Morrison and Wilson on the Blues

Two Quotes on the Blues. The First is by James Baldwin in “The Uses of the Blues” James Baldwin (1964) it reads: “And I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy. Now joy is a true state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness, which is not a real state and does not really exist. Consider some of the things the blues are about. They’re about work, love, death, floods, lynchings; in fact, a series of disasters which can be summed up under the arbitrary heading “Facts of Life. ” The second is from DJ Lynnée Denise, on James Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues.” It reads: “I wanted to anchor Black music and the Blues in joy, which I believe is a kind of radical reading of a kind of music mistakenly understood as being rooted in unbearable misery. Baldwin says, we've made this music based on these experiences designed to break us, which means that the blues and its uses or its function as a cultural product is kind of… a stylized way of expressing survival. He also uses the Blues to think about Black music as a lived experience and not simply a musicological topic…Blues as a form of social explanation or Blues as an analytical tool through which we can begin to understand the Black experience.”

Morrison and Wilson on the Blues

Related Lessons

lesson:
The Juke Joint: Where Oral Literature Comes Alive

Grades: High, Middle

Subjects: ELA

What role do Blues lyrics and juke joints play in Black American literature and life?