In the Voice and in the Deep, Blues Poetry

Though there’s no singular definition of the blues that fully encompasses the history and culture of the people from whom the blues are derived, I do think there are some notes to consider. First, research supports the claim that blues music originated during the post–US Civil War era (1861–65) and is derived from spirituals and work and field songs of Black sharecroppers of the rural south, particularly the Mississippi Delta. Second, the first published blues composition is accredited to W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” in 1912. Third, Mamie Smith became the first Black blues singer to record a blues record in 1920. Considering these notes about the blues’ inception, the blues endured and scored—if not directly then through derived musical forms—the majority of the United States’ early nation-building and cultural formation. Today, I hear phrases such as “the winter blues” and “Blue Monday” and know that they are not considering this history. However, the blues’ utility in our everyday language signifies to me that the blues are ingrained into US culture.

In our workshop, “In the Voice and in the Deep, Blues Poetry,” participants and I studied blues music, history, aesthetics, and ultimately blues poetry. We were grounded by Amiri Baraka’s claim in Blues People, in which he conveyed that in the context of Black American culture, music explains history as history explains music. Furthermore, Baraka notes that Africanisms (retentions of African culture throughout the African diaspora) were not limited to US Black people but that the culture of the Americas contains and is itself influenced by Africanisms. This suggests to me that aspects of contemporary US poetry could be in lineage of African diasporic culture. Baraka attributes this knowledge to his mentor Sterling A. Brown, who alongside Langston Hughes was a pioneer of blues poetry in the 1920s. 

After discussing blues history, we went over Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” then Langston Hughes’ “Too Blue,” and concluded our study with Jericho Brown’s “Duplex” (specifically “A poem is a gesture toward home”). I chose these works for how they built upon classic blues (blues that follows the standard AAB lyrical structure and common themes of love, longing, suffering, and travel) by addressing an ecological concern, as in “Backwater Blues,” or innovating the classical structure, as in “Too Blue,” and “Duplex.” 

I want to encourage reading and listening to early blues poetry and classic blues as a method toward mastering blues aesthetics. We could define and reproduce several devices of blues lyric, such as “call and response,” and blues “turnaround,” and surely, we can write sad poems. Though, after repeated listening and reading of blues standards like “Backwater Blues,” call and response became more than an AAB tercet on page/to my ear. The elements of voice, musical instrument, and audience formed a living tercet in which the blues singer and musician resound one another to deliver that final line blues statement. Another way of reading classic blues lyric structure is as weighted-sonic couplets. The initial first line resounds—therefore necessitates itself perhaps as a question, a declaration, or even a second guessing of this sung thing’s existence to its audience of many or just their self. Try listening to “Backwater Blues” while reading the lyrics; hear how the piano embodies the texture of what is being sung, as if the piano witnesses and takes on the storm and flood alongside Bessie Smith. Once more, listen for the turnaround (the melody at the final two bars of each 12-bar progression or last line of each stanza) and hear it transform the melody of one progression/stanza into the next. For examples of innovative uses of these devices in poetry, visit Jericho Brown’s “Duplex,” Evie Shockley’s “Fukushima Blues,” and Kevin Young’s “Langston Hughes.”

I do not believe in a fixed way to write blues poems or poetry with blues feeling. However, I recommend practicing the classic form (first line repeated in the second line, third line responds to the second, entire poem at least three tercets long) to fully grasp blues aesthetics. Thematically, write about whatever you feel must be sung. I believe the blues represents a range of human experience that can speak on and to that thing that nearly ended someone but the very fact of them living to sing about it encapsulates the blues.