Word: knowed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...blues isn't about exploring your problems or even about listing them. It's about sharing them: getting them out of you and putting them in the open, letting other people see them so they can say "Yes, I know that feeling." More than that, so they can shout it out, tap their fingers, stamp their feet. Perhaps more than any other genre, the blues depends on its audience. Blues songs are a dialogue between performer and listener, a way of creating a shared community of sufferers. It's no coincidence that B.B. King's song "Why I Sing...
...understood. Singing the blues, even listening to the blues, was supposed to be a commitment to a type of emotion and a type of experience. And what on earth, I used to wonder, could a middle class white boy from the New Jersey suburbs possibly know about the blues...
Sure, I could know the history of the blues. I could tell you that it grew out of sharecroppers' songs in the Mississippi Delta, and that the patron saint of those gritty Delta blues is guitar virtuoso John Lee Hooker. I could tell you how the blues followed the sharecroppers as they looked for jobs up North, first in Memphis, where the blues would fuse with country music to create rock and roll, and then up to Chicago, where it would settle into a pulsing rhythm and produce the likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf...
...knowing the blues isn't the same as knowing the stuff in history books. The blues, I was always told, was about suffering. And what did I know about the troubles of sharecroppers or migrant workers? The lyrics of most blues songs read like a litany of unfaithful lovers, spiteful landlords and unsympathetic bosses. The song titles alone are enough to fill a therapist's appointment book: "My Baby Don't Love Me" by John Lee Hooker, "Please Send Me Someone to Love" by Luther Allison, "Born Under a Bad Sign" by Albert King. Whatever problems I faced...
...want to understand the blues, all you have to do is listen. It doesn't matter if you're from New Jersey or New Orleans; understanding the blues comes simply from knowing how to share. We all know how to suffer, goes the logic of the blues. If there's anything we have to learn, it's how to talk and listen to each other...