza was a manifestation of God’s wrath at sinners and there was little compassion for the large numbers of people who’d died as a result of the flu’.

Linda said that when she stumbled across the song, she thought how perfect it was for the current situation – but “the lyrics were very direct. So we tweaked them a bit in the choruses. It’s a gospel song of course, but you’re not going to die if you don’t go to church! But we thought the song was perfect for record. We weren’t sure whether people would love it or hate it!”

Actually, you can’t help but love Vika and Linda’s version, driven by a rollicking barrelhouse piano. The amended version of the song is well-chosen, actually, so timely, and with a great message talking about the epidemic getting the rich and the poor alike, and saying that it’s going to get a whole more if you don’t listen up and behave. Wear your masks people!

I asked Linda if there’d been any sort of pushback against science and wearing masks in Australia?

“There was a bit of a pushback. Yes, there were marches and demonstrations and anti-mask-wearing demonstrations, but all in all, you know, in the middle of all this, there was a black lives matter movement, and people were very observant of wearing a mask and they still went out and protested, so people in general were pretty good. No one loves wearing a mask or being told what to do – I get it, you know, but the result was good.”

Talking about black lives matter, the spectre of racism is something that we’re all increasingly aware of these days. What, I asked Linda, has been her experience in Australia, with her Tongan background?

“Well, yes, we have dark skin. So obviously we look different. So we have experienced a certain amount of racism, but nothing like our mother experienced.” The sisters’ mother came to Australia during the White Australia Policy, which from 1901 basically sought to forbid or restrict people of non-European ethnic origin, especially Asians and Pacific Islanders, from immigrating to Australia. It was only legally disbanded in the mid-1970s.

The racism encountered by Linda and her sister has been “nowhere near as much as the previous generation. So it’s getting easier in some ways, but we feel very strongly about being treated equally, and why shouldn’t we? We are respectful, but we are direct, so I always say we stand up for ourselves.”

The sisters are half Tongan – Tonga is a Polynesian neighbour of Australia, and it’s a heritage they feel proud of.

“Polynesian culture is very strong in our family. And the way they sing – when they sing in church, time pretty much time stops, it’s so beautiful. That’s how we were raised. We were raised listening to the Tongans sing in church, and that’s where we get our voices from. Because they taught us, our mother taught us.”

From listening to Linda and Vika, I’d sure love to visit one of those Tongan churches.

“Everyone we take cries when they see the Tongans fire up…as soon as you walk into the church and they start singing and they get into it, how can you help but not be moved?”

The album finishes with a beautiful, unaccompanied Amazing Grace. The slow tempo and the pure quality of the voices make it an appropriately emotional end to the album. There’s something about this song that seems to appeal to almost everybody, so I asked Linda what she thought it is about gospel music that has such a wide appeal even to people of no faith?

“I think that it’s uplifting and it’s one of those sort of genres that you can lean on when feeling a bit down, or when you could do with an uplift. It lends itself naturally to that sort of universal feeling. You know, we all want to live a little bit better sometimes. Although we grew up in a church and had a very religious upbringing, we think this music is for everybody. And I think that we love singing it because for us, it’s a release. I think it’s ultimately our aim with a gospel record to make people feel better, whether they believe or not.”

Sadly, with the restrictions still in place because of the pandemic, the Bull sisters haven’t been able to go out and play on the road. But, Linda told me, they can’t wait to sing these songs to a live audience. Hearing these two sing these songs live is going to be some experience. I just hope I get the opportunity to hear them.

Blues in the Time of Corona #3

We’re picking a few songs to help keep our spirits up at this time in a series we’re calling Blues in the Time of Corona, borrowing a bit from the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s famous novel.

Today’s song is Eric Bibb’s Needed Time, which he performs at practically every concert.

It’s an old traditional song, brought to prominence by Texas guitar-slinger Lightnin’ Hopkins and recorded by him in 1950. Hopkins, although a prolific recording artist, recorded few spiritual songs, just Needed Time and Sinner’s Prayer, as far as I know.

Eric Bibb brings an earnestness and passion to Needed Time that draws everybody in the room together, and makes them feel we’re all in this together, whatever our individual needs and circumstances are. We all know that “right now, is the needed time.” It seems more than ever appropriate in this health crisis. Sometimes we need something more than just ourselves.

I’m down on my bended knees
Down on my bended knees
Praying, won’t you come by here?

(More on this great song here). The following version is a lovely recording which features kora player Lamine Cissokho.

Harriet – “I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them.”

“I have heard their groans and sighs, and seen their tears, and I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them.”

Harriet Tubman

As the credits rolled at the end of Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet, I found my eyes welling up, moved by the depiction of this powerful woman, whose determination and heroic action had helped expose slavery for the pernicious evil that it is and rescue hundreds of black women, men and children from the slave-owning South.

Cynthia Erivo’s portrayal of Tubman is masterful, giving you a ready sense of the doughty, fearless character of the woman who not only escaped herself from the Maryland farm where she was enslaved, but then returned again and again, as a conductor on the Underground Railway, to free others. “Slavery,” Tubman said, “is the next thing to hell,” but vowed that “I have heard their groans and sighs, and seen their tears, and I would give every drop of blood in my veins to free them.”

In a recent interview Lemmons made no apology for highlighting Harriet Tubman’s faith and her sense of God’s guidance in the movie. She spoke of “consulting with God,” during her perilous expeditions south and trusted that God would keep her safe. Fellow abolitionist Thomas Garrett said of her, “I never met any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God.”

Black theologian James Cone noted that black slaves were not passive – they resisted the bondage they suffered in a whole range of ways. One of these was the sort of religion they developed. The Christianity embraced by many blacks in slavery was not just that of their masters. The idea of Christianity that black slaves embraced was one where freedom and liberation was vigorously affirmed and one where black humanity was affirmed, despite everything that slavery and white people said.

So black people shouted and prayed, preached and sang about a God who was not confined to the powerful and the free. A God who was for them and loved them and who was their source of strength and dignity in the midst of the trials and hardships of life. A God to whom they looked for deliverance, not just when this life was over, but right now, from the torment of slavery.

The movie also features Tubman using Spirituals to communicate with other slaves in her rescue missions. Coded songs contained words giving directions on how to escape also known as signal songs or where to meet known as map songs. She used “Wade in the Water” to tell slaves to get into the water to avoid being seen and make it through. This is an example of a map song, where directions are coded into the lyrics. “Steal away” meant to sneak into the woods for a secret slave meeting and “Swing low, Sweet Chariot” was used by slaves looking over the Ohio river – “I looked over Jordan and what did I see?” where the chariot was the means of transport northward. I’d read about this before, but as I watched the movie, I began to see how it really could work.

The movie rips along at a thrilling pace, with the tension at times almost unbearable. It’s a great story, it makes for great cinema, with a focus on courage and liberation rather than the horror of slavery (not that this this atrocity and blight on American history is glossed over). It really is a travesty that this is the first significant movie to be made about Harriet Tubman. But then, she has rarely been accorded the recognition she is due. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse, laundress, and spy with Union forces along the coast of South Carolina and was one of the few American women to lead an armed assault – yet despite numerous honours, she spent her last years in poverty.

Most of all, Harriet is a tribute to a remarkable woman, a true American hero. When asked by a BBC interviewer what had happened to the Harriet Tubman $20 bill, Lemmons said simply, “Trump happened,” but went on to express confidence that Harriet would be celebrated in this way in due course. Let’s hope Harriet helps keep the pressure on the US Treasury.

A Song for Good Friday: Lead Belly, Nirvana, The Welcome Wagon

Huddie Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly,” survived a life that included desperate poverty and long stretches in prison to become a renowned blues and folk singer. Discovered by the Lomaxes in the early 1930s in the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana where he was serving time for stabbing a white man in a fight, Lead Belly was released to become the “King of the Twelve-String Guitar,” – the most enduring image of Lead Belly is wielding his large Stella twelve-string.

His last recording session was around one year before his death, when he set down as much of his repertoire as he could, from field hollers, blues, and country & western songs to children’s tunes, ballads, autobiographical pieces, and popular hits of the day. There are some spiritual songs in there too, including the poignant He Never Said a Mumbling Word.

The song refers to the Good Friday story of the crucifixion, drawing attention to the Gospel’s account of Christ’s silence before his accusers when on trial – “They led Him to Pilate’s bar,
Not a word, not a word, not a word… He never said a mumblin’ word.” There’s a sense of destiny in all of this, that Jesus willingly gave himself up to his executioners, because he knew it served a great purpose.

In Lead Belly’s rendition of the song, it clips along, almost jauntily, sung unaccompanied and driven by rhythmic clapping. It scarcely seems to do justice to the subject matter, until half way through the song when Lead Belly sings, “He’s coming back again, He’s coming back again for me.”

The song was recorded again in 1989 by Nirvana, in a version that in some ways is not too dissimilar from Lead Belly’s, but driven now by electric guitar. Somehow, though, the rough, rather discordant guitar strumming and the vocals seems to fit the brutality of Christ’s crucifixion. Interestingly, however, the “He’s coming back again,” is missing from Nirvana’s version.

Maybe the best version of the song comes from the Welcome Wagon in 2014. The slow tempo, the banjo, the strings, the slide guitar and the gently sung lyrics carry the sombreness of the story from “Pilate’s bar” to the cries of “crucify” from the mob to the “nailing to a tree.” No second coming in this version either, the artists clearly wanting to focus the attention on the crucifixion.

In St. John’s version of Christ’s trial before Pilate, Jesus is not entirely silent, albeit his answers were, to Pilate’s ears, rather enigmatic. Eventually, though, Pilate asks, maybe cynically, “What is truth?” and receives no answers. “The answer to Pilate’s question, this answer he so desperately seeks in his confusion and emptiness, is standing right in front of him. The one who was the way, the truth, and the life. Christ did not give an answer, because he himself was the answer.” (In All Things).

 

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi in concert: 7 Things We Learned

Rhiannon Giddens was recently described as one of the 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and according to the New York Times “her voice is a perpetually soulful marvel.” She’s an historian, musical social activist, former opera singer, top-notch banjo player, fiddle player, actress, and accomplished song writer. Her recent solo album, Freedom Highway and her collaborative project, Songs of Our Native Daughters, with Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla and Amythyst Kiah bring to centre stage the history of black women in the United States, their suffering and resilience.

Along with Italian pianist and percussionist, Francesco Turrisi, she’s just completed a tour of Ireland. Turrisi, dubbed rightly a “musical alchemist,” is an highly skilled musician who has the deepest knowledge of the history of his music imaginable and is an accomplished raconteur, able to utterly engage his audience between songs.

They played a sold-out Black Box in Belfast, treating the delighted crowd to a feast of eclectic music, charged a times with intense emotion and laced at others with humour.

Here are 7 things we learned from their performance of at the Black Box (actually it could have been 26 things, given the lessons we got during the gig on music history, frame drums, banjos, southern Italian trance dancing and more besides).

1. Rhiannon Giddens is a fabulous singer. Actually, we knew that beforehand, but to hear her live was something else. She’s a trained opera singer, so the control, tone and dynamics are all there. But the timbre, the emotion and the connection she makes with her audience when she sings are all utterly mesmerizing. As for the ability to sing flawlessly in a Puglian dialect…

2. Who knew the history of the frame drum could be so interesting? It dates back to the 7^th century BC and there are a huge variety from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, most of which Francesco Turrisi had with him on stage. Well, quite a few anyway. Turrisi’s musical history lessons were never less than fascinating and when he pulled off that tambourine solo, he had us in the palm of his hand. Oh, and did I mention the Iranian Sufi drum which Francesco tuned by means of a bicycle pump?

3. The one string piano is a thing. There it was, right on the stage, the Una Corda, designed by David Klavins, the most unusual piano I’ve ever seen. The hammers hit one string, as opposed to three on a regular piano and it’s only got five, not seven octaves, if you must know. The important thing is that Francesco Turrisi could play that thing. Perhaps the most unexpected turn in the concert was when he sat with his back to us and started to play some 16th century Italian keyboard music, which eventually began to give way to jazzy syncopation. Quite wonderful.

4. Most people think of the banjo as a white person’s country music instrument. Rhiannon Giddens is on a mission to ensure we understand its roots in West Africa and then as an instrument of black slaves. It was eventually popularized in the middle of the nineteenth century throughout the United States and Europe by white performers. Giddens played her nineteenth century replica 5-string minstrel banjo with consummate skill, especially in the contra dance tunes she played in duet with Turrisi on piano accordion. The accuracy of the fast in-unison passages in these were jaw-dropping.

5. Ms Giddens’s song-writing is steeped in the infamous history of African Americans, where she distils the whole horror to an individual’s or family’s experience. The performance of the Purchaser’s Option (from her album Freedom Highway), which tells the story of a young black slave and her baby is horrifyingly effective, and but we heard the strength and resilience of the woman despite the horror as Rhiannon Giddens sang over and over,

You can take my body
You can take my bones
You can take my blood
But not my soul.

 

6. Despite the intensity of her historical quest and her dismay at the current state of affairs in the United States and elsewhere, Rhiannon Giddens remains incredibly positive. “We need to focus on how beautiful we can be,” on our potential for good, she told us.

7. Towards the end of a remarkable evening of the most eclectic musical elements you could imagine, Rhiannon Giddens sang an old spiritual “I’m Going to Tell God All of my Troubles When I Get Home,” with a simple piano accompaniment. You could have heard a pin drop in the packed Black Box. “When you think the world’s gone crazy, He will see you through…” It was exquisite. And an appropriate hymn to take back into life.

40% off The Gospel According to the Blues

The Gospel According to the Blues dares us to read Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in conversation with Robert Johnson, Son House, and Muddy Waters. It suggests that thinking about the blues–the history, the artists, the songs–provides good stimulation for thinking about the Christian gospel. Both are about a world gone wrong, about injustice, about the human condition, and both are about hope for a better world. In this book, Gary Burnett probes both the gospel and the history of the blues as we find it in the Sermon on the Mount, to help us understand better the nature of the good news which Jesus preached, and its relevance and challenge to us.

“The Gospel According to the Blues is at once a primer in American music, culture, and race and religious history. Gary Burnett moves deftly from lyrics to theory and back again, from Blind Lemon Jefferson to the insights of contemporary scholarship. Highly readable, thoroughly researched, and with deep respect for the art form on every page. For best results, read with scratchy vinyl recordings of the masters as accompaniment.”

Michael J. Gilmour, Providence University College, Otterburne, Manitoba, Canada

Order at: Wipf and Stock quoting LABOR40

 

Thanksgiving – Whatcha Gonna Do?

I listened last week to a version of a Bob Dylan song recorded recently by Tim Easton and the McCrary Sisters to raise awareness and support for the Nashville Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter and addiction recovery centre. The song is Whatcha Gonna Do and this is a really fine new version.

Being a bit of  Dylan fan, I’d heard the song before (on The Bootleg Series Volume 9: The Witmark Demos), but had rather forgotten it. It’s a version of an old spiritual, which asks the sobering question “Oh my Lord, what shall I do…when death comes a-creeping in the room.” Something I guess most of us would prefer not to think about too closely.

I then stumbled upon an excellent post by Sean Curnyn in The Cinch Review from 2014, who points out that Dylan has recorded several versions of the song. The one covered by Tim Easton was in fact the Witmark Demo version, the latest of three versions. Curnyn goes through the lyrical changes in each Dylan version, and prefers the version where the questions posed by each verse of the song are as follows:

First verse: Tell me what you’re gonna do when death comes creepin’ in your door

Second verse: Tell me what you’re gonna do when the devil calls your cards

Third verse: Tell me what you’re gonna do when the shadow comes into your room

Fourth verse: Tell me what you’re gonna do when your water turns to wine

Previously Dylan had had the 4^th verse question as Tell me what you’re gonna do when death comes knockin’ on your door.

This he finds interesting because there is a deliberate change here from contemplating the disasters of life – death, misfortune and evil, the “shadow.” Whether we like it or not, we all, sooner or later, have to face the shadow, or “the devil” (be it the consequences of our own foolish actions or, ill-treatment by others) and, last of all, death, of those we care about and, inevitably, our own. The ancient wisdom writers of Israel thought carefully about these sort of questions, when they wrote about “walking through the valley of the shadow of death,” and wondered where to go “in the day of trouble.” Their conclusion was that the only safe refuge was in “the Lord.”

Important as these questions are, Dylan takes us a step further when he asks “what you’re gonna do when your water turns to wine?” recalling, probably very deliberately, the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned the water into wine. What happens when something good happens, when something turns out, perhaps surprisingly, to be a blessing, when you encounter a moment of grace, when, perhaps, it seems like a miracle? How do we respond? Do we take it for granted? Do we enjoy the moment and then rush on to whatever’s next? Do we think it’s our right?

Or do we pause and be thankful? Gratitude is a powerful thing. Research shows that choosing to focus on good things makes you feel better than focusing on bad things, and that choosing gratitude can also bring out the best in those around us. It doesn’t just happen, however – we need to cultivate “interior gratitude,” the practice of giving thanks privately, and along with that, “exterior gratitude,” publically expressing our gratitude.  Someone has suggested writing two short emails each morning to friends, family or colleagues, thanking them for what they do – I’m gonna give that one a try.

It’s said that truly happy people find ways to give thanks for the little, insignificant things that happen in life – in this thanksgiving week, Dylan’s question is pertinent: asks “what you’re gonna do when your water turns to wine?”

Whatcha gonna do?

Playing the blues is like having to be black twice – B.B. King

What’s the relationship between the spirituals and the blues? James H. Cone, black liberation theologian and Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, in his 1972 book, The Spirituals and the Blues, says that both the spirituals and the blues are essentially about the struggle for black survival. He traces the spirituals to ante-bellum slavery in the Southern States in the dehumanizing and brutal experience of the African American community, and says that they were a means of black people “affirming that divine reality which lets you know that you are a human being – no matter what white people say.”

For Cone, “the basic idea of the spirituals is that slavery contradicts God.” They were a means of resisting the white gospel which emphazised the obedience of slaves to their masters. In the Oscar-winning, film 12 Years A Slave, there are two rather chilling scenes where white masters are seen reading the Bible to their assembled black “property,” the one with plantation-owner Epps reading about slaves obeying their masters from the New Testament, being particularly poignant. Cone suggests that songs favoured by black slaves were particularly those that recounted Old Testament stories such as Moses and the Exodus and Daniel and his friends as captives in Babylon. Clearly these stories of deliverance by God of those who are oppressed resonated strongly with a people in bondage, who looked and yearned for a day of freedom.

Cone makes the point that it would be simplistic to see these songs which celebrated passing through the waters of “Jordan” and going to the “promised land” as simply looking in desperation for relief from present sufferings beyond the grave. Such songs often had a double meaning: beyond “spiritual freedom” was “an eschatological freedom grounded in the events of the historical present, affirming that even now God’s future is inconsistent with the realities of slavery.”

Cone traces the roots of the blues to the spirituals, which both lamented black suffering and held out a hope of deliverance. The blues, he says, “are about black life and the sheer earth and gut capacity to survive in an extreme situation of oppression.” As such, the spirituals and the blues “flow from the same bedrock of experience” – the blues are, he says, “secular spirituals.”

Of course, as has often been pointed out, most blues songs are about love, sex and relationships. Son House said the blues were about what happened between a man and a woman. There has, of course, been a steady stream of blues songs which explicitly referred to the evils of the Jim Crow era and have sounded a note of protest – Leadbelly, Josh White, Big Bill Broonzy are prime examples of artists who raised their voices against the social situation in the South. But the blues rise from, and reflect, the context of the oppression of blacks, no matter what their explicit subject matter. They were a means of black people affirming their existence and an expression of their refusal to be destroyed by an oppressive environment. They are, in the words of Charlie Patton, a “Mean Black Moan.” Cone says simply, “the blues is black.”

Does that mean that white people can’t sing the blues? Of course it doesn’t – there is something about the blues that can get under anybody’s skin not matter what color, and something in the words, the music and the whole feeling of the blues that has universal appeal. As Willie Dixon said, “the blues are the true facts of life expressed in song, inspiration, feeling and understanding.” Audiences around the world for the blues are now, probably, predominantly white. And there are many great white blues artists who have a great appreciation for the music and the history. B. B. King said once that “playing the blues is like having to be black twice.” But he went on to say that “Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.”

But we can never forget that the blues are deeply rooted in the black experience of oppression and violence in the first half of the twentieth century. As Jimi Hendrix said, “Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.” Ain’t that the truth?

Slavery, the Spirituals & hope for a better world

James Cone’s excellent Spirituals & the Blues

It’s widely recognized that the blues has its roots in the Spirituals. These were songs that had their beginnings in the humiliation, the exploitation, the suffering that was black slavery in the United States. Slavery in America began in the seventeenth century. From the 1700s on, America become the land of opportunity and freedom for white Europeans; for black people, it meant one thing – bondage and dehumanization. Slavery meant being snatched from your homeland and sailing to an unknown land in a stinking ship; being regarded as property; working 15-20 hours a day and being beaten for showing fatuigue; being driven into the fields three days after giving birth; being sexually and physically abused as a matter of course.

Although the odds were stacked against them, black slaves were not passive – they resisted the bondage they suffered in a whole range of ways. One of these was the sort of religion they developed. The Christianity embraced by many blacks in slavery was not just that of their masters. The idea of Christianity that black slaves embraced was one where freedom and liberation was vigorously affirmed and one where black humanity was affirmed, despite everything that slavery and white people said.

So black people shouted and prayed, preached and sang about a God who was not confined to the powerful and the free. A God who was for them and loved them and who was their source of strength and dignity in the midst of the trials and hardships of life. A God to whom they looked for deliverance, not just when this life was over, but right now, from the torment of slavery.

Interesting to note, of course, that although blacks found plenty of encouragement for wanting relief from slavery in the Bible, so too, did the anti-abolitionists in the 19^th century, citing numerous NT passages, including Colossians and Ephesians as supporting slavery. The same was the case by the apartheid regime in South Africa. Which raises for us the very real problem of how the Bible ought to be read. A crude literalism, with no understanding of the culture in which the Bible was written, or the pervading narrative of liberation and justice stretchimg from the Old Testament into the New, more often than not lands us in trouble.

But for black slaves, as for Jews over the centuries, the story of the deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt was a formative one. Those of you who’ve heard Springsteen’s Seegar Sessions will remember the spiritual that celebrates the come-uppance of the slave-master in chief and his army:

O Mary don’t you weep no more. O Mary don’t you weep no more

Pharoah’s army got drownded, O Mary don’t you weep.

As well as the deliverance from Egypt, other Old Testament stories keep appearing: Joshua and the battle of Jericho; Daniel in the lion’s den, Daniel’s fiercy furnance. All stories of God  coming to the aid of his people when the odds were stacked against them. Black faith was grounded in the sense that God’s liberation is at work in the world. God’s righteousness for them was not some religious concept – it was an affirmation of the power of God released in history for deliverance.

If there’s one thing that’s clear about the God of the Bible, it’s this – that God is not remote from God’s world, unknowable – rather, God is the God of history, who works and intervenes in our world to bring change and transformation.

And in case we think that the aspirations we find in the spirituals for crossing over Jordan and reaching the promised land and meeting those who’d gone before were solely about going to heaven when you die, here are the words of one ex-slave preacher:

“When I started preaching I couldn’t read or write and had to preach what Master told me, and he says to tell them slaves iffen they obeys the master they goes to heaven; but I knowed there’s something better for them, but daren’t tell them ‘cept on the sly. That I done lots. I tells ‘em iffen they keeps praying, the Lord will set ‘em free.”

Slaves clearly had to be very careful about how explicitly things were expressed – and it’s likely that many of the references to freedom in the spirituals had at least a dual meaning. Heaven was not just some opiate for the slaves to make them more docile & submissive. It was at once a transcendent reality beyond time & space – but also earthly places where freedom lay, like Canada, the northern US and Africa.

Harriet Tubman was a slave who escaped to Canada. She used a song to let her relatives & friends know that she intended to escape to freedom:

When that ole chariot comes, I’m goin’ to leave you

I’m boun’ for the promised land, Friends I’m goin’ to leave you

I’m sorry friends to leave you, Farewell! Farewell!

But I’ll meet you in the mornin’, Farewell! Farewell!

I’ll meet you in the mornin’,When you reach the promised land

On the other side of Jordan, For I’m boun’ for the promised land.

When she reached freedom, she said, “I looked at my hands to see if I was de same person now I was free. Dere was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.”  Harriett Tubman went on to return to the south thirteen times and brought with her what she called “over 300 pieces of living and breathing property to the promised land”

Swing low, Sweet Chariot was used by slaves looking over the Ohio river – “I looked over Jordan and what did I see?” And the chariot was the means of transport northward. “Steal away” meant to sneak into the woods for a secret slave meeting. Christian faith for many slave inspired a hope for things to change in this world, and not just in the next.

Christian hope is not about escaping our troubled lives at the end for some sort of disembodied existence in a beautiful celestial city. It’s about God renewing and transforming God’s world, making all things new, including God’s people. As the apostle Paul tells us “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption”. Christian hope looks forward to God establishing a new world full of God’s grace and justice – and requires Jesus-followers to anticipate this new world and participate in God’s liberation project even now by modeling a self-giving love that simply won’t stand for poverty, oppression or despair. Christian hope must never result in quietism and self-complacent passivity, as we wait for God to sort the whole mess out. Jesus described his own personal mission as bringing “good news to the poor…proclaiming release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go free.”

The slavery out of which the spirituals arose has long gone in the United States – but sadly there are more slaves in the world today than at any point in history, with numbers as high as nearly 30m people, despite being outlawed everywhere. Bonded labour, child trafficking, the sex-trade all continue to bring people into servitude and lives of misery. Just one of the injustices in our world in which Christians need to be actively engaged in fighting. (For more information on how you might do that, see the Not for Sale website or Christian Aid’s campaign).

Here’s modern blues master Eric Bibb singing about “that great getting up morning” when God’s world will see its final transformation: