Blues Beyond The Blues

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The blues is a long echo, rattling across decades and vast distances. Returning like a ricochet to tell each generation a slightly different story about what it means to be alive right this minute. It’s wisdom from an old place and from ten minutes ago. It’s escape and in the same instant an encounter with realities that can’t easily be escaped. It’s a rhapsody and a knock upside the head, the painful sting and the salve for the wound.

As conveyance for essential truths, gripes about daily life and assorted cosmic vexations, the blues is a singularity of art: Its elements are unendingly simple, universal enough to be used by anyone yet tricky enough to take a lifetime to master. In most basic form, it’s three chords splayed across twelve measures supporting some sort of repeating melodic phrase. There aren’t too many rules in the blues – indeed, many great blues songs don’t use those three chords, don’t fit into 12-measure form and don’t have a repeating melody. The blank-slate nature of the blues makes it less a style or a genre of music than a platform for all kinds of human expression. From an origination standpoint, there is no such thing as “pure” blues: Almost as soon as the blues spread, there were classical composers and jazz players and others seizing its tones to incorporate them into their own works. Of course blues icons like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf deserve respect as “founding fathers” and shapers of the sound; that doesn’t mean when a singer/songwriter like Tracy Chapman ventures into the blues space, as she did on “Give Me One Reason,” she is somehow less qualified to communicate within it. Likewise Hank Williams. Or Miles Davis. Or Cee-lo Green. The blues is an open tributary, freely shared and happily re-routed. It’s one reason so much American music feels interconnected. [click to continue…]

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