The Language of Poetry - LanguageArts-NHS

TAKE NOTES
How are contradictory
emotions important to
the form of the blues?
c TAKE NOTES
Review the author’s
list of blues subjects.
What attitude do blues
songs express about
these subjects?
744 unit 7: the language of poetry
30
40
50
But another saying knows the opposite is true: the blues ain’t nothin’ but a
bad woman (or man) feelin’ good. b
. . . As Langston Hughes often said, the blues are “laughing to keep
from crying”; the fact that this line also appears in the song “Trouble in
Mind” tells us that even when there’s trouble, we still can laugh about it.
We must, the blues insist. Ralph Ellison puts it this way:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of
a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its
jagged grain, and then transcend it, not by the consolation of
philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of
personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
Indeed, for me the blues provide a fresh way to express the lyric poem’s
mix of emotion and intensity, all the while evoking not so much strict
autobiography as a personal metaphor for life’s daily struggles. “You’ve
been a good old wagon, but you done broke down.”
The blues can be about work, or the lack of it; about losing hope or your
home, your lover or your mind or your faith; or all of these at once! The
blues are unafraid of talking about violence, whether of the physical kind
(as reflected in Hughes’ “Beale Street Love” and Ma Rainey’s “See See
Rider Blues”) or the often more troubling psychological sort. Still, the
heartbreak the blues rails against and trains us to overcome is never far
from ironic and even comic, and for every “Nobody Knows You When
You’re Down and Out,” Bessie Smith declares “Tain’t Nobody’s Business if I
Do.” That Nobody sure is fickle. c
The blues ain’t polite—they don’t say please, though sometimes they say
“Good Morning.” They are, in the end, often more loyal than the sweet
mistreater whom the singer loves but wants “to lay low”. . . after feeling
low for days. Or nights—the blues after all, began as Saturday night
entertainment, making us laugh and move and maybe even forget our
troubles, not by pretending everything’s all right, but by admitting it’s a
hard road full of forks and crossroad devils. By finding out that the
powerful voice onstage, or on the jukebox, or coming from the radio, has
been there too. The blues are loyal to a fault.