There is so much history and healing in the Blues.
It really is a beautiful thing.

At the end of the day we can always choose to see things on the surface.
Music can just be music. But as an artist I know through experience the many layers in music beyond the surface.

We are all here and all fans of the Blues. I fell in love with them
by the time I was eleven. Even then, it wasn't just a genre of music.

I needed to play the Blues as I do today. I needed that space where I could just let me out.
I needed to let me out.

How do our lives get to the point when we need to create and dedicate a time and
space for letting ourselves out? To being free with the emotions that run down to our core.

I'm a real human being. I don't play one on television or in life. People got to be who they are.
That is why we are here. I'm the only one who can be me and your the only one who can be you.
Celebrate that!

Thank God for the Blues.

I created the website http://classicbluesvideos.com/ as a tribute and resource for the Blues and
what they are all about.

This is our way of saying hello :)

The article below was written by a close friend and brother of mine.
I asked him to capture what the Blues are, what is their true origin and
what is function of the Blues as it relates to spirit or the spiritual function of the Blues.
Because we know it's not just music.

Moose
http://classicbluesvideos.com/

Fragments of a Fugitive Faith
(A Cubist Portrait of the Blues in Our Time)

A.
Exhuming
a
Corpse

UNDOUBTEDLY,
…you have already delicately paced the halls of the museums (with their cubical shrines of light and glass), patiently weighing the meticulously constructed exhibits...
…you have carefully perused the pages of the histories & the chronicles, breathlessly reading between the lines, straining to hear the life scintillating behind the notes
…you have stalked the edges of the photographs, grasping behind their mute face, all the while unconsciously half conjuring a spark of life to leap from the frozen moment enigmatically captured.
All of this, as you piously entered the sepia-tinged room - on the cold etherized table - the exhumed corpse, cold and lifeless where it rests.
This is the flesh that once lived, fading away into the soil with time - leaving behind in its traceless passing the hissing and the crackled recordings - where that foreign and alien voice sings, returning to the present like a ghost wrapped in fog or mist.
Here where the primordial life of this primeval music once animated and played.
This dead music more alive than the life presently so loud and furious around you…you who are captured â€" and enchanted - by its audible archaeology.

B.
A
Haunting

BUT,
In those dreams that lead you here, in those irrational imaginings and daydreams, that was a real place that you went, a world closer to that music.
There, as in the heart, the myth outweighs the facts in the scales of meaning.
The image lays waste to the “objectiveâ€쳌 hearsay…
The sinking feeling in your chest at that first primal moan, the flutter in your flesh at the tense, sharp pluck of the choked strings. The cry and the wail…
This was always worth more than the most erudite gossip of the countless pale souled men, sulking in their safe, closed rooms, so far from the pregnant openness of the Delta.
For example, one hears their desperation and their greyness so often: ‘Robert Johnson was either poisoned by a jealous husband or knifed to death by a spurned woman.’
But this is just the vapid talk of the all too common blasphemers of the dead, vainly grasping, fighting over the material remains, unaware of what we all owe these living phantoms, that their voiceless eyes still witness and judge us.
The myth says it far more truthfully, no matter how it may seem to do violence to the world of facts:
He went to the crossroads to learn the secret, and at the end the crossroads came calling to recollect him to its source…
[…….]
and so he was pulled under by the stalking hellhound.

C.
The Blues:
A
Fugitive Faith

THIS MUSIC:
The unspoken and real fugitive faith of this stolen continent, rumbling ominously below the skin grafts, below the artificially transplanted churches and temples, like a thumping bass tone.
This faith that grows wild like weed naturally from the soil, that needs no elaborate gardener or cordoned boundary to be safe from the savage truth that this land everywhere throws up like spit or breath.
This music that resonates in the desolate and the empty places, in the vacuum left by the dispossessed, the exiled, the erased, and in our hearts, us the entranced remnant, iron-ringed by denial.
This music that sings for all that is human…
All that has been taken by theft, by cunning, and by violence.
This music for those cursed by the colonizing cadence,
Whispered by our slave drivers to the rhythmic clinking of chains,
To syncopated fate metred out of the end of a gun,
Muzzled against the shaking and the trembling of our pleading flesh.
This music for whom this curse is a silent blessing (for we are not the one’s doing the killing).
So that there will come that time â€"
At the end of this time, this time of troubles â€"
When we can return, humble and cleansed,
Before the furtive, yet attentive sky
And the deep, long enduring earth â€"
And return without the incessant white noise of selfish calculation in the saturating backdrop or the whooshing reddened voice of lust thundering in our ears.

THIS FUGITIVE FAITH:
Uncleansed by barren godliness, yet more pristine, pure, and deep with bone and blood divinity than countless abstracted catechisms.
This Blues, the unspoken religion of America, the one that has no identifiable insignia, no Church, no dogma, all the more magnetic in its fascination because it has remained reticent and dumb, like a young embryo under the cover of the womb.
This Blues, the music that heals and pierces. For your burdened mind and wizened skin, your breath and your muffled weight, your sterile heart, when you can no longer feel the soil, smell its dark fecund scent, or hear the awed, dismal voice of the thunder.

D.
They “Sang
as
They Went Underâ€쳌:
A
Poetic Etymology

As to the prehistory of this music and it’s birth, though the academicians and the historians may doubt and argue, the poetic traces are clear. In Robert Hayden’s Middle Passage, itself culled from the historical record, he gives us the following:
10 April 1800--
Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says
their moaning is a prayer for death,
our and their own. Some try to starve themselves.
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under."
You see?
Some jumped the hellish exilic ships, brewing their pestilent stew of human hopelessness and death, jumped into the raging waves, to be pulled undertow, their singing voices echoing against the towering, dark surf.
When one reads this one is awestruck with recognition: this is the moment when the music is born, prophetic, right at the very beginning of the whole infernal journey, of the half-millenia toil of an accursed race, held hostage by atrocity and hypocrisy.
Oh what an elegantly deceptive mind, steeped in mantras of gentile progress &manifest destiny is this European mind which heedlessly thinks all our thoughts still…Yet how unable to overcome the siren’s refrain of a music wed so indissolubly to the fugitive dream of life and the relief of death, of a new song thrown out to birth as the body heaves itself headlong to watery dissolution. To sing as you go down, to sing as you go under, this is the genius of this music, there from the onset.
Such deadly sincerity, birthing, on that hellish passage, the secret religion of a new age to be swaddled in blood, slavery, and betrayl, so far removed from the glittering face of the ideologies of a comatose ethnocentrism still alive in our diseased present.
As origins tell us everything, etymologies and etiologies holding the hieroglyphic sigils of destiny, this music’s genesis in this moment elegantly writes its own striking caption. The genius of a race, ripped from it’s soul, no longer able to run untamed along the edges of its native expanse, becomes the mighty Samson shorn in captivity, pushing its wronged and forbidden roots deep into this new cramped and alien space. The shiftless buoyancy and shimmying airiness of West African folk music, collapses under great pressure, falls through the floor, grows a minor hue, compresses into an enigmatic sybilline terseness -the previously winged footed soul becomes involuted and compact as sullen stone - till its dense might overthrows all falsity and self-deception. This is the how diamonds are made, the secret alchemy of pressure and strain unfurling towards the absolute and the ultimate.
Like that penultimate moment in the The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the beginning of the soul’s return, when the shade first opens its mouth to sing the mantras of its return home, this music was the awakening of the African corpse in the American underworld. Black Art would thus know itself from this moment, and would lead all other artforms in the New World like an elite phalanx rushing the lines of the enemy in the spiritual war of liberation, possessed as it was of the true recognition of the secret hidden face of this supposed utopia. It would strive to articulate the essence of human nobility and dignity against the dehumanizing abstraction of narcissistic death and solipsism.
It is in this light that we should read the oft repeated tale of the Bluesman’s demonic initiation at the crossroads…This is just a natural reawakening to the truth of the situation of bondage. All the drama and the inverted deus ex machina, is on some level code for being forced to violently reject the white Jesus, whose meek blue-eyed love was, from the very beginning, stained with the subtext of empire and psychological terrorism. Consequently, this Devil is no simple Satan, and the soul given up to retail, not a clear and open entity. All this cannot be properly understood if the whole episode is painted with the whitewash of pale Christian allegory.
What then is this Crossroads?
It is the willingness to wager, with the very primal source of Cosmic Chaos, the riddle of that evil fatally inborn into mortal life, to cast away the comfort of the small self for the sake of an awful freedom.

E.
Play
These
Keys
(Watch for the Pun)

A Call and Response with Tradition:
I’m a Gambling Man…to be sure, the House always wins, you throw the dice against the pale faced foes, spinning their distorted tale around you
I Got My Mojo Workin…Better have it rollin’ when you descend step by cursed step into the void, staring for long immensities into the heart of the cold withering abyss
Born Under a Bad Sign…When you and all your brethren are born in chains I would say decidedly so
I’m So Blue…Yes, and by singing it, we join together in an exorcism that is the necessary precursor to resurrection

Know this or falsify it:
In this music authenticity and resonance have trumped technique and bludgeoned artificial ideals of classicism or decorum.
Virtuosity cannot protect you
The love of the masses is nothing but a hall of mirrors
Once one stands at the crossroads, nothing can evade the type of self-confrontation that breeds the suicidal impulse like pestilence
You are the tightrope along which the past runs headlong into a more human future, or you are chain that suffocates the human wing.
Live or die, it does not matter, but without the sharpened sword blade of sincerity your song will wilt and wither like the vanity of empire against the gaping hunger of the untrammeled abyss…
You might burn hot for a while, but against the immensity your hollowness will rise and billow like the stench of an infant’s bowels.

E.
P.S.
A
Brief
Lesson
For the
Culture

Like some Aphrodite or Hera who they say must periodically return to bathe in such and such a body of water to remain fresh, virgin, enduring (even immortal), so it seems all music (and the culture that it sings into being) for the people in America must return to the Blues, to the Delta, in order to be baptized, to be reinvigorated, or else…fade into the slick, overproduced, prefabricated kitsch that shits out of our hypermodern souls and bleeds our urban landscape the color of plastic wrapper and consumer landfill.

Written by Solomon Slowburn. A poet, musician, and philosopher; student of mysticism, shamanism, kabbalism, poetry, and myth.
For more information on Solomon and his music visit
http://www.myspace.com/solomonslowburn