A BLUES BLOG?

Tom Yeager, one of the songwriters at Just Plain Folks (http://www.jpfolks.com), is fond of passing on gig opportunities—usually in the Nashville area, where he lives. One recent one was a solicitation to write a blog. An “American Blues” Website wants six writers, each to write a weekly blog about the blues; one will be posted every day.

I could do that. “The Writer’s Blog” has been a regular writing exercise for 2-1/2 years now—a little over a page in the word processor, at least once a week (and more like two to four times a week since I got unemployed 13 months ago). It has kept honed the old newspaperman’s skills of writing for space and writing for deadline, and expressing a complete thought in reasonably literate language. (That’s good training for songwriting, too.) But BLUES? I may be a musician and songwriter, but do I know enough about the blues to be able to write something intelligent about it every week?

I would probably have to do it a little differently. (I always seem to be saying that.) I do know a lot of writers; that became obvious when I was assembling material for the Failed Economy Show benefit for the food bank—I got tons of stuff from people all over the world, and picking out an hour and a half’s worth that the band liked, and thought we could do justice to, wasn’t easy. One reason I wanted to pick independent, unknown writers is because they’re independent and unknown, like me; these are the people who have been closed out of the music industry. It doesn’t matter whether their stuff is better than what you hear on the radio (and much of it is)—they’re not part of The Club, and they’ll never get attention. Some are gigging, and some not. (One guy was 92 years old.)

I could talk about the ones who “do” blues, and why, and what triggers the stuff they write; I could try analyzing some of their material, suggesting maybe why it was good writing—emphasizing that like any artistic analysis, my opinion is wholly subjective and personal (just because I know what I’m doing does not mean that I’m right). I could tell folks where to find their material—their Websites, if they have any—and whether they’re gigging, and whether they have records for sale. The same stuff I put in the Failed Economy Show program handouts for the writers whose stuff we performed there.

Do I know what “the blues” IS? People tend to think they do; they’ll hear a piece of music and say, “that’s blues,” but they’re often not able to say WHY. It’s an amorphous thing, like a little kid peeing in the swimming pool—you know it’s there, but can’t quite pin down where. Maybe that’s a question that should be asked of the blues boys and girls: “What makes what you do ‘the blues’?”

I’ll offer my own definition (I am fond of pat one-liners), one I picked up from an old blues guitarist. The blues, he said, “is all about getting up in the morning.” That’s a dig at the stereotypical opening line of a lot of blues songs (“I woke up this morning”—I used it myself, in my “Blood on the Floo’ Blues”), but it goes deeper. It’s an ATTITUDE—life is not pleasant, and things happen to you, but you have to get up in the morning and deal with it anyway. Determination, in other words, colored in many cases by a good bit of pain—and it permeates most of the blues I know, even the happy ones. It’s perhaps not surprising that a lot of early blues music was written by Southern blacks who USED TO be slaves.

That enough? I’ll contact these “American Blues” folks and see if they’re interested in hearing from me. If not—well, there’s probably another blues in it.

Joe