Ain't It Hard?

In a famous review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy in 1945, Ralph Ellison eloquently describes the blues as a form:

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

We should add that the blues is a performance. The “lyricism” of this extraordinary genre is best expressed in a musical rendering. Whereas in many cases of the word-music combination the words are simply added to the music, or the music sets the words, in the blues words and music go together in a common lyric. As such, the form emanates from the deepest recesses of the soul. Lyric does that when it is authentic. Thus it brings the “aching consciousness” to the front of the memory in order to transcend it. While indeed the blues lyric may be autobiographical, it also articulates a worldview.

Not that the blues cannot be purely instrumental. Often, it is. Yet even without the voice, one “hears” the cry and the passion of the song in the subtext. Take, for example, Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues.” Known as the greatest recordings of classical jazz ever made, the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions (1926-28) are beyond any category previously set down. The lineage of this music goes back to New Orleans, back to Louis’ boyhood. By the time of these recordings there were actually six musicians in the Hot Five, including Zutty Singleton on drums, and the great Earl Hines on piano. His broken chords and delicate improvisations were the perfect dialogue with Armstrong’s strong cornet.

The “West End Blues,” was recorded June 28, 1928, in a Chicago studio, under the Columbia label. Columbia had just purchased the legendary Okeh record company. It is one of the great peaks in Louis’s art. A Clarence Williams composition unremarkable on its own, in the hands of these musicians it becomes a “tapestry of pain, joy, and transcendence through musical artistry,” a sort of tragic drama with Shakespearean depth (Bergen). There may indeed have been strong personal elements in its background. Louis Armstrong had just lost his beloved mother, who died of what they used to call hardening of the arteries at age 41. Mary Albert Armstrong, known as Mayann, had grown up in the oppressive Jim Crow era of Reconstruction, and yet she had a fun-loving, spontaneous spirit: “God bless you, my son, and thank God I lived to see my son grow up to be a big successful young man,” she said to Louis in her dying moments.

The funeral itself was a metaphor for the black aesthetic. Moving from the slow dirge to the final release of the interment, there was a sense of Ellison’s “jagged grain” moving toward transcendence, illustrated in the sequence, and in the music that went with it. The blues embodies this funeral journey, at least the first part.

The immediate precursor to the blues was the work song. For field hands, railroad workers, and cotton-pickers, the most elemental form of work music was known as the “holler,” a mournful shout which would echo in the workplace. These cries could be heard hundreds of feet away. According to one witness in 1853, on a railroad project, “One raised such a sound as I had never heard before, a long, loud, musical shout, rising, and falling, and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle call. As he finished, the melody was caught up by another, and then another, then by several in chorus” (Charters).

One of the typical work songs that directly fed into the blues is “John Henry.” Apparently, in the 1870s, there was a famous competition between the “steel drivin’ man” John Henry and a steam drill. It was during the construction of the “Big Bend Tunnel” on the C. and O. Railroad. Myth and reality blend, and there are many versions of the story line. One of them has it that John Henry beat the steel hammer but died in the process. The hero became a figure of defiance. Mississippi John Hurt sang the “Spike Driver Blues” in 1928, exclaiming, “This is the hammer that killed John Henry, but it won’t kill me, but it won’t kill me . . .” the blues is about lament and defiance, all at once.

With the great W. C. Handy (1873-1958), the blues were somewhat crystallized. One standard form he helped define was the twelve-bar blues. In the key of C, this would mean four bars in the tonic (C, or home-base), two in the subdominant (F, or away from home), four back through the tonic to the dominant (G, or ready to go home), then two in the tonic (C, home-base). Although this is one of the most basic patterns found in Western music, there is African ancestry in the particular way the pattern is articulated. The harmonies, the tensions, the rhythms display a fusion between this ancestry and various kinds of folk music and spirituals. For example, the so-called “blue note” bends the tone, the way one might stretch a string on the guitar, producing a soulful sound. The words follow the three-part harmony but are in the form of AAB. For example, Handy’s most recorded number is the “St Louis Blues,” about a woman whose man left her for somebody else.

I hate to see that evening sun go down
Oh, I hate to see that evening sun go down
Because my baby has done left this town.

Though more polished than some of the songs from the Mississippi Delta, when interpreted by Bessie Smith or another great African-American vocalist, this song is the quintessence of the blues. It combines the sadness of lost love with the veiled defiance of a victim strong enough to mock the oppressor: “If it weren’t for the jewels, and all that store-bought hair, that man of mine wouldn’a gone nowhere, nowhere.” Behind the theme of lost love is the abandonment of black people by white oppressors. And behind that, a question: “Why, O Lord?”

One of the reasons for the strength represented in the blues is that it bespeaks the courage of African-American people as they learned to resist oppression. The major place where such a spirit was nurtured was the church. Here the slaves and former slaves heard the good news of the emancipation and forgiveness of Christ. They heard the story of the Jews and the early Christians. Both in the preaching and the singing, these stories were heard and became their meta-narrative. The King James Bible was practically memorized by those who attended. The church was both a “structure of plausibility” in which a worldview was made plausible and a protection against the cruel outside. Here is how Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood put it:

The passage from traditional religions to Christianity was arguably the single most significant event in African American history. It created a community of faith and provided a body of values and a religious commitment that became in time the principal solvent of ethnic differences and the primary source of cultural identity. It provided African Americans with an ideology of resistance and the means to absorb the cultural norms that turned Africans into African Americans. The churches Afro-Christians founded formed the institutional bases for these developments and served as the main training ground for the men and women who were to lead the community out of slavery and into a new identity as free African American Christians.

In a parallel universe to the church, the realm of entertainment was a regular feature of African-American life. The relation of the two was complex. At times amusement was frowned upon and described as sinful, or “of the world.” At other times, many close connections could be observed. In truth, the two existed in a symbiotic connection. To be sure, the blues were sung outside the church. But they were more than mere entertainment, because they expressed deeply felt convictions about life, its contradictions, its joys, its hardships. Indeed, the blues are remarkably close to the spiritual in every way, except that its subject matter is more about troubles with life than about heavenly solutions. Were it not for the ending, the great spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” would be a blues (“Nobody knows, but Jesus”). Were it not for its irony, “Preachin’ the Blues,” by Bessie Smith, would be a spiritual.

The interdependence runs even deeper. The Wisdom books of the Bible often use the poetic device of parallelism in order to set up a tension and then either resolve it or drive it further forward. The stark realism of the Book of Ecclesiastes is rendered in places by this poetic device:

A good name is better than precious ointment,
and the day of death than the day of birth.
It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go into the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.
Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
(Eccles. 7:1-4)

This ironic description of life under the sun could well be a blues in the Old Testament! It is a call, not to pessimism, but to facing up to reality. It is the dark side of the coin of hope. The blues uses the same poetic device to drive home a feeling or an observation.

Nehemiah “Skip” James was an elusive figure among blues singers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He hailed from Jackson, Mississippi, and was quite at home in the church as well as in the tough world of performance. When the Depression set in, he sang about hard times and then stopped singing until much later. His music was introspective and ruminating. He played both guitar and piano, and his voice was most versatile. The “Cypress Grove Blues” captures the same irony and realism of the Book of Ecclesiastes using the poetic device of parallelism.

I would rather be dead and six feet in my grave,
I would rather be dead and six feet in my grave,
Than be was up here, honey, ‘treated this a-way.



And the old people told me, baby, but I never did know,
The old people told me, baby woman, but I never did know,
‘The Good Book declare you got to reap just what you sow.’



When your knee bone achin’ and your body cold,
when your knee bone’s achin’ and your body cold,
Means you just gettin’ ready, honey, for the cypress grove.



(This blues was originally recorded on Paramount, and reissued on Skip James: Early Blues Recordings 1931, Biograph BLP (12029.)

Neither in form nor content is the connection of the blues to Wisdom literature fortuitous.

It would be easy to conclude that this type of music is without hope or redemption. But this is far from the case. The realism of the blues does not stand opposed to hopefulness, but to sentimentality. So often the music of white people responds to troubled times with escapism. The blues is stark and realistic, but not hopeless. The blues tells us how to live on earth in order to prepare for heaven. Living down here makes no sense unless there is a heaven to give it meaning.

John Storm Roberts makes the point that white ballads often have a moral, whereas black songs simply state the facts, albeit with a theological subtext. The point may be exaggerated, but there is something to it. The Dixon Brothers, a white group, sang “Wreck on the Highway,” with the words, “I saw the wreck on the highway, but I didn’t hear nobody pray.” In contrast, the black song, “Frankie and Johnny,” starkly states, “this story has no moral, this story has no end, this story goes to show that there ain’t no good in men.” Consider the lament over the kidnapped Lindberg baby:

Oh who would steal a baby out from his little bed?
The world is full of trouble, trouble,
Oh Lord have mercy on us folks!

No sanctimonious finger-pointing, yet a strong recognition of original sin, says Roberts.

The reason this is important is that the Bible never pretends that evil and suffering are easy. But it gives them meaning. God’s revelation never underestimates the power and the cruelty of the trials wrought by a fallen world. But it tells us he is in control. Indeed, we should not be surprised by the attacks (1 Pet. 4:12). Intellectually, we may balk at the doctrine of original sin, but descriptively, as Blaise Pascal suggested, it is the best thing going, because it accounts for what we observe and feel. At the same time, while no rational explanation for the possibility of evil in God’s world is offered in Scripture, yet on every page it defines that evil as being against God’s holy law. Evil is transgressive. We human beings are the authors of evil, although ultimately God himself must have ordained it for his purposes. But we dare not go there, nor guess what those purposes might be. So evil surrounds us, like the dust of death. Even the godly prophets could ask, honestly,

O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear?
Or cry violence! and you will not save? (Hab. 1:2)

The Lord will not always answer in the terms we would have preferred. His answer to Habakkuk was at first confusing: judging the Israelites by the means of the violent Chaldeans. But ultimately, he was asked, as are we, to believe that God’s good answer would come in God’s good time: “wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay” (Hab. 2:3). Still, unless we can face our troubles with honesty, we will not be in line for the particular way in which God does answer us.

Truth is the highest virtue in the blues. The foremost blues singer of the Old Testament is surely Job. While his suffering appeared to him to have no purpose, he was vindicated in the end by a God who owed no accounts to him, but who nevertheless is incapable of injustice. Harold Courlander collected songs from the nineteenth-century African-American repertoire, including early versions of the blues with a biblical hue:

Old Job said, good Lord,
Whilst I’m feeling bad, good Lord,
I can’t sleep at night, good Lord,
I can’t eat a bite, good Lord,
And the woman I love, good Lord,
Don’t treat me right, good Lord.

Yet Job did not simply receive pity and comfort from the Lord. Rather, he had to be told to trust in his sovereign ways, however lacking in rational sense they may appear. No wonder black people identified with Job and many other biblical figures who experienced suffering! Like them, they could sing the blues and preach the blues. As Jon Michael Spencer observes, “That from their blues podium singers preached and confessed the truth appears to have provided them with a sense of divine justification.”

Of course, there is more than just truth telling to the sense of divine justification. The blues refuses either to blame God for oppression or to endure it passively. Rather, the blues typically suggests taking a journey. Consider the “road” motif which frequently characterizes the blues. Reflecting on the songs of Floyd Jones, “Dark Road” and “On the Road Again,” Justin O’Brien describes this journey as both an exile and a refuge. We can endure our suffering when we know that we are on a journey with God as our guide.

Among the most comforting words in the New Testament are Paul’s to the Corinthians, on the subject of affliction. “No temptation has overtaken you,” he says, “that is not common to man” (1 Cor. 10:13). The blues often reflect on the universality of suffering. “In the world, you will have tribulation,” says the Lord Jesus (John 16:33). How is that a comfort? Back to the realism of the blues. It is the beginning of an answer for us. We are not in this alone, or by chance. We are not experiencing something unusual, or unique to us. We cannot say that no one understands our plight. But the answer does not end there. It promises, “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability.” Blues singers sing about hardship and about the strength to climb the mountain and defy the oppressor. God is faithful; he is in charge. But still, the final comfort is this: “but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” How can this be? Because God is faithful. How can he be faithful? First, because that is his nature. But second, because of Jesus Christ, who himself endured so much hardship so that we might be delivered. “But take heart,” Jesus tells the disciples, “I have overcome the world.”

May we reverently put it this way? Jesus sang the blues in his life, and on the cross. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Was there ever a more heart-rending blues? This song is from Psalm 22, the cry of the poor, “O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest” (22:2). In the New Testament it is the cry of Jesus. But then, because of his sinless obedience, he triumphed over death in the resurrection. Now he is the sweet singer of Israel, who praises God in the midst of the congregation of the people he has saved (22:22). His mourning and ours have been turned to dancing and rejoicing. The blues have become gospel song!

Dr. William Edgar is professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is also associate professor at the Faculté Jean Calvin.