Language of the Blues - Edmonton Blues Society

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the force that character
Ultimately,
such character becomes the mystic coolness of Yemoja, and of the Buddha, Jesus, and all
the saints and sages who have bridged the gap between their own personalities and their
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potential for ashe
correctness that a fine carnelian bead or a passage of exciting drumming may be praised
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The Yoruba are the largest ethnic group in Nigeria, and number close to 100 million
people throughout West Africa. In traditional Yoruba morality, generosity results from
coolness and is the highest quality a person can exhibit. The act of giving embodies
of propitiation.
This reverence for generosity is also obvious in the culture of the Bakongo people, who
live along the Atlantic coast of Africa, from Brazzaville, Congo to Luanda, Angolao. The
Bakongo proverb kiyaala-mooko kufwa ko
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William Ferris, the former Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the
University of Mississippi, experienced a similar commitment to generosity among
African Americans living on the Mississippi Delta during his travels there in the late
right in. If I eat a piece of bread, you eat too. 123
extended their hospitality by offering to feed and house me as long as I was in
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astonishing that this ethic survived to be extended to a white scholar wandering around
the Delta looking for blues musicians to record and interview. Jimmie Vaughan
Empire Ballroom in Dalla
door and kinda look after me. I knew I was a white guy and they were black people but I
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That the blues spread beyond the
African American community to become a worldwide phenomenon is likely due, in part,
to this commitment to being cool.
The slaves, and then their freed descendants, faced grinding poverty, and the daily
threats, humiliations, and viciousness of life as a denigrated minority. In the ghetto,
coolness took on an edge. As LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) said in 1963:
environment. It defined an attitude that actually existed. To be cool was, in its most
accessible meaning, to be calm, even unimpressed, by what horror the world might
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