Black Soul, White Soul: The True Colors Of Blues

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.