Moan That Particular Blues

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But I think the appeal is more about lineage. The blues was born of a displaced people crashed on the coast of a foreign shore and made to feel unwelcome. It was born of loneliness, of desperation, of hardscrabble fields and little to eat, and of needs and wants and dreams unfulfilled and shriveled like a raisin in the sun. It was a crying for what was taken away and a moaning for the pittance that was offered in return.

When I heard it I wanted to cry. Against the four-four push of it was the continuo of pain, the underlying pulse of hurt and hardship. It reminded me of my isolation, of my lack of a cultural linchpin, of a people disappeared, a history ruptured and a family fractured, split apart and never reassembled. The blues contained all of that, and I embraced it.

Within it I found the purple world of a small boy confounded by forces beyond his control and puzzled by the way “home” was never about belonging. In the blues I returned to the beatings meant to engender discipline, the banishment meant to create cohesion, and the jarring differences never addressed, never mentioned, and never healed. The blues let me see that I was not alone in all of that, and that was healing in itself.

It’s the same with a lot of Native people. The blues gives you permission to shout. It gives you permission to vent everything that life has stoked in you, return it to the air all ragged, rough, and rude, to proclaim the fact that you’re righteously pissed and that you won’t be slave to it anymore. It’s music. And in the clack of the skeletal bones of Robert Johnson that serve as its meter, you can mask the political with passion.

There’s a lot to sing about. That’s the sad thing. I heard an Ojibway artist called Shingoose sing a song called “Reservation Blues,” back in the ’80s, and within it was the sum breadth of our experience. He sang of trading his moccasins for white man’s shoes, and in that small metaphor was the unspoken hum of Canada, the swapping of cultural history and tradition for someone else’s sense of the order of things.

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