Blues is said to be a very personal music. There’s certainly
some truth to this view--blues songs of the first half of the twentieth century
were generally more personal than other songs, and early autobiographical songs
were almost always blues or blues-related. Yet it would be a mistake to view
the blues as primarily a confessional mode.
On the one hand, many blues singers
were social outcasts--respectable folks wanted to have nothing to do with them.
And social outcasts have nothing to lose. Far less invested in their
reputations than are their peers, they can afford to be forthcoming about their
sins, hard times, and sensual joys. Blues thus lends itself very well to gritty
first-person narrative, narrative that purports to be autobiographical. And the
large majority of blues songs fit this mold.
But on the
other hand, those narratives usually either were fiction (Blind Willie McTell’s
“Writing Paper Blues” is one of the best storytelling blues songs ever, but
McTell couldn’t write), were too vague to be strictly personal (Robert
Johnson’s songs sound personal, but he doesn’t give away enough details or
string together a rich enough story), or concerned an event in which the singer
was only a peripheral figure (Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere” concerns
a flood, Lonnie Johnson’s “Life Saver Blues” a shipwreck). Autobiography
certainly wasn’t out of the question, but it was relatively rare: I would
estimate that only about one to three percent of pre-war blues songs could be
called autobiographical (by which I mean that they relate a detailed story
about the singer). In general, as noted in my previous post on blindness, blues
songs tended to be about situations to which listeners could relate, rather than situations peculiar
to the singer.
Truly autobiographical
blues songs tend to stand out because of their uncommonness. In 1930 Charlie
Jackson sang a compelling account of performing at a dance and being arrested
and jailed; apparently it was so unusual to write autobiography that the song
was entitled simply “Self Experience.”
In 1940 Booker White, prompted by a recording director who was dissatisfied
with the repertoire of standards he had brought to the studio, recorded “When Can I Change My Clothes?” But this
song, like the other prison songs recorded at the same session, was composed on
the spot, which indicates that White didn’t commonly perform material of this
nature.
The Memphis
Jug Band’s 1930 “Meningitis Blues,”
written and sung by Memphis Minnie, is not only a moving and very personal account
of a near-fatal illness, it tells a truly autobiographical story--a fact she
seemed to acknowledge when she retitled it a few days later, on a second
recording, as “Memphis Minnie-Jitis Blues.” It begins with an extraordinarily
personal verse--“I come in home one Saturday night, pull off my clothes and I
lie down.” It is as if she were pulling the listener right into her life--and
her suffering. In my opinion, this is the pinnacle of autobiographical blues--I
can think of no other pre-war blues song that says more about a singer’s real life.
- Yuval
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