Black Soul, White Soul E-Book

Patrizia Barrera

• Herausgeber: Tektime
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 467

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A journey into the ancient world of Blues: how it was born, its origins, its path in the world. And then many stories and biographies about its protagonists, black and white, who helped create it and spread it to the general public.

Leseprobe

Patrizia Barrera

BLACK SOUL WHITE SOUL

THE TRUE COLORS OF BLUES

English Translation by

ALEXANDRA IVAN

COPYRIGHT

Black Soul White Soul

Copyright 2024 Patrizia Barrera

ALL RIGHT RESERVED

It is forbidden to use the contents of this book, in full or in part, without the written permission of the author and the publisher.

The reproduction and distribution of all forms and means, digital, mechanical, photocopying or insertion into a data system of all or part of this book is also prohibited, except for small excerpts for promotional, cultural and educational purposes.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Copyright

Introduction

At the roots of the Blues

The Black Soul

Blues and Magic

The path of the Blues

Charlie Patton

“Blind” Lemon Jefferson

Peg Leg Howell

Alger Texas Alexander

Barbecue Bob

Robert Leroy Johnson

Leadbelly

The White Soul of the Blues

Bessie Smith

The Blues of the street

The first voice of the Urban Blues

Queen without crown

The melodramatic Blues

The Blues of Harlem

The American Prison

The Invisible Empire

The Jim Crow Laws

The music of the prisons

No More, My Lawd!

John Henry

Bibliography

Author’s Biography

Introduction

When we talk about American culture we inevitably walk on the blood of an extermination. A mass massacre that lasted for three centuries, starting from the South and culminating in the North, started in the Americas of Columbus around 1500 with the Spanish Conquistadores and finally embracing all of Europe. America of the early times was surely a hard country, split in half between the great prairies, the sunny plantations and the emerging cities, in an ungrateful and unknown climate where those who were there would have preferred not to be, and those who remained there were often lost. The first settlers were outlaws, thieves, rapists and mercenaries, blinded by the mirage of gold that seemed to float in the golden rivers, and where bank robbers were considered an elite. British, but also Irish, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, French and Italian, arrived in that wild land with the sole purpose of owning it.

The worst kind of people who didn’t stop at anything, not even murder. The local Indians, the so-called Native Americans, scattered throughout the territory in hundreds of different tribes and languages, were exterminated, deceived and stripped of their dignity, as it happened before with the indigenous people of South America. Doomed to starvation and stripped of everything, the Natives died, taking their ancestral culture to the grave. And this aberration merged with the bisecular trade of African slaves, the backbone of the newborn America.

The American culture was born in a mixture of blood and languages that has no comparison anywhere in the world, an exceptional history that has no precedent. The first whites had been by now lost: and if initially were lowlifes who ruled over those wastelands creating their own kingdom, those who came after were ex-convicts, peasants, workers and prostitutes, poor people who did not know where to go to free themselves from hunger and, thanks to the American government that fascinated them with the promise of the land, they hoped to find a place in the new continent to take refuge. And like that people and ethnicities completely different from each other, that in normal conditions they would never have dreamed of hung around, they found themselves working side by side to survive. And all of them, looking around, found no trace of their past, no one to hold on, no memory to keep. It was REALLY a new world, full of idioms, ferments, novelties and experiences, but also of marginalization, anger and blood that merged into a new MUSIC that contained EVERYTHING: the Blues.

It was on the African matrix that the European suggestions were grafted: the English ballads, the Irish folk, the great Italian composers, the Argentinian tango, the Spanish guitar and not least the Cuban magic, already the practice of mixes between sacred and profane with its Santeria. And everything was in its turn redesigned and remixed with the dragged step of the convicts and the infernal rhythm of the whip from the State prisons, where the Blues reached peaks of absolute lyricism just before dying. A swan song in which beats all the essence of his double soul: the Black and the White. This is its story, from its origins to its death, in an anonymous room on a cotton plantation, when Robert Johnson took his last breath alone.

After that, oblivion? No, of course not. Because the blues is history. It’s the lifeblood that flows in the veins of jazz, it’s the screaming anger of rock, it’s the everlasting memory of the universal language that we all share and from which we should take example, to keep our humanity intact.

It’s the beat of our heart. That’s where the blues hides.

AT THE ROOTS OF THE BLUES

The Origins

Life was hard for a black slave between the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the new century! Not that previously it was easier. The slaves in any period and in any place have always lives in inhumane conditions. However, in America, the Civil War not only did not solve the problem of slavery, but it also created a new one, even more dreadful because of its suppressed and institutionalized nature. The entire economy of the Southern States had been based for at least two centuries on the labour of slaves who, with some exceptions, had finally integrated into everyday reality by creating families, and the relationship with the white master was not much different from what TODAY the whole industrialized and flourishing universe establishes with the non-EU, underpaid and over exploited people.

After the war, immense territories appeared destroyed, plantations burned and properties confiscated: the South was on its knees and poverty was running rampant, among whites and also blacks.

It goes without saying that the scapegoat for all this matter was precisely the African-Americans, seen as the first reason of despair and collective misery. Although the Northern states welcomed them kindly, in the wake of the politics of the moment, very few were able to leave their birthplaces: expatriation was a difficult matter, they needed money and food, and families abounded with women and children who could not face a dangerous journey of whole weeks, using only means of luck!

It so happened that emigration interested mostly the few males who managed to do so, usually fathers of families who hoped to settle in the North and then call upon their loved ones. A utopia, a mirage. Slaves in the South outnumbered 4 million individuals and the ratio of white to black was one white to every 50 blacks: even wanting to, there would be no way to settle them all.The majority of the former slaves remained in the lands then auctioned by the States of the Union and sold to the highest bidder: that is to the Northerners and those few Southerners who during the war had managed to get rich on behave of others. The black people, free and therefore illegal in all respects, were kept as tenants of the land and, since they could not pay the rent with money, they would do it with work. But it was not enough: they were charged with the payment of the rental of agricultural tools, seeds and everything needed for the care of the new plantations. Debts upon debts that were settled by the hoarding by the owner of 70% of the fruits.

A new slavery that had no hope of freeing itself, as perfectly legalized: the former slave, despite not yet an American citizen, nevertheless enjoyed civil rights equal to those of other free men and, like all, he had the duty to take responsibility for his debts. In these cases, it is known, the Law is always white. One will wonder how it is possible, at least in terms of number, that the black has not decided to rebel, to free himself from a state of things that in the long run would have certainly annihilated him. The answer lies in the very nature of black man, being able to adapt and bend like no other, in his own conception of life, in his ignorance, in the strong religious belief that would later lead him to true redemption and, unfortunately, at the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. This despicable organization was born in 1865 at the behest of former Confederate army officers as a “reaction and opposition” to the central government, which had completely forgotten about widows and war orphans, but granting freedom and the right to vote to black people, crumbling in addition the segregationist laws that prevented slaves from expatriating.

The founder was General Forrest, later called the Great Magician, recovering the so called sense of secret society and Masonry. The infamous individuals dominated over the plantations, punishing blacks for rebelling against their “natural” condition of slavery. Border guards killed uncontrollably those who tried to leave the country, and violence against women and children become part of everyday life. The Ku Klux Klan also had full control over the local police, judges, and a large number of politicians, whom slavery served them well. The few white owners who dared denounce this state of affairs to the Central Government were treated like blacks, especially when the Union army finally abandoned the south.

Gangs of Ku Klux Klan mid 1800

Music remains for the African-American the only lifeline: and he uses it in two ways. On the one hand he uses it as a moral and spiritual redemption, shouting it in church as the call of a tormented soul to his God, to whom pain is offered as a hope of liberation. On the other hand, it clings to the darker side of the African soul, combines voodoo and black magic, and, using the ancestral pattern of back and forth, becomes a secret code of communication between individuals.

The double talk (the double sense) already known to the white public within the MINSTRELS where the black became a parody of himself, NOW takes on a wide-ranging communication meaning. Certain words began to acquire occult meanings to encourage collective meetings, inform of the living conditions of expatriates, and even reveal the hiding places of rebellious blacks. Instead of Music we can talk about musical “practices” that between 1865 and 1871 took on fundamental significance for the change of African-American society.

The very first songs of the liberated black person that use the double talk to express the social condition in which he lived, without fear of being abused for what he sang, had the style of the old medieval Anglo-Saxon ballads, but with an all African flavor. These songs have come to us already purged of their occult meaning, but it is still possible to find here and there some tracks: like UNCLE RABBIT, or THE GREY GOOSE, in which the human bestiary was “hidden” in that animal; but I am referring above all to the beautiful JOHN HENRY, BOLLWEAVILLE, STEWBALL and others of the same period.

Abandoning the banjo, now a trophy of the Country, the former slave directs his pain and his sense of loneliness to the guitar and the harmonica, simple instruments, cheap and able to follow the African habit of the back and forth. Soon, therefore, the “ballad” is replaced with an entirely new way of interpreting the music of silence, disintegration and social alienation. A very simple turn of DO, which could also be performed by a child, discreetly accompanied the true weapon of communication between former slaves: the voice and its delirium.

Many of the Southern States claim to be the home of the Blues. However, today it is certain that the true soul of the music that changed the world was born in the Mississippi Delta, the fertile areas close to Arkansas and home to huge tobacco and cotton plantations. Here, hundreds and hundreds of former slaves found refuge, working there 15 hours a day, mixed with the dregs of the white population, that very poor part of immigrants coming mostly from Ireland and that nobody wanted to hire. At the time blacks, gypsies, Irish and (alas) Italians were disliked by the very civilized American society, which called them “beggars, drunks and brawling hominids from overseas”.

Separated from the others, the Chinese, who nevertheless constituted a community to themselves, already oppressed by their brutal Mafia. In the Northern States, if they were okay with it, all these people were confined to pretty-named ghettos, like Little Italy or China Town, or neighborhoods like the Bronx, where people killed each other for nothing and where prostitution, alcohol and murder was the norm. Those who wanted to hope to survive in these realities had to succumb to all sorts of abuses, or to confine themselves to the Southern States, where the huge works of reclamation, construction of railways, spreading of rivers and plantations were constantly recruiting people.

Here life was hell: malaria, cholera, lung diseases, syphilis claimed victims, the pay was derisory and the food like crap. Alcohol was made from potato skins, the average age of prostitutes was 12 years, and life expectancy was no higher than 35. However, there was a strong sense of community, of mutual help between the disinherited and, by force of things, there were no obstacles of a racial nature.

Strumming two notes and singing their misfortunes became a great outlet and everyone, without exception, used them. In these places abandoned by God religion and spirituality mattered little, and the blues of these areas is filled with carnality, depravity, resentment towards power and hope of rebellion. And since God was absent, Satan still remained. Drawing hands-on from their African heritage, animist culture, voodoo ritual and all the great cauldron of superstitions, pagan rites and invocations to the higher spirits mixed together, a music that was both a hymn of rebellion and a cry of pain. It happened that black and white not only “sang” but “gave birth” together to a new language, of such immediate impact and musical ease that it spread like wildfire with the force of a hurricane.

The end of the 19th century thus sees a split between the society of the derelicts: on the one hand those who lived in the cities, attended the Church and drew their survival power from the knowledge that men were all equal before God; on the other hand the true blues man, the marginalized among the marginalized, who lived in a separate reality and that not only they did not know God at all, but neither would they have wanted to. For if God exists, HOW can he not turn his eyes to human suffering?

The rift becomes evident when dealing with the content of blues songs. It happened that the “emancipated” black society, which carried out humble but integrated jobs in white society (porters, dock workers, low-income workers but also cleaning women, cooks, nurses, servants) began to use the blues to tell others about their daily lives, an experiment that could fit in the family, love, the facts of their lives and - why not? - also God.

Songs within everyone’s reach, often referred to as Urban songs, spread by a large group of both white and black men who lived as gypsies, traveled illegally on trains and fed themselves doing chores here and there, then narrating their adventures in music. At the end of the '800, therefore, we can say that there were TWO types of blues, clearly different from each other and whose dividing line was represented by the social class to which they belonged.

On the one hand a popular and decidedly “watered down” Blues, advertised by the various organizations of whites who had understood the great commercial power. On the other, the blues of the swamps, of the derelicts with a capital D, who sang the rage of the slave against the white master and who, mixing Satan in their songs, are envy to whites as to blacks. A carnal and overbearing blues left, together with its ugly, dirty and bad authors, in complete oblivion until its artistic rediscovery at the end of the 1950s. Clearly of the latter “true” blues there are no recordings of that time.

On the shores of Mississippi, 1870

The two blues had different fortunes: between 1870 and 1890 the black folk began to spread through the countryside thanks to improvised theaters on walking carriages, run by whites or emancipated blacks who called themselves doctors or healers. They sold miraculous potions ( usually herbs mixed with alcohol or even more often water and alcohol) to cure all evil which, to attract more audience, forced their black workers to perform improvised songs strummed with the guitar or with the harmonica, that told of a simple and imaginative daily life. Songs that, addressing a heterogeneous audience but that attracted many whites, was deliberately adapted and purged of obscure meanings. The first artists were former farm laborers who, to eat, also bowed to the rules of the Minstrels Show, thus accepting to become a parody of themselves. Later, ex-convicts were preferred, who could draw on the so-called Midnight Special, very evocative pieces born in prison and that were musically more articulate. In short, to these rural artists were added others: jugglers, dancers, magicians, which made the carriages a real attraction, such as to call them Black Varieties.

The first to organize a permanent theater of this type of blues were two Italians, the Fratelli (brothers) Barrasso. They opened their club in Memphis in 1907, giving birth to The TOBA, one of the most slavish and notorious organizations that were enriched literally of the skin of black artists, who were only allowed to live hard. A market where there were plenty of money and that soon aroused the interest of the first major record companies, which recorded in the 1920s “customized” songs written by specialized composers such as William Handy, which soon produced 4 great hits. ST.LOUIS BLUES (1914), MEMPHIS BLUES and BEALE STREET BLUES (1917) and the famous HARLEM BLUES (1923).

It was the record companies to call this genre of black music “BLUES” (sad, melancholic), to distinguish it from the Minstrels still quite widespread. A large turnover, but above all a lucky emotional impact that went BEYOND the social condition and the racial barriers. A packed audience crowded the theaters where the Great Stars of the Blues performed, those very few black woman singers who, thanks to their own voice and the empathic ability to enter directly into the hearts of all, they managed to free themselves from poverty, simultaneously entering history.

An economic success and an enviable social status achieved at a high price: unspeakable harassment and sexual abuse of which the protagonists themselves agreed to never talk about.

THE BLACK SOUL

The blues is mud. It is the dusty and dirty air of the swamps, it is the sense of abandonment and loneliness of the slave born free; but, above all, it is the African soul that cries out in silence and that, in spite of the white master, brings home those who have lost the way. Unlike what has happened to other populations born and raised in America, such as the Indians in the South and the Native Americans in the North, whose past has died with them, the African-American has never lost its tradition and identity. Despite the centuries of slavery, fathers continued to educate their children in the practice of remembrance, which in Africa is a school of life.

And paradoxically in this practice they enjoyed the involuntary help of the same slavers, who continued the importation of slaves even when not only in America but all over the world slavery had been defined illegal. They, in their greed, had underestimated the fact that the slave who came directly from Africa was a warrior, a hunter, a shaman.

Captured in the prime of his life, male or female, he had already passed the stages of initiation designed to forge it to the harshness of life, and was now familiar in all the practices of oral narration, the liberating song of the soul and pride in their traditions. If the import had ended at the beginning of the 1800’s rather than continue illegally until almost 1875 the black people of America perhaps would have partially forgotten the African origin, as already integrated in the white society in a country where they were born.

Instead the continuous mixture of individuals born free with other born slaves, in a historical period of ferments that were under the eyes of all, has allowed and stimulated in African-Americans the reconstruction of an identity now forgotten. Generally, the “birth of the Blues” dates back to the early 1920s, with the first recordings of Charlie Patton and to some extent “Blind” Lemmon, in the area called “the Mississippi Delta”. But the blues has always been there: it is an African heritage that cannot be set an exact start date, as it is NOT a musical genre: it was the whites who defined it that, at a time when the first record companies tried to take it for profit.

In reality, the BLUES is a “collective practice of liberation”, a “medicine of the spirit” and an education to the recognition of one’s individuality in close balance with the environment. It has been part of Africa since the dawn of time and began with the first cry of the child, blessed and educated by the Griot.

Halfway between shaman and minstrel, the Griot is a predominant figure in the African culture. As guardian of the wisdom of the elders, an expert in the conditions of trance and in continuous relationship with the spirits, he used music to tell the deeds of the ancients and pass on to the new generations the taste of the past.

The rhythm was his main weapon: through the sound of the drum he “threw his heart high”, making him fall back into the land of dreams. As an emblematic figure, the Griot accompanied his art with two musical instruments, the KOR A and the HALAM.

It is a sot of “ancestors” of the banjo, to which the Griots used to entrust their compositions. In Africa, however, music was not an act of Creation but a WAY to reach the spirit: singing was equivalent to freeing, because this life is only a transition from one dimension to another, and a test to strengthen our soul..

The combination of music and magic will come later as a natural evolution of this thought..

Both Shamans, the Griot and the Bluesman use music to heal diseases of the soul, but with one difference: the environmental and socio-cultural context in which they moved.

In Africa, the music is ritual, it participates in natural phenomena and is imbued with water and wind. She speaks to the community conveying emotions through the technique of remembrance and is often entrusted to the care of older men who transfer all the wisdom accumulated over the years. It’s a source of teaching for the new generations and it’s also a simple and immediate way to impress the cultural heritage of Tradition in adolescents.

The Bluesman, however, uprooted from his land and deprived of the balm of memory, leads everything back to his own innerness, to which he desperately asks to find the road back home. The Griot tells, the Bluesman shouts. Both rely on a musical instrument, which becomes its inseparable companion and on which they operate a real transference. Nevertheless, both remain alone...

The Griot is not a social being; he lives in isolation and accompanies others only when asked, spreading the history of his ancestors and his wisdom.

For the rest of the time he takes refuge in his hut or climbs high hills, taking with him the Kora or the Halam to whom he confides his loneliness. He loves his people but is ascetic by choice, in order to rise from daily passions and become a pure being, able to bring help and impartial teachings to others.

The Bluesman is also alone, but for different reasons. Slavery has deprived him of his individuality and therefore has no rights. He no longer remembers the fairy tales of his land and so desperately invents new ones to convince himself that he is still a man. He too carries with himself daily a stringed instrument, which is not the African instrument but an instrument linked to the land in which he is a slave and which he calls Banjo.

Having no memories to tell, he sings of himself and his everyday life, using music as a weapon against loneliness and a balm to heal from anger and frustration. An unconscious attempt to heal the soul and return home. A spontaneous experiment for which symbolism and archetypes are used that come from the unconsciousness, which place the Bluesman in direct contact with an African nature that he does not know he owns.

Like the Griot, the African-American coins a music on his own heartbeat.

There is no harmony in his notes but only a rhythmic sense, to which he adds an exceptional and very personal instrument: his voice. In Africa the distances are huge. Every man or woman knows how to use its own voice as means of wide-ranging communication, whether they live alone or in collectivity. Combined with the rhythmic of tribal dances the voice acquires thaumaturgical power, and allows to heal the diseases of the body as well as those of the soul.

The vocal paroxysms allow ecstasy, through which the human being frees himself from his chains and speaks directly with the spirits. It’s the only way that the individual can ask for their help, for better or worse. As a sounding board he uses rudimentary musical instruments, which have the task of reproducing the sounds of nature: drums (the human heart), whistles ( the air, the breath of life) and stringed instruments, which represent the push of the soul towards the sky. Forcibly brought to America, the slave was put to work in the fields, where he remained constantly in the company of other people but practically he was alone, as his master forbade him to make real relations with his fellow men.

Every social activity was strictly controlled by the whip of the overseers, which prevented any form of aggregation. He had also been robbed of the precious drum, an exceptional instrument of communication for the deported African. The only activities allowed by the white master to his slaves were dancing and singing. And the African-American uses both very well.

Black men to forced labour, 1880

The slave will land in America with his Spiritual, a sort of accusatory cry against the white master and a real request for help to God, which however is not heard. The original Spiritual is a song of humiliation and defeat, which will turn into a song of liberation only long after, when the black of Africa will marry the Christian religion. The slave dragged in chains, however, does not give up. He adapts to the burdens of life but DOES NOT SUCCUMB to the new reality. He desperately seeks a new code of communication that allows him to keep alive in his heart the taste of his land and to get in touch with other brothers of misfortune. He succeeds almost immediately, through the creation of the Work Songs.

These were improvised arias based on a sound and response apparently harmless and not to rise suspicion, but that ultimately contained hidden codes of communication. For the slavers, the Work Songs were an outlet for maintaining the rhythm of slave labor, and for this reason they were never banned. In reality, they allowed to the African-American to keep awake within himself the traditions of his own land and the habit of remembrance. Over time, he used them to communicate to his comrades escape plans or report news of confreres otherwise forbidden: this fueled a kind of spiritual communion among individuals who, despite the work of disintegration put in place by the white masters, it stimulated into the slave the feeling of revenge and fomented his hope of returning home.

In parallel to these collective songs there are also solitary ones, called Hollers. Intoned by slaves working in the fields alone or by those kept isolated in their own mud cells, these songs began with a call to effect, very often a cry or a sharp sound that cracked the air and aroused the attention of those who listened.

Also a legacy of Africa, where this technique allowed to find oneself empathetically even at a great distance and to break down the barriers of space, the Holler had NO purpose to free itself but to “transfer” his sorrows to the soul of the listener. The African-American slave used it with a dual value: to blame the white master and at the same time to affect and indignate the black brother. Later the mixture of Spirituals, Work Songs and Holler, together with the suggestions of European music, gave birth to what is commonly called Blues. Taking origin from hidden codes, grim passions and constant references to the dark part of the individual, such as to deny even the existence of God, the Blues soon acquired a negative and malefic meaning, especially then when it became linked to voodoo rituals and Black Magic.

BLUES AND MAGIC

Blues and Black Magic. There is a lot of talk about it, sometimes incorrectly, sometimes retracing the path already traced to the times when slaves were forbidden the practice called evil, and fixed in the collective imagination thanks to the 1884 book Haiti or the black Republic, written by S. St John, that described voodoo as a dark cult and bound it inextricably to the Blues.

In reality of obscurity in the blues there is only the memory of the lost homeland, the famous “homecoming” that happens (because only there can happen) in a spiritual dimension, and there is the pain of slavery that nevertheless did not cancel in the Afro-American the pride of its roots.

The slave, even in the most desperate conditions, has never stopped being a child of his homeland. And he managed to keep alive the bond with it thanks to the few weapons with which he climbed on the slave ships, namely his music and his religion. Two “bare” yet infallible weapons, as deeply and indissolubly rooted in every individual.

Africa is a continent with wide spaces that man, alone with his physical forces, cannot cross by himself. At the time when modern slavery was legalized, in 1510, huge distances separated the small villages and every man was only struggling with the will of heaven. Perfectly integrated into his small universe, the African lived in close symbiosis with all the elements of nature, of which it recognized a specific identity. Everything had a soul, wind, water or a simple stone; in this context man was only ONE of the many things that form the world, neither better nor worse than the others. The possibility of survival was therefore determined by respect for every living form and by the possible communication that could be established with it.

The idea of a possible God the Creator in Africa has always been very pale, compared to the European belief. He conceived God not as a Supreme Being present and active in earthly life but as an abstract and undefined Entity, living reflexively in his creatures, to whom he infuses part of his energy. Possessing even a small part of it was therefore for the African of the villages the only way to dominate the forces of nature and finally succeed in rising in the world of the Spirits.

The most extraordinary expression of Energy is the “vibration”, which is easily perceived in every living creature but also in atmospheric agents, inanimate objects and in everything that surrounds them.

African rituals, therefore, are based on the use of vibration, on its reproduction through sound, rhythm and speech, and the channeling of it into objects reproducing the image of the recipient of Magic, or a symbolic representation of it.

The Shaman, through the rhythm of the drum, the hands or the voices of the members of the tribe who participated in the Ritual, came into contact with the essence of things to understand its secrets and help his people survive. Helped by vegetable drugs, which altered his state of consciousness allowing him to draw on the deepest part of the soul (for example the limbic system of the human brain, which controls the emotional aspect of man), the Shaman “predicted” the results of the hunt, he fought the evil spirits that carried the diseases, and appealed to the forces of nature by speaking the same language.

The use of the “fetish” was therefore instrumental: the material reproduction of what was an astral force, which then served as a catalyst of energy. The fetish absorbed its power, managed to keep it in time and, properly treated, gave its power to those who possessed it. A vibration game that has nothing to do with the so-called “Black Magic”.

Shamanic Mask Ivory Coast, 1700

It was only after the forced importation of slaves into America that the African religion underwent profound changes. Trafficking lasted about four centuries and was started by the Portuguese in order to replace with the African labour, more robust and enduring, the Indigenous one that was being decimated by European diseases and overwork. The Americas, in fact, were rich in immense plantations that constantly required cheap labor, and the African slave market soon proved to be an extremely profitable activity for everyone. It originated in territories such as Togo, Ghana, Benin (formerly Dahomey) and Nigeria, thanks to the support of the local Kings who enriched themselves by selling their fellow citizens to slavers.

First of all the AGASOUVI, the famous Sons of the panther, whose founder, Princess of Aligbonon, according to legend had mated with a panther. The dynasty was deeply rooted in Dahomey and served as the central government for all princes and village leaders in the area, imposing its laws thanks to strong warrior techniques and, last but not least, the help of the mythical Amazonas.

King of Dahomey, late 1800s

Rare photo of Amazonas

They slaughtered with ferocity any enemy, coming to tear the flesh with their teeth, and they were also famous because they loved to “strip the flesh of” the skulls of their enemies, then offering them as a gift to the high European officials who, clearly, were horrified. And since all the trades took place at the Royal Palace of the sons of the panther in Abomey, here is explained the origin of the term abomination.

If we add to this that the throne of Ghezo, King of Abomey, until 1858 rested conspicuously on 4 human skulls... it is understandable how easy it was to combine Africa with black magic and the idea of evil!

Equally “abominable” was the payment of slaves to the kings of Dahomey. This time, however, it does not seem that the European governments, so easy to horrify in matters of black magic and blood sacrifices, felt horror. The historian and writer Bruce Chatwin in his novel The Viceroy of Ouidha reconstructed a big part of the early period of slavery in America, particularly that conducted by the Portuguese, who used to match the Cyprinids to the African kings in payment for slaves. That is a kind of river snails that proliferate on the muddy bottom of rivers, acting as natural scavengers and feeding on all that mush of harmful microorganisms that make the water toxic. A precious currency, therefore, for Africa always afflicted by the problem of thirst, and that saw in the shell of these creatures not only currency but also as propitiatory talisman. Unfortunately, these gastropods are extremely aggressive and...carnivores, full of soft and spongy tissues typical of mammals, so their capture in water was very problematic.

The Mississippi, however, was full of them, so the slave traders devised a very cheap way to pay for the slaves to the kings: they chose a slave, tied his hands and feet and threw him into the water upside down. In this way the cyprinids attached themselves to him and, while they ate alive the unfortunate starting from the appetizing eyes and mouth, they could easily be drawn dry and closed in glass bubbles, and finally offered in payment for the slaves. The price of course varied depending on demand, but in general for each snail it was easy to get at least 10 healthy individuals.

Slave market, late 1700

So it's understandable the “power of memory” that has always inflated the waters of the Mississippi into the soul of the African-American. The place of the holocaust becomes the fulcrum of the identity of the slave, with a double value: the pain of injustice and the desire for revenge. When it is said that the Blues was born on the Mississippi delta, it is not only referring at the geographical element, but also at the cult of memory that the Black People has developed over the centuries. Every victim of sacrifice is transformed into a God who has lost the original brightness and no longer dwells in the heavens. The Gods of the slaves become dark and threatening and the water, always a carrier of life, turns for the African-American into a muddy tomb.

African Papa Legba

Yet these poor souls transformed into Gods are easy to reach: having once been men they know the difficulties of existence, and can understand its needs. But their painful death have deprived them of the balm of forgiveness and they have become hostile to humanity. Their power is enormous, superior even to that of the Gods of Light, as they know no limits and are not hindered by any sense of Justice. They represent the true bridge between this and the afterlife dimension, and only through their help can favors be obtained.

Thereby in the pantheon of the African Gods, usually linked to the beneficial forces of nature, there are present terrible creatures, the EXU of the New Land, depicted as hominids armed with paddles (the same with which the slaves were recovered from the Mississippi after the sacrifice for the cyprinids) and shells instead of the eyes and mouth.

These fierce Gods who had not yet lost their nostalgia for the earthly dimension, were flattered with very simple gifts, but certainly not within the reach of slaves, such as alcohol, chickens and cigars.

A Papa Legba from Voodoo religion, Dahomey, late 1700

Having not received a proper burial, it was easy to recall them in silent places linked to death: cemeteries clearly, but also wheat fields, old crumbling walls and where executions had taken place. The Rituals instead took place in the crossroads, to represent the point of intersection between the human and the otherworldly dimension.

It’s what will become classic iconography not only of voodoo but also of the origins of Blues.

Lord of the crossroads and father of all the new Exu was the feared PAPA LEGBA, an emblematic figure already present in the African tradition, but whose original meaning of Light bearer of life is distorted, to the point of assuming malignant and witchcraft-related appearance. Mistakenly confused with the Christian Lucifer, Papa Legba became the trigger of the fierce repression against African cults and the music that celebrated them, first of all the Blues. Many original blues songs speak explicitly of magical practices and demonic possession. It was already mentioned the conditions of degradation in which the slaves lived, during but also after the Civil War. The “To have the blue devils” that gave rise to the term BLUES is a wonderful way to express a condition of the soul that can be found in all the bluesman of the time.

The color blue in the English language indicates a state of suffering, melancholy and deep existential discomfort; but the association to the term “devil” amplifies the suggestions, binds them to Evil, making doubly alive the image that arises.

Blues is NOT a song of resignation but of anger. It is NOT only despair but anxiety of reaction.. The famous NOTE BLUES (the III, the V and the VII of the major scale) that are lowered by a semitone making the harmony slightly waning, create a special atmosphere of light and shadows that make each song a track “in the making”, an image projected into the future, an expectation in music of “what will happen”, a possible future in which everything will be different. The so-called END OF THE TUNNEL, to be clear.

The refuge in the talisman catalyst of energy and in the magical practice, dominant motif of the first blues, is not only a legacy of African culture but an effective attempt to pour the pain of the soul into the catalyst object, that may grant to the singer the strength necessary to live. It will come out directly from the darkness, from the depths of the waters of the Mississippi and from the slimy Gods who inhabit it, to bring LIGHT. Praying to The devil is therefore equivalent to using him to obtain justice, because at the end of the night comes always the day, and in every fold of Evil the warmth of Good is hidden.

Satanization of Papa Legba

References to the Magic, black or white, of early blues are wasting. From the emblematic figure of Willie Dixon’s HOOCHIE COOCHIE MAN, the hermit and sorcerer who brings both good and bad luck, to Robert Johnson’s crossroads, to the specific quotes of Muddy Waters like “work with magic powders”, the Blues bestows the deep meanings of its culture. To confirm this, it will be mentioned just a few of the most indicative phrases of famous music. Starting with the timeless Bessie Smith. Unthinkable that even in the city Blues alluded to black magic? Not at all. Here’s what Bessie says in Blue spirit Blues.

The devil came and grabbed my hand

Took me way down to that red hot land…

Mean blue spirits stuck their forks in me

Demons wid their eyelids dripping blood.

The next one is Robert Johnson with Hellhound on my trail a year after Bessie.

I got to keep movin’,

I got to keep movin’

There’s a hellhound on my trail.

Not to mention the term “MOJO” that is find in practically ALL the songs of the first Blues. It is a bag of magic powders made up of various aphrodisiac herbs but especially by the famous John the Conqueror, a tuber from the woods that grants physical power to those who own it. And what about the equally famous “black cat bone”, a bone from a black cat offered as a sacrifice to the God of crosses that, put under the tongue, would confer the gift of invisibility?

Obvious Americanization of Papa Legba

It was precisely the explication of magical practices mixed with satanic and sexual references to make the Blues unpopular with whites as to blacks, cursed by the Churches and the masses, to make the first Bluesmen fall back into the mud of the swamps from which they came....

THE PATH OF THE BLUES

From the Delta to the big labels

The Blues isn’t just visceral music. It is a reflection of the soul on the loneliness of life, it is the cry of liberation of a oppressed people who have been able to redeem themselves from slavery, but above all it is the smell of the New Age that rises from the swamps of Mississippi. Mistakenly considered repetitive music, minimalist scheme and not harmonious. “Making Blues” is an art for a few.

Similar to the water of the river from which it originates, this musical genre, just like water, takes the form of the surrounding environment, fully adapting to the uses and customs of the place while keeping intact its original soul.

The first Blues musicians, the famous BLUESMAN “ugly dirty and bad” had no weapons to express themselves, except a rudimentary instrument prepared by hand with the material they could find, and their own voice; in this there are affinities with the music of other desperate, the cowboys. However, the similarities end here: if they were to be compared with each other, is immediately obvious that between these two musical genres there is no connection other than the use of guitar and voice or guitar and harmonica.

What separates them is NOT the sense of degradation that accompanies them, IT IS NOT the Afro or European culture and IT IS NOT even the color of the skin. The Cowboys, the Ramblers and the Bluesmen are all lonely people, who express through music their own bad living and the anger of alienation. But, if the cowboy and the rambler support their melancholy to the echoes of the European past that resonates in the Old Time melodies, in the Bluesman there is a phenomenon that has no precedent in history: deprived also of the memory of his own traditions he manages to build for himself a NEW identity, which however remains instinctively African.

Born in the New Continent, the African slave coined a music with UNUSUAL, ANIMIST and SHAMANIC reflections that nevertheless projects unconsciously towards the future, using a game of vibrations and suggestions that are perfectly linked to the traditions of their people, although he does not know them at all. The ideals of equality, liberation and independence will then be constant elements of the Blues, representative of a turning point not only for the African-American but for the whole America.

On the banks of the Mississippi. Freed slaves, 1875.

And, as history reveals that the Adam of the Bible had black skin, it is now clear that the first great music of the MODERN Era is African.

The great river is muddy; its waters often form swirls and rapid waterfalls, which sometimes change into stormy streams. Then it goes down to the valley and finally stops, making the first blackish wave clear.

So is the Blues. A round of chords with strong rhythmic accents that swells in a scream and goes out in a whisper, torn in tired dissonances or revived by the vibrating voice. The emblem of a people that always remains itself but also absorbs the soul of the environment in which it lives.

Technically the Blues consists of 12 loops that repeat for the entire melody, with a tempo of 6/8 or 12/8 bars in triplets.. but in practice HAS NO fixed rules and is a musical genre absolutely INDETERMINATE. This is because, technically speaking, if is played in Major it NEVER has the distinct feeling of the chord, but sometimes it seems to be played in MINOR, the note seems INACCURATE and the unpleasant effect decreasing. This is partly true.

The famous Blues scale, which is its characteristic element, is actually played in Minor but also uses the Major pentatonic scale, which is DEPRIVED of its natural harmonic component. To put it simply, there are notes in the Blues that are “not centered” but slightly waning which, while arriving at the precise melody, it is done “with some hesitation”.

It follows that the melody will not be immediate but, slightly slowed down, and not very catchy. For this reason “making a good blues” will depend on the range of variations that will be used, the game of voice and the wise use of the pentatonic major scale, that is the classical one, which will fill harmoniously those spaces a bit cacophonic.

Does that sound hard? Well, IT IS.

The early Blues is definitely “ugly, awkward and asynchronous”; however it was able to talk to people. It is said to have been born in the Mississippi Delta and surely, when the recording industry “discovered” it, grabbing the rights and making a bank of money, the blacks were already singing it for a long time.

When talking about the delta it must be mentioned also Tennessee, Memphis and Vicksburg, which were the first lands conquered and inhabited by the Spanish and then by the English settlers, or even more the area of the ancient plantations, Bolivar, Cohaoma, Issaquena, Warren, Washington and Yazoo, where the mixture between Europeans and African-Americans was more ancient and evident. In 1850 this area had a population of 51,847 inhabitants divided between 13,153 whites and ... 38,711 black slaves! The plantations, with adjoining farms, were 306,000.

All these people lived in a narrow but stable equilibrium: the slaves were by now... at home in America and, although the masters kept the right of life or death on them, the attempts to escape were very rare and living conditions much better than they will be only 20 years later, with the end of the Civil War.

After a long day of work, the slave was allowed to vent with music. Definitively forbidden the practice of the drum, given its possible use as a weapon of subversion and revolt, to the children of Africa remained the possibility of using or building personalized instruments, usually woodwind or with strings.

Cigar box from early ‘900

Few lucky people could buy some, usually violins, xalam and banjo with which they often cheered the dancing evenings of the masters.

However building a stringed instrument with strips of animal guts was quite easy. Later, to these rudimentary tools were added the JUGS, large neck bottles in which to blew, and even simple tools of common use, such as wooden boards used to wash clothes. The guitar would only arrive much later, with Spanish immigrants and the first railways. Being very expensive and difficult to get slaves aimed at its surrogates built with recycled materials, such as... the boxes of cigars! The CIGAR BOX GUITARS, spread for several decades throughout the United States of the South and their tradition has not been extinguished at all. Just think that even today in LOUISVILLE, Kentucky, every year is celebrated the CIGAR BOX GUITARS FESTIVAL that welcomes professional musicians and not from every part of the world to challenge each other with the sounds of the... cigar box! But already so the first Blues is a pentatonic scale, with flattened notes and the use of vibrato, paroxysmal cries and syncopated rhythms able to “adapt” even to the fine ears of the English and Scottish masters who, on the other hand, loved to listen to their slaves play. Mixed with the suggestions of the Spirituals songs, the lament of the Hollers and passing unharmed through the Work Songs, the Blues of the origins rises then with the “Liberation” of the Civil War. Abandoned, forced to emigrate in the swamps to be reclaimed or absorbed by the north for the hard work of the Railways, the former slaves find themselves breathing the same air of the White emigrants, the “beggars among beggars”, from whom they learn to play the guitar or the harmonica by mouth. Others, more fortunate, encounter the balm of the Christian religion, they perceive its strong liberating power and integrate it with African superstitions.

So, between 1860 and 1890 we see the famous “Blues Rift” that, on the same banks of the Mississippi, on one side sinks in the marshes and on the other goes up to Paradise...

An emerging Chicago of 1886

In the Blues the use of the harmonica came around the beginning of the '900 as an appendix" of the human voice, taking its cue directly from the traditions of the Delta and then passing through the influences of the emigrants who came from Europe. The Spaniards had already introduced the guitar that, as we have seen, was reinterpreted in an artisanal key with cigar boxes. This is because the harmony of vibration, which could be easily achieved with string instruments, has always been a basic element of the African-American musical tradition. Initially “street music” or “work music” as it accompanied the hours of solitude of blacks who emigrated to the north in the period immediately before Prohibition, then became commercial business of the highest level for the emerging record labels, that saw in the new music the possibility of expanding overseas with a paltry expense. Technically speaking, the Chicago Blues is perhaps one of the most plastic and pleasing, thanks to the wide range of stylistic possibilities it allows and the subsequent introduction of numerous musical instruments. There are those who call it a first draft of jazz... but I do not fully agree.

It is true that, compared to the first Blues, here the use of the major scale is obvious, and it is also true that the use of wind instruments gives it a warmer sound like the orchestra, but the visceral approach is maintained if not even amplified by the strident notes of the harmonica first and by the famous “rolling” then, an oscillatory and predominantly rhythmic technique that inspired the Anglo-Saxon musicians and the subsequent Rock’n Roll.

Stringband Chicago, 1900.

If it gets to a purely chronological speech it can be recognized in the Chicago Blues two periods of fundamental importance, straddling the two world wars.

The first, the one is been talk about and that saw the explosion of record labels, is perhaps the purest and most connected to the Afro tradition. The use of harmonica and homemade instruments that distinguish it remain the most authentic expression of this “song of the soul” that only later, on the push of the economic markets that swallowed it, was commercialized assuming European and Urban connotations. Around 1950s, finally, the use of the electric guitar and the amplification and manual correction of the dry sound of the harmonica, deprived it of the original viscerality, making it a phenomenon of custom and therefore more suitable for the public.

Emigrates, early ‘900.

When the first blacks arrived in Chicago, they found themselves in a developing city. Born to welcome the wealthy Europeans, Chicago later split in two, allowing the new immigrants “drinkers and smelly” to settle in the southern part less served and in a certain sense port of landing of former slaves. On the other hand, Chicago was forced to absorb as much manpower as possible, given the growing development of industries and the incessant construction of railroads. The black worker, or even Irish, Spanish and Italian, arrived in the factories by walking half the city but always carrying with him his harmonica, which kept him company in the short break between a shift and another. Despite what is believed, among the black workers finally freed from slavery there was no capacity for cohesion, and the African-American worker was alone.