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
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 19th 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:
I listened to Carolyn Wonderland’s excellent album, Peace Meal, recently and while I thought the whole album was fantastic – strong songs throughout, powerful, passionate and bluesy vocals, some pretty nifty guitar work and a great band – one song stood out for me. Only God Knows When is a powerful song about peace. 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”.
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”
“Nobody knows you when you’re down and out” was written by Jimmy Cox in 1923 during the Prohibition era in the US, and tells the story of a millionaire who loses all his money through having a “mighty fine time”, treating his friends to as much “bootleg whiskey, champagne and wine” as they all could drink. It’s a simple morality tale – everybody wants to be your friend when you’ve money to spread around, but when you’re “down and out” – “as for friends, you don’t have any”.
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
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2011 was the Protester. Time noted that there had been a hiatus of protest, at least in the developed world, over the past 20 years, as we enjoyed easy credit and increasing comfort and convenience in our lives, summed up by Francis Fukuyama’s declaration in 1989 that humankind had arrived at the “end point of … ideological evolution” in globally triumphant “Western liberalism.” Thus, Time suggested “’Massive and effective street protest’ was a global oxymoron until – suddenly, shockingly – starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.”
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 bluesis 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 55th 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
