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Blues, Gospel and Jazz Impulses: A Way of Understanding of African

American Culture and Damn Near Anything Else, For That Matter

Timothy B. Tyson
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

In his essay, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Ralph Ellison, the great African
American novelist and cultural critic, called blues, gospel and jazz the
essential “impulses” of black culture in America. Blues, gospel and jazz—
not the specific musical forms but the cultural sensibilities they reflect--are
not just different styles of approaching the saxophone or piano; blues, gospel
and jazz are fundamental ways of addressing the human condition. Craig
Werner’s classic A Change Is Gonna Come: Race, Music and the Soul of
America expands on Ellison and illuminates the blues, gospel and jazz
impulses, drawing on sources from Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues to
Willie Dixon’s “Hootchie Kootchie Man” to Ice Cube’s “True to the Game”
to the latest and grittiest hip-hop. I spend the most time on the blues impulse
here because it is the fundamental recognition necessary to engage the
gospel and jazz impulses.

Of the blues, gospel and jazz impulses, the blues is the most basic. You
cannot do the gospel impulse without going through the blues impulse, nor
can you do the jazz impulse without going through the blues. The blues
impulse begins in a brutal history, personal or political or most often both. It
addresses the grittiest realities of human life: sex, money, violence, mortality
and the lack of practically everything. And also the 123 percent of cases in
which one might suspect sex and money to be the same damn thing. As
Zora Neale Hurston says: “Love made and unmade.” Albert Murray argues
that the blues addresses Hamlet’s question—“to be or not to be”—“which is
also what the question is when you wake up with the blues there again, not
only all around your bed but also inside your head.” As I am tiring of
feeling but fond of saying, I don’t just have a problem, I am a problem. And
then the blues impulse looks those brutal truths in the eye and says, in the
words of Willie Dixon: “I’m here, everybody knows I’m here.”

Ellison defines it succinctly: “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 to transcend it, not
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through the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-

tragic, near-comic lyricism.”

One woman’s blues, expressed in a country song title: “Killing Him Didn’t
Make the Love Go Away.”

This definition of the blues as an existential posture is not limited to12-bar

musical structures or any particular genre on your iTunes. Blues is instead a
posture of confronting the broken world by means of narrative honesty,
bitter poetry and hard-won laughter. The blues impulse embraces a brutal
history, and not only acknowledges that brutality but refuses to deny
responsibility for one’s own part in it. The blues is about endurance, not
innocence, it’s about survival, not transcendence, except such transcendence
offered by “squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”

Not just a musical form but a cultural form. In this sense, hip-hop can be
blues, lots of country music can be blues, and some of the books we’re going
to read can be blues. Blues starts with the burden of history, the pain of
human existence. Unlucky in love, out of money, if you’ve heard blues
music you know those themes, but how about chained in the bottom of a
boat and sold across the sea? Where does the blues take us from there? It
looks a brutal history straight in the eye. And then it turns those agonies into
poetry and grim humor.

Rather than sipping the weak tea of optimism, rather than praying for Divine
intervention, the blues impulse shoots the straight whiskey of truth and
fatalism, confessing its own isolation and despair. But rather than succumb
to grief, the blues artist laughs to keep from crying and cries to keep from
dying and turns to that “near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” to turn nightmares
into poetry and heartbreak into humor. Always outnumbered and always
outgunned, the blues David looks old Goliath in the eye and says, “I’m
drinkin’ TNT, I’m smokin’ dynamite / And I hope some fool try to start a
fight / I’m ready, ready as anybody can be / I’m ready for you, baby, I hope
you’re ready for me.”

The blues impulse leads a man to stand up and sing, “I’m a rattlesnakin;
daddy / love to rattle all night long,” the whole time knowing, and
sometimes crowing, deep in sorrow and hard to say, “there’s another mule
kickin’ in my stall.”
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The blues impulse understands a world in which there are no good choices;
in which we have made terrible mistakes already; where we have innocent
blood on our hands, even though we had our reasons; a world in which we
are damned if we go deeper and damned if we duck out; and yet a world in
which we nonetheless have to make choices. Like the underrated theologian
Bessie Smith sang: “Nineteen men living in my neighborhood / Eighteen of
them fools and the one ain’t no damn good.”

The gospel impulse takes us one giant step beyond the blues. Gospel begins
with a brutal history, too, asking: “Were you there when they crucified my
Lord?” (In fact, this song in some ways is more blues than gospel, despite
its formal genre.) The gospel impulse testifies to the same burdens that the
blues carries. Rather than simply enduring, however, the gospel impulse
seeks to transcend those burdens by expressing itself in relation to others and
to God. The gospel impulse reaches out and reaches up and always moves
toward higher ground. “How I Got Over,” Mahalia Jackson sings. The
gospel impulse bears witness to the burden and upholds the tradition, but it
extends a hand to humanity and to God, and works toward redemption.
Where the blues endures, the gospel transcends, lifts up, sees the Divine
light within us and finds God in the beauty of Creation. Gospel vision holds
out the hope for a better tomorrow.

Like blues and gospel, the jazz impulse is rooted in that same burden of a
brutal history and in traditions of addressing it. A jazz artist keeps one hand
wrapped in what Ellison calls “the chain of tradition,” and yet improvises
outward, finding new ways of phrasing and rephrasing the problem and
innovative means of dealing with it. Jazz keeps one foot on the old melody,
testifying to the burden just like blues and the first turn of gospel, and then
tries to work its way forward, keeping the world in motion. Louis
Armstrong said that “jazz is music that is never played the same way once.”
The jazz impulse is a means of rethinking the human condition, not just an
approach to the saxophone. Jazz says we don’t have to do it the way we
have always done it.

In freedom movement history terms, then, we could read the sit-in

movement that began here in North Carolina in 1960 as a blues expression.
It walks in, takes a seat, looks a harsh and contemptuous society in the eye
and says, “I’m here, what are you going to do about it?” It’s Willie Dixon
singing “Hootchie Kootchie Man” again: “I’m here, everybody knows I’m
here.”
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“Two-four-six-eight / We don’t want to integrate,” chanted the

segregationist mob. One crowd of sit-in protesters had the wit to chant back,
“Eight six four two / Bet you sons-of-bitches do!” That might be blues
humor, might be gospel or jazz, too, in some sense; you don’t have to pick
one when you’re using Ellison and Werner’s framework for a prism.

But of course we could read the sit-ins as gospel, too. You the brutal burden
of history, testify to the truth of its inhumanity, and call upon God and call
your brothers and sisters together to transcend it. Church clothes, church
music, school books, a certain generational strut—smacks of blues—but
definitely a clear call for the creation of the beloved community.

And at the same time, you could say that the young people who created the
sit-in movement were jazz artists. They kept one foot on the tradition. They
had learned from their grandparents and parents and teachers and from the
Declaration of Independence and the Bible that they had a right to life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that they had a right to the tree of life,
and they learned their politics in all-black institutions that were often very
cautious environments. They kept one foot on the tradition, but then they
reinvented American politics with a bold, defiant stroke that truly brought a
new language of freedom into the American political vocabulary. Scarcely a
grown-up or a civil rights organization in the South approved at first, but
they did it anyway, and it worked.

In jazz mode, we might be able to imagine the transitions of understanding

to a world beyond white supremacy, beyond sexism and gender-based
oppression, beyond classism and poverty, materialism and war. The jazz
impulse traces the brutal origins of a historical moment, testifies to its truth,
but leaves us open to the possibility that history could have been much better
if human beings had acted differently. Jazz violates narrative boundaries of
history, memoir, poetry, fiction and folklore, leaving us laid open to radical
retellings of our stories.

The blues, gospel and jazz impulses may not offer an easy add-water-and-
stir redemption, but they open up a history—a history past, present and
future--in which we can see the faces of flawed, well-meaning people like
ourselves, who might do much better—especially if we remember that we
have the capacity to do much worse. Nothing here is inevitable except
trouble and the gospel says for the ages that “trouble don’t last always.”