When Your Way Gets Dark: A Rhetoric of the Blues

When Your Way Gets Dark

A Rhetoric of the Blues

Jeffrey Carroll

Parlor Press

West Lafayette, Indiana

www.parlorpress.com

Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906

© 2005 by Parlor Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carroll, Jeffrey, 1950-

When your way gets dark : a rhetoric of the blues / Jeffrey Carroll.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-932559-38-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-39-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-932559-40-X (Adobe ebook) 1. Blues (Music)--History and criticism. I. Title.

ML3521.C37 2005

781.643--dc22

                                                     2004030507

Printed on acid-free paper.

Cover photograph: © 2003 by Dick Waterman. From Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archive, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003. Used by permission.

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is also available in paperback and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 816 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [email protected].

To Ruth

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Working (into) the Blues

1 Writing (on) the Blues

2 Reading (for) the Blues

3 Cooking (with) the Blues

4 Teaching (by) the Blues

Works Cited

Index to the Print Edition

Acknowledgments

My parents, Glenn Arthur Carroll and Doris Alva Carroll, helped me love music; I honor their role first in this modest project of mine. My brothers and sisters, all five of them (Audrey, David, Alan, Robyn and Holly), are themselves music-lovers, and I, being the youngest, fell luckily under their influence and the sounds that issued from their rooms and cars and stages; I thank them for such a rich education. My friends have always kept the blues pot boiling, too; I mention Gary Ashbrook especially for his love of the roots music that is so important to the life of America. My colleagues at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa have always supported me and my varied research projects; for this book I especially want to thank Glenn Man and Cristina Bacchilega, department chairs whose unfailing commitment to faculty research swept me up and helped me complete my work. Susan Schultz read an early draft of this book; her comments were typically incisive and helped me immensely in the revision stage. Arnold Edelstein was my mentor in many things, and a colleague whose support was constant and bracing. Thanks also to Thomas Rickert for his early and positive reading of the book; his suggestions were helpful in the revision stages. My editor and publisher, David Blakesley, has brought this book to completion with skill, patience, and a personable mastery of the publishing art and craft.

I acknowledge finally the blues makers, the blues lovers, men and women of the blues everywhere who speak to one another through the power and beauty of the blues—and to whose danceable conversation I hope this book contributes.

Rhetoric moves the soul with a movement which cannot finally be justified logically.

—Richard Weaver

Introduction: Working (into) the Blues

My interest in the rhetoric of the blues began on a cool September night in Chicago in 1994. I had gone with two friends to a club on the north side and found myself seated at a table about ten feet from the stage. We sat on stools and drank beer from bottles and said nothing at all through the thick air of the place that seemed to vibrate like water in a washtub with every heavy, thick pulse of the music. The keyboard player was a young white man who was earnest and looked to his guitarist with a furrowed brow. The sound of his Fender electric bounced off the low ceiling of the club with a high clashing sound that reminded me of stage thunder. The rest of the band was black. The bassist’s eyes would go from the keyboard player to the drummer to the leader and then back up to the low ceiling as if he had put some sheet music there and was checking a figure, but his eyes were more in time to the music than with anything else, and occasionally he would bite his lower lip like a boxer coming off his stool to start one more round. The guitarist and drummer were older men, dressed in dark shirts and jeans that looked well-lived in, wrinkled up under the arms and sagging in the knees. The drummer was soft and easy, finding the way the best drummers do to go into and out of a groove and make it sound right, loose, and smart. You never heard him by himself, you only felt him, and the band lived off his beat. The guitarist was a singer as well, who had led off the set with a couple of tunes to warm up the band and club. He played and sang okay, and you knew if he was any better he probably wouldn’t have been here waiting for the real show to start, but on his own somewhere else. He pulled his cowboy hat down low and muscled out some familiar licks, sang hard and steady against the crowd that was still coming in the door. Then he introduced the man walking through a plywood door at the side, and the band crushed my attempt to say a few words to my friends by finding a riff to fill in the few moments it took Otis Rush to plug in.

It is conceivable that the word rhetoric sprang to mind as, having rotated on my stool, I watched the band working up to this moment. I was a white fan of the black and brown (and white) blues for years, since Muddy Waters played at my college in 1968, but had been for an even longer time an English major who was interested in the broad universe of language and emotion. My love of literature bled comfortably into my love of music, where the poetry of both mingles with its primary matter, which is sound. As with many young people, music with its double-barreled strengths of lyric and melody, to say nothing of explicit rhythms emanating from both these barrels, soon outdistanced literature as the favored medium of unalloyed pleasure in my life. I could work hard to tease all the music out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in its full flowering a gorgeous performance to be sure, but there was something downright magical to have wash over you from your speakers, in a short five years, the Beatles, Dylan, the Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, and then Muddy Waters. And the lesson probably began much earlier, with my father’s 78s of Benny Goodman and especially Count Basie. This was a lofty arc indeed, or a serpentine that describes many journeys of my young adulthood, beginning in the exotic, the foreign, the hip and unknown, and working through a sense of discovery, a sense of origin or source. This journey was taken in far more authentic terms by the young white men who went south to find the bluesmen in the early 1960s; my journey until the one that began on the north side of Chicago was purely aesthetic. I didn’t care about the lives of the musicians, their ethnic or cultural biases and strengths. For me, enjoying Muddy Waters perform Blow Wind Blow in 1968 was to sense the highest degree of transparent speech I had ever heard, transparent as to its meanings, its feelings, the inner music of the human voice, the inflections of phrases and sentences, augmented and whipped up and creamed by a band second to none, led by a man whose voice was all honey and thunder. This transparency had something to do with a reaction to the aesthetically difficult poetry of literature, which invariably led me to interpretive gymnastics while, I hoped, leaving undamaged the essential beauty of the language.

Song lyrics tended to be simpler or more vernacular than published poetry in their usage; pop music has grown a huge general audience based on this principle. The blues was even more of this street feel, back porch feel, with a downhome rhyme scheme that was even simpler, more transparent than Tin Pan Alley.

The idea of rhetoric was not too far beyond my apprehension of the blues that night. We sometimes associate rhetoric with pleasure, but not often; rhetoric is more often the term we use to label that which uncovers, covers, or merely embellishes the truth. But certainly there has been for many, and always will be, great pleasure in the sermonic rhetoric of a great preacher, a great politician—or the rhetoric of a great poem or novel or drama that moves us to something more than sadness or happiness—moves us, or persuades us, to know, to believe, to act.

The performance of music became for me—after listening hours on end to the radio, and to my growing collection of records—a complete environment of language, in which its finest moments were those that jumped forward and grabbed your attention, and which I knew that I understood totally, with every part of my self. This sense of wholeness was, perhaps illusory—given the folly of a youth’s sense of mastery—and was, certainly, pleasure, although it could be of parts joyful or sad, nostalgic or doom-filled.

The term rhetoric, I will show in a later chapter, has many meanings and senses, but at this point in my study of the blues, I mean rhetoric to suggest a language-use that is consciously constructed, and which aims at an understood audience whose expectations are primarily affective, and whose understanding of this rhetoric is contextualized culturally. Rhetoric arises in particular moments, in performances both real and virtual, and can echo down the years for new users, new audiences. Rhetoric allows for the testimony of the oral and the erased, the hidden song, the subversive gathering, the innocent dance. It can exist without the machinery—what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the inner mechanics—of the literary world. And it can still provide for the expression and needs of a culture’s soul, which the blues was for African-American culture—what Angela Davis calls experience as emotionally configured by an individual psyche (112). Rhetoric is that old and new illumination of this configuration, I argue in this study; rhetoric can take the blues back—or borrow it—from its still nascent position within the canon of American literary study and reinvigorate the blues as rhetoric, as public address that melds the power of music with the emotional, social, and political needs of the audience in a language that comprises representations of black and white cultures in America.

This complete environment of language was appealing to a part of me (since I was a post-adolescent, and never changing in at least this one way) that wanted the lost word, the need—as I read and wrote and listened and spoke—for a truly linguistic essence, a reality that would be present only insofar as we knew it through words. How better to make that transparent reality thick and delicious than through the complex workings of a song, and then—by the miracle of electricity, lights, auditoriums, clubs, and student unions—the power of the performance, the ritual by which people gather for this evocation of sound, word, rhythm, movement, and response?

I understand rhetoric as a tool for the examination of blues to be the ways language has meaning, force, and beauty in the complex of conditions and contexts surrounding performances of the blues. I argue for rhetoric’s use in our understanding the blues—and add an opening apology, to which I hope I will not have to return to again. This apology is directed to all those writers, thinkers, scholars, and hipsters to whom I have silently hurled curses over the years for their missing the point. As many do, I eat up work on the blues, on rock, on jazz, voracious in my appetite to understand, to enjoy at least vicariously yet another run-through of the Chess years, or the Robert Johnson legend, Coltrane’s last flights, or even the classical elements of the Beatles’ middle period. But I have always felt faintly misdirected for going so deeply into the literature on the music, suspecting that the lost word I seem to be searching for won’t be revealed at that remove. Perhaps I have been looking for clues, or for a comfortable, interpreted road map to the source. It is one thing to read Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues for its foundational excellence and clear sense of affection for the music—but it is another thing altogether to listen to the hours of music referred to in this book. Indeed, it is not another thing—it is another universe, another reality. Puzzling out the lyrics on Charlie Patton’s acetates isn’t nearly as much fun as reading Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow’s description of his performance tricks, yet listening to Patton has no substitute. To write a book about rhetoric and the blues is a somewhat suspect undertaking, then, if the intellectual and the visceral must be so jarringly brought together. As Elvis Costello so tellingly put it, to write about music is like dancing about architecture. He didn’t need to supply anyone an explanation

My own intentions in this book seem to replicate much of what I have scorned over the years for missing the point. And, if a glance at my sources is sufficient, my sin will be greater than most. I drag a host of interpretive tools to the work that has little or no obvious relevance to, for example, Leroy Carr or anyone else singing How Long How Long Blues. Part of my task will be to show the usefulness of these tools in understanding the blues, but my compounding the error of our Western analytical ways will have to be excused by readers who hope, as I do, that there are still other ways to know and feel the power and the beauty of the blues. It is my contention that the tools of rhetorical analysis have not been brought to bear on the blues in such a way as to increase our understanding—and our love—of the blues. I will got out on a limb with my baggage and see if the weight will hold. It is surely not the blues that will break. Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky are still standing under the weight of published studies that have no music themselves. The Beatles still endure an industry of analyses. It is no surprise that Patton, Johnson, and Waters sing endlessly in our airspaces without the aid of interpreters.

Yet it is the nature of our linguistic universe that we must talk about all this.

So rhetoric. Not only is its sense a negative one for many, but a related term seems to seek to bring everything around us into its gloomy maw: it has become fashionable in recent years to see rhetoricality as the primary truth (or disruption of truth) of our times. Rhetoricality is a kind of extension of rhetoric’s basis in argument to all matters, but an argument for which there is no recourse to resolve. We argue that everything is words and the clever arrangement of words—or arguments—for the purpose of gaining advantage, of getting things done, of exerting power over someone or something that will, then, have less power, or will have its power dominated by others. Views—or serious, ideological positions—compete with each other; we find, often, no final or foundational truths to hold down or hold up our conversations, language that is infected by partisan agendas and desires(Fish 474). Our lives, according to this view, become competitions in wit, deceit or, at best, possibilities (not even Aristotelian probabilities or eikota) of truth. We scrap and argue; the best wins—with best meaning most rhetorically effective, with no necessary reference to the truth, or goodness, necessarily intended. It is a sophist’s best nightmare.

There is something fascinating about this view, even for the blues around which this book will try to circle. It concerns the politics of language-use, which will also come into play in my analysis to come. A rhetoricality of our world suggests that there is no source of truth or meanings to our language acts other than those which impinge specifically on the act—for example, the reasons for speaker A grabbing listener A and telling him that person B is a crook and should not be trusted. (Speaker A wants your vote so he can get a job.) The implications of such a rhetoricality in our lives can be both attractive and appalling because they free up power to create powerful stories (Person B, it will be shown through testimony provided by Speaker A, beats his wife)—for each of us to argue as if we do indeed have a strong, if private or individual, pact with the truth. At the same time, however, such a freedom to persuade destroys the underlying comfort that, somewhere out there, there is a clear and good source-point of resolution, of an ending to argument and a certainty of meaning and significance. In conventional rhetorical terms, this is the difference between an Aristotelian rhetoric of the heuristic and a Ciceronian rhetoric of controversy: solve a problem, or give voice to diverse points of view. It may come as no surprise that I wish to use both kinds of rhetoric, Aristotelian in arguing strongly for a new, effective story of the blues—unifying many stories about it—while arguing, like Cicero, for the beauty of the blues being in its sense of cultural communality, of voices thrown back at voices, the mingling of voices in endless musical conversation.

For the blues, rhetoricality suggests a political freedom of expression, an appropriation of forms, figures, and arguments without regard to source or original meaning, a free evolution of the blues (and blues criticism) without the constraint of prior ideological positions. The mostly covert politics of the blues, now overtaken and made far more explicit by rap music, was that makers and listeners made it their own; by doing so bluesmakers and audiences were casting into new forms the relatively stable Western poetic lyric, its authority and ownership, its prior patrilinearity to the great Western poets. (David Evans’s Big Road Blues in fact describes this free exchange, play, and appropriation of lyrics, motifs, and music among the bluesmen who shared one song over many years and miles of performance.) Similarly, rhetoricality suggests for the blues its appropriation by other musical forms, other interests, many of which seem purely commercial or economic, so that we are faced with so-called blues-based performers (blues-rock, for example) who are as difficult to accept as making the blues as many poets have with accepting rap artists or song lyricists as poets. The blurring of genres and their attendant modes of understanding and evaluation is not the only concern. We are faced—if we accept the blues as just language, as I did when young and callow and most interested in the electricity of the performance—with cutting the blues off from its experiential ground, turning it loose in a textualized place of primitivist poetry and virtuoso musicians, so that the cultural heart of the music is unheard and unknown. What remains of the blues—if it is only a feeling in words, or only a protest in volume—is somehow only pentatonic, cool with shades, guitar-based, and ultimately sterile.

I recognize that the rhetoricality of our times is indeed reflected in its cultural products—their market-based ephemerality, their disinterest in the local or the narrowly contextual. The blues, spread thinly now across a mostly-white audience of affluence, is not an exception. I will, however, attempt to show how an attention to rhetoric today does not necessarily suggest that we must cut ourselves loose from the histories of our bluesmakers, from the experiential truths of its audiences. Rhetoric is the conscious use of words, sound, movement to create a meaning, or force, or beauty by which we communicate with one another through and within a shared or given moment. The truth about participants in this shared moment can still be sought.

I suspect if you confronted Otis Rush with the term rhetoric he might give you that faraway look, the half-smile with which he greets his audience. He would probably rub his fingers against his thumb and wish he were just playing and singing for you. When he plugged in that September night the faraway look was there, and the half-smile. The eyes were invisible under the shadow of his white cowboy hat, and as the sounds came effortlessly from his white Fender Stratocaster, left-handed, strung upside down, it seemed to me that here was a man of words and music, for whom the word artist was an honorific, certainly, but to whom the word rhetorician might never be self-applied. Yet contained in the term bluesman, however, is all the power of the rhetorician. And bluesman/rhetorician Otis Rush admits to this tendency:

Let me tell you [. . .] being a blues musician is one of the hardest things you could ever want to do. But it’s sweet, too, if you make it. I’ve been up a little bit; I’ve been down. And I think I suffered more because I quit. I have a gift and I chose not to use it for awhile. And it felt like God give me a whuppin,’ you know. I gave you this and you’re just hangin’ around in pool rooms? (qtd. in Drozdowski, Rush 68)

Rush speaks of the gift, and of the choice, of pain and sweetness, of God and pool rooms. He begins, Let me tell you; he has the awareness of the performer for his audience even in a relaxed moment. His discourse, briefly, embraces much of the power of the blues—its scope and depth. I hope to bring his experience of the blues to my understanding of the blues in this book.

There are scholars of the blues for which the use of artist to describe the performer would have been a difficult stretch; their adherence to a primitivist label precluded the kind of conscious shaping that our understanding of art generally requires. Other critics err perhaps too much on the other side—and see classic poetry in every line of Robert Johnson’s largely derivative lyrics. Others see the bluesman as a working entertainer, a craftsman aiming to make a living by making people want to dance and sing. Indeed, some believe that the blues became the blues as we know it when it became an economic reality, a job, a thing to do for money. It only became art when it came under the view of