Blues as Secularized Spirituals

Books by C. Liegh McInnis

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Blues as Secularized Spirituals

and the Power and Importance of McKinley Morganfield

In Clarksdale, Mississippi as with all Delta towns, the downtown street that houses all the cafés and juke joints intersects with the street that houses all the churches. Though today there are more churches than cafés, the intersection once was a natural crossroad that echoed if not troped the actual crossroad of Hwy 49 and Hwy 61 where Robert Johnson is alleged to have sold his soul to the Devil to be able to play the guitar and where black people still pass fleeing the Delta for economic opportunity or merely looking for less social hell or returning home to commune with a slower pace of life.

When I was a kid, it was impossible to walk home from choir practice and not pass, hear, or stop and eat in a café. Blues and juke joint culture were as normal to me as catfish and chitt’lins even though I was constantly told that people who frequented cafés where heathens who were going directly to hell. Funny how all these people would tell me to say hello to my grandmother who always claimed to have only frequented church and work. At the center of my Delta blues life was the shadow of McKinley Morganfield. There was B. B. King. King was/is the superstar and reigning international diplomat of the blues. And I don’t know how many times I saw King and others, such as Bobby Rush, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Johnny Taylor, and many other old men in suits and wet hair perform for free. But, McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, cast a shadow of the plantation worker who used music to circumvent the hell of Jim Crow.

The blues presented secular salvation, and Waters was its chief evangelist. It is to him and my father that I refer in my poem “Black Man,” when I say that “I’m going to pull myself up by my wingtips and look good doing it.” Muddy Waters died in 1983 when I was 13, but by then he was the apex for a country town of men in suites, silk shirts, and processes. At a gut, blues level, Prince was aesthetically familiar to me. He played a guitar. He wore shiny suits and shirts. He had a process. He sang sex songs that my mother’s church friends hated. Being a Prince fanatic never seemed to contradict with my love for the blues. It seemed like a natural extension. The falsetto, screams, grunts, and moans were directly linked to the emotional vocabulary and vocal delivery of churches, cafés, and James Brown.

I’ve been on a couple of blues panels, but I never had the desire to become an archivist or blues critic. I was probably in my late twenties before I purchased my first blues record. Living in Clarksdale, I was so surrounded by blues—it was blasted from radios through the windows of shotgun houses, it blared from cars up and down the street, and it floated on the night air from the downtown juke joints—that I never felt a need to purchase a record. All I had to do was keep walking up and down the street, and eventually I would hear the song that I desired. LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Blues People is a very important book for me, but it mostly affirmed things for me rather than taught me anything. It precisely articulated and crystallized general notions that I’d always had. It made me say “amen” or “oh yeah” a lot.

The same is true for Cadillac Records. For those who are familiar with blues culture, it will not teach them much if anything. But sometimes affirmation is as important as revelation as Aristotle asserts that the beauty of the play is man’s recognition of himself. For Cadillac Records illustrates that blues music was created as an emotional and intellectual response to America’s incomplete and abandoned Reconstruction and that the blues is the soil from which springs all other American music, including the style and swagger that goes with it. The movie is, for me, a grade of B+. Having the actors sing diminishes some of the power of the songs, which is important to the story.

The blues is emotive on an all-encompassing level. “Manish Boy,” probably Waters most noted hit, is as political as it is social. To have a sturdy, confident, massive black man declaring “I’ma a Maaaine” in 1955 just after the murder of Emmett Till with women unabashedly affirming his declaration was a political thing, being as important as a song such as “Big Boss Man.” Whenever I see the footage of men wearing the “I Am A Man” signs during the 1960s, I always think of “Manish Boy.” So the lost power of the songs affects the power of the film. Yet, the actors do a solid job of capturing and articulating the essences of their characters.

Mos Def exudes the wit, intellectual insightfulness, and rambunctious nature of Chuck Berry. Columbus Short sheds his pretty boy façade to become Little Walter and plays him as the spirit of angry black men whose combustible rage battles but does not completely overshadow his kindness. Beyonce gets the sex appeal and internal conflict of Etta James correct. Eamonn Walker’s portrayal of Howlin’ Wolf shows that the intelligent, self-sufficient, militant black man did not “jes grew” in California and the North, but that he migrated there from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and from all parts South. And Jeffrey Wright reveals that it is Muddy Waters who brought the blues from the fields to the streets, from overalls to slick suits and even slicker hair with a mountainous swagger equal to the jazz legends before him and the soul, R&B, funk, and hip hop icons after him.

The other flaw of the film is that the beginning is a bit rushed or hurried. The early scenes with McKinley Morganfield in Mississippi seem as if they exist more as an unavoidable obligation rather than being there to lay the foundation of or to articulate the totality of what actually went North when black people went North. Yet, I understand that one of the reasons you cast Beyonce and Mos Def (both of whom I see as fine talents) is to entice a younger, hip hop audience, which based on the audience’s lackluster reaction to the actors being on BET’s 106 and Park seems a futile attempt. And since that younger generation is not going to wait forty minutes for a film to establish itself, context must be sacrificed so as not to loose their short attention spans.

Accordingly, the Hollywood movie houses are not going to fund a three hour feature film about the blues for obvious greenback reasons. This movie needs to be three hours long, but I’m one of the few people with no life who would sit there that long. People refused to patronize Spike Lee’s latest effort, Miracle at St Anna, citing it as being too long despite the fact that it is well done and an important conversation about the contribution of African Americans to American freedom and democracy. Yet, the actors’ ability to deliver and completely fill the screen with the essences of their characters almost compensates for or counterbalances the rushed, underdeveloped beginning.

The strength of the film is that while it is as typical as Clint Eastwood’s Bird (1988) starring Forest Whitaker as jazz legend Charlie Parker (a movie that I like unlike most of the folks I know), Cadillac Records ulls back the monolithic cover of stereotypical down-and-out people to reveal blues music as a complex art form created by complex people. Howlin’ Wolf is presented as the unapologetic ideological opposite of Muddy Waters; yet Wolf is also Waters’ bookend, proving that the black bodies that were in those southern fields were thinking people that created and embraced various philosophies as to how best survive and/or defeat Jim Crow.

For instance, no matter how stylish, humane, and prolific Waters is, he never does escape or transcend the mentality of a sharecropper. He accepts the pedagogy of the oppressed: he works, the white man makes money, and he hopes that the white man “breaks him off” a crumb or two. However, both Wolf and Berry are portrayed as the exact opposite. They are black men who verbalize their discontent with the sharecropper systems of the music business and who attempt to remove the heavy hands of white supremacy from the pockets and their lives. Ultimately, we see that just because a blues man or women is cheated of their royalties that does not mean that they are innately or completely ignorant and that blues music is intellectual and humane music created by intellectual and humane people.

Waters’ relationships with Little Water, Howlin’ Wolf, Leonard Chess—Jewish owner of Chess Records, and his love interest Geneva Wade (played by Gabrielle Union) shows that although black life and human neurosis is complicated by the umbrella white supremacy, black art is one of the reminders that black people continue to retain their sanity and dignity even while being forced to live as the wretched of the earth. Thus, blues music is a testament to black people being able to pull beauty from the very bowels of human existence in the same way that soul food and quilting are examples of black people taking the scraps of life and weaving a tapestry of excellence.

McInnis is the author of seven books and the publisher and editor of Black Magnolias Literary Journal. For more information psychedelicliterature.

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C. Liegh McInnis is an instructor of English at Jackson State University, the publisher and editor of Black Magnolias Literary Journal, and the author of seven books, including four collections of poetry, one collection of short fiction (Scripts: Sketches and Tales of Urban Mississippi), and one work of literary criticism (The Lyrics of Prince: A Literary Look at a Creative, Musical Poet, Philosopher, and Storyteller). He has presented papers at national conferences, such as College Language Association and the Neo-Griot Conference, and his work has appeared in Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Sable, New Delta Review, The Black World Today, In Motion Magazine, MultiCultural Review, A Deeper Shade, New Laurel Review, ChickenBones, and the Oxford American.

In January of 2009, C. Liegh, along with eight other poets, was invited to read poetry in Washington, DC by the NAACP for their Inaugural Poetry Reading celebrating the election of President Barack Obama. He has also been invited by colleges and libraries all over the country to read his poetry and fiction and to lecture on various topics, such creative writing and various aspects of African American literature, music, and history. McInnis is editor of Black Magnolias Literary Journal.—PsychedelicLiterature

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Black Magnolias Literary Journal is a quarterly that uses poetry, fiction, and prose to examine and celebrate the social, political, and aesthetic accomplishments of African Americans with an emphasis on Afro-Mississippians and Afro-Southerners.

We welcome pieces on a variety of African American and Afro-Southern culture, including history, politics, education, incidents/events, social life, and literature. All submissions are to be made by e-mail as a word attachment to psychedeliclit@bellsouth.net . Each issue costs $12.00, and a year’s subscription is $40.00.

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan / The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll / Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery

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African Revolutions

By Mukoma wa Ngugi

Her womb pressed against the desert to bear the parasite

that eats her insides like termites drill into dry wood.

He is born into an empty bowl, fist choking umbilical cord.

She dies sighing, child son at last. He couldn't have known,

instinct told him - always raise your arm in defense of your

own -Strike! Strike until they are all dead! Egg shells

in your hands milk bottle held between your toes,

you have been anointed twice, you strong enough to kill

at birth and survive. You will want to name the world

after yourself but you will have no name- a collage of dead

roots, tongues and other things. You will point your sword

to the center of the earth, duel the world to split into perfect

mirrors after your imperfect mutations but you will be

too weak having latched your self onto too many streams

straddling too many continents, pulling patches of a self

as one does fruits from an from an orchard, building a home

of planks with many faces. How does one look into a mirror

with a face that washes clean every rainy season?

He has an identity for every occasion - here he is Lenin

there Jesus and yesterday Marx - inflexible truths inherited

without roots. To be nothing to remain nothing, to kill

at birth - such love can only drink from our wrists. We

storming from our past to Jo'Burg eating wisdom of others

building homes made of our grandparent's bones. We

gathering momentum that eats out of our earth, We standing

pens and bullets hurled at you, your enemies. Comrade, there

are many ways to die. A dog dies never having known

why it lived but a free death belongs to a life lived in roots,

roots not afraid of growing where they stand, roots tapped all over

the earth. Comrade, for a tree to grow, it must first own its earth.

Source: Zeleza

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Ancient African Nations

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The Slave Ship

By Marcus Rediker

In this groundbreaking work, historian and scholar Rediker considers the relationships between the slave ship captain and his crew, between the sailors and the slaves, and among the captives themselves as they endured the violent, terror-filled and often deadly journey between the coasts of Africa and America. While he makes fresh use of those who left their mark in written records (Olaudah Equiano, James Field Stanfield, John Newton), Rediker is remarkably attentive to the experiences of the enslaved women, from whom we have no written accounts, and of the common seaman, who he says was a victim of the slave trade . . . and a victimizer. Regarding these vessels as a strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory, Rediker expands the scholarship on how the ships not only delivered millions of people to slavery, [but] prepared them for it. He engages readers in maritime detail (how ships were made, how crews were fed) and renders the archival (letters, logs and legal hearings) accessible. Painful as this powerful book often is, Rediker does not lose sight of the humanity of even the most egregious participants, from African traders to English merchants.— Publishers Weekly

Marcus Rediker is professor of maritime history at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (1987), The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), and Villains of All Nations (2005), books that explore seafaring, piracy, and the origins of globalization. In The Slave Ship, Rediker combines exhaustive research with an astute and highly readable synthesis of the material, balancing documentary snapshots with an ear for gripping narrative. Critics compare the impact of Rediker’s history, unique for its ship-deck perspective, to similarly compelling fictional accounts of slavery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage. Even scholars who have written on the subject defer to Rediker’s vast knowledge of the subject. Bottom line: The Slave Ship is sure to become a classic of its subject.—Bookmarks Magazine

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Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues

By Ida Cox

I hear these women raving 'bout their monkey men
About their fighting husbands and their no good friends
These poor women sit around all day and moan
Wondering why their wandering papas don't come home
But wild women don't worry, wild women don't have the blues.

Now when you've got a man, don't ever be on the square
'Cause if you do he'll have a woman everywhere
I never was known to treat no one man right
I keep 'em working hard both day and night
because wild women don't worry, wild women don't have no blues.

I've got a disposition and a way of my own
When my man starts kicking I let him find another home
I get full of good liquor, walk the streets all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't act right
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't have no blues

You never get nothing by being an angel child
You better change your ways and get real wild
I wanna tell you something, I wouldn't tell you no lie
Wild women are the only kind that ever get by
Wild women don't worry, wild women don't have no blues.

Born Ida Prather,25 February 1896 in Toccoa, Habersham County, Georgia, United States. Died 10 November 1967 (aged 71) Genres Jazz, Blues Instruments Vocalist.

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Guarding the Flame of Life / Strange Fruit Lynching Report

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The State of African Education (April 200)

Attack On Africans Writing Their Own History Part 1 of 7

Dr Asa Hilliard III speaks on the assault of academia on Africans writing and accounting for their own history.

Dr Hilliard is A teacher, psychologist, and historian.

Part 2 of 7 / Part 3 of 7 / Part 4 of 7 / Part 5 of 7 / Part 6 of 7 / Part 7 of 7

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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan / The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll / Only a Pawn in Their Game

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery

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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg

The Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804 / January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of Haiti

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John Henrik Clarke—A Great and Mighty Walk

This video chronicles the life and times of the noted African-American historian, scholar and Pan-African activist John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998). Both a biography of Clarke himself and an overview of 5,000 years of African history, the film offers a provocative look at the past through the eyes of a leading proponent of an Afrocentric view of history. From ancient Egypt and Africa’s other great empires, Clarke moves through Mediterranean borrowings, the Atlantic slave trade, European colonization, the development of the Pan-African movement, and present-day African-American history.

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BLACK CLASSIC BOOKS

BCP Digital Printing

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posted 10 December 2008