By Norman Knight
Pastor Mary was planning a series of sermons about Seasonal Affective Disorder. She was thinking she would examine the blues that people sometimes get during the winter months and how to deal with them.
I knew this beforehand because she shared it with the members of the worship committee of which I am a member. We were brainstorming, kicking around ideas when I sort of jokingly suggested we could do some blues music. She didn’t realize it was a joke, apparently, and that’s how I along with Tammera, our music director, wound up playin’ the blues at church.
I first became acquainted with the musical form called the blues as a teenager in the 1960s. The blues as a genre is generally considered to have originated by African-Americans in the post Civil War South, with its roots going through field hollers and chants all the way back to African music. My introduction came as I listened to the music of young, white British rockers who took the form and made it electric and loud.
I read the names Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and Lightning Slim in the liner notes of the LPs and learned who these young Brits — The Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, The Animals, among others — cited as influences on their music. (An unfortunate causality of the digital revolution was the demise of those wonderfully artistic and informative album covers. I miss them.)
I eventually searched out the source material and listened to the original artists. My circuitous route started off as a course in the roots of rock and roll and eventually grew into an appreciation of the blues as an art form unto itself.
Blues music is distinguished by certain patterns. A musical scale which includes flatted thirds and fifths is often called a “blues scale” while the chord structure of a typical twelve-bar blues is based on the first, fourth and fifth chords of a key. These patterns are among the most common in popular music and are part of the DNA of songs from rock and roll to radio pop to Broadway musicals.
Early blues lyrics consisted of one line repeated four times. By the beginning of the 20th century the lyric form had evolved to the common one we have with us today: the AAB pattern. In a 12-bar blues, for example, the first line would be sung in the first four bars (“I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees”), repeated in the next four with the concluding line (“Asked the Lord above for mercy, save me if you please”) sung over the last four. Of course, as with all art forms these patterns can be adapted, modified, morphed and tweaked to serve the imagination and vision of the particular artist.
The blues also is a close cousin to African-American spirituals. Spirituals were created by enslaved Africans in the United States. A close study of spirituals reveals the dual nature of the music. Slave owners often encouraged Christianity among the slaves thinking it would make them more submissive and compliant. The flip side of that idea is that the concept of “freedom” is a major component of the Biblical story and of Christianity.
So, when slaves were singing their spirituals, were they singing about freedom from sin or slavery’s oppression — or both?
The religious foundation of the blues is why none of us had qualms about using the form in our worship. We borrowed heavily from some standard tunes, “Walking Blues” and “Good Morning, Blues” are two examples, and modified the lyrics according to the AAB pattern to fit the themes of the particular sermons. If comments from the congregation are any guide, the church blues seems to have worked.
It is probably just a coincidence that Pastor Mary’s sermon theme is happening during February which is Black History Month. Then again, maybe it’s not a coincidence at all.
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
