I regret not being able to repost it in its entirety

Azizi, you can-- as long as it's music info it's fine to insert long paste-jobs, per the Mudcat FAQ.

Instead of the usual convention of italicizing a long quoted paste, I'm using the blockquote HTML command to indicate the quoted full version of the article. (Because it's so long and so relevant as music info, and because I think it will get a lot of reading.)

~Susan

BODYMATTERS
Blind Boy Blues
28 June 2002
by Michael Stephens
PopMatters Music Columns Editor


How does our appreciation of music relate to bodily awareness? This question would take deeper thinkers than I and many volumes to answer, but a simple example might be the association that I made in my teens — when music hit me first and hardest — between blues and the pain that I projected on early blues artists. The suffering I imagined the old blues people enduring was so vivid and profound that it seemed right that it would somehow mark them bodily.

The lives of the early blues singers were full of many forms of social, psychological and spiritual pain — imprisonment, violence, tragedy, addiction, madness and a sense of damnation — but the pain of the blues manifested itself most identifiably for me in the blindness that afflicted many early blues singers; Blind Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Blind Willie Johnson. Blindness seemed as much a part of the blues as lonesome freight trains. But blindness was not just a lyrical motif: it marked the bodies of blues artists like a sign indicating the authentic presence of "the blues".

I first discovered roots blues and gospel in my late teens, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. At that time, I had never met a black person and rarely seen one in the flesh. As I listened to Son House and Robert Johnson, I bridged the cultural chasm that divided me from these legendary black men with fantasies and projections. Myths like the one about Robert Johnson's pact with the devil enhanced the mystery of those crackly old recordings, but the musicians' names and the basic facts of their lives — playing Mississippi juke joints, drinking white lightning, riding freight trains — were more exotic to me than any voodoo jive. Hambone Willie Newburn and Peetie Wheatstraw (The Devil's Only Son in Law) didn't need their mystique enhanced. To me the old blues men were in themselves as magical as unicorns.

I extrapolated the landscapes of 1930s Mississippi and Georgia from the 1890s Mississippi of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. It was through this imaginary countryside that my blues heroes wandered. "Leaving this morning if I have to go ride the blind, I been mistreated and I don't mind dyin'". Beyond the power of the music itself, what attracted me most to early blues, were the terrible social and cultural injustices that the artists endured. The pain of the blues was exaggerated in my teenage mind to cosmic proportions: it reflected the ignorance and unfairness of a world in which gods like Blind Willie McTell and Blind Willie Johnson were allowed to live and die unrecognized. The cruelly undervalued talents and hard lives of the early blues artists helped to focus and validate my rage at the puny injustices of my life.

Blind blues singers most perfectly embodied my image of the blues-singer-as-saintly-martyr. Blindness was the visible stigmata, the bodily proof of suffering, the ultimate hard-knock credential identifying the true blues artist. The idea of Blind Willie McTell — musical hero of Bob Dylan, Duane Allman and countless others — singing for his living on Depression-era street corners and wandering the world in darkness was an image of terminal alienation that, for me, surpassed anything in Western art. In comparison to Blind Willie, Kafka's heroes were spoiled brats, and successful, sighted blues artists like B.B. King were showbiz phonies with about as much blues power as Liberace.

The blind, Depression-era blues artists were the blues. Everyone else was fake. By my logic, however, if Blind Willie had received his just rewards as an artist, his music would have lost its authenticity. My blues men had to suffer. Without the proof that their lives offered that the world was cruel and unfair, what would they (and I) have to be blue about?

In the tragic kingdom that I made of the early blues, Blind Willie Johnson reigned supreme. The cruelty of Willie Johnson's life was as extreme as anything in Grimms' fairy tales. His mother died when he was an infant and his father married a woman who had so little patience with children that she threw a cauldron of boiling lye in young Willie's face, blinding him for life. Like many blind black children in the 1930s, Willie Johnson took the only career path that was open to him: he became an itinerant musician. He played on the streets all his life and died of pneumonia after sleeping on wet newspapers in a burned out building.

Willie Johnson's voice is unlike anything in twentieth century music: a hoarse, rough, brackish sound, shrouded in darkness and shot through with dazzling flashes of tenderness and love. Despite his near-perfect qualifications as a blues man, Johnson chose to sing gospel. Unlike Willie McTell, who shaped his repertoire to his audience and sang blues in the juke joints and gospel in the churches, Willie Johnson sang only gospel music.

Blind Willie's gospel is, nonetheless, as blue as any sanctified music has ever been. "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground" is, according to your point of view, either the greatest piece of music recorded in the twentieth century or three minutes of incomprehensible moaning over acoustic slide guitar. Either way, there is nothing else in the history of African-American music remotely like it. The song's lyric, "Dark was the night, Cold was the ground, When they laid my Savior down", imagines the mourners at Christ's tomb. Johnson's version abandons the lyric entirely for a wordless, grieving moan that cannot be described or explained, only heard. It is hard to imagine that the "darkness" Willie evokes on this song was not drawn from the permanent night of his own blindness.

On "If I Had My Way, I'd Tear That Building Down", Johnson speaks as the Old Testament hero Samson, a blind man asking God to give him the strength to destroy the civilization that has enslaved him. The rage Johnson expresses in "If I Had My Way" and the equally apocalyptic "Jesus Coming Soon" is barely repressed on more melancholy songs like "Motherless Children Have A Hard Time" and "Lord I Just Can't Keep From Crying". In these songs, Johnson dramatizes his anger, loss and despair — emotions that are rarely expressed so nakedly in gospel music — in lyrics that are often as bitter and cutting as anything in the blues. Yet the raw honesty of these flights of emotional darkness serves a spiritual purpose: it helps non believers and believers alike to identify with Johnson's ultimate, unshakable affirmation of spiritual light in songs like, "Let Your Light Shine on Me", "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning", and the transcendent, "God Don't Ever Change".

The emotions I projected on Willie Johnson and the other blind blues men in my teens were undoubtedly forms of inverted racism. My attitudes to my heroes were patronizing and demeaning. I made them receptacles of my self-pity. My supposed sympathy for the blues men also set me on a pedestal from which I could look down on them and their misfortunes. Like the narrator of Raymond Carver's Cathedral, my youthful attitudes to the blind reveal everything about my own blindness and nothing about theirs.

Yet my love for the music of Blind Willie Johnson and Blind Willie McTell was real. My projections, racist and patronizing though they may have been, were also attempts to identify with a culture outside of my own for reasons that extend beyond race into historical and cultural context. A black American kid today might have just as much trouble identifying with Blind Willie Johnson and his world as a white Irish kid had in the 1970s.

My focus on the blindness of the early blues singers was more than just a way to channel and validate my teenage angst; it was also a connection to an era and a culture that was otherwise utterly foreign to me. Blindness is a universal minority experience. The racial experience of African Americans could never have meant anything more to me than the legendary trials and tribulations of a foreign people in a faraway land, but I had an uncle who was blind. I knew nothing of the pain of blindness, but I had spoken to and hung out with a blind person. Blind Willie Johnson's blindness was more or less the same as my uncle's. I couldn't go to 1930s Mississippi, but I could close my eyes and imagine what it was like to be blind. It was a start.