The blues: Powerful music for Black Liberation
By
Larry Hales
Published Feb 9, 2006 9:10 PM
In the classic book, Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B.
Dubois relates a story about the origin of the song “Nobody Knows the
Trouble I’ve Seen.” The story goes that, when a certain brigadier
general was assigned to the Sea Islands on the Atlantic coast, upon telling the
Black inhabitants that they were going to be denied the land they and their
ancestors had long cultivated while suffering under the lash of brutal slave
masters, the Black women began to sing this song that has been a staple in Black
musical culture since then.
Blues music was born with the field hollers
and work songs. However, shortly after slavery was abolished, there was a sense
that justice long delayed would bust U.S. society at its seams. There were 4
million Black people in the country and that power could not be denied, nor held
under foot any longer.
To understand what led to the Civil War and shortly
afterwards would take a great deal more investigation than what is taught and
upheld as fact. The truth is the abolishment of slavery was the beginning of a
revolutionary process that was carried out by Northern capitalists and their
Republican Party, and a small faction of Northern Democrats that split from the
Democratic Party. Yes, the Democratic Party was then the party of
slavery.
Slavery was a boon for the landed aristocracy in the South. The
cruel Southern “aristocrat” slave owners were not only despised by
those enslaved and the abolitionists, but as well by white farmers in the north
that had to compete with the large plantations in the south worked by unpaid
labor.
Also, the Northern finance capitalists wanted to break up the
semi-feudal conditions in the South, not out of moral compassion for those once
enslaved, but out of need for cheap Black labor, for arable land, and for
international trade. World commerce had earlier dealt in the buying and selling
of human beings, resulting in robbing the African continent, decimating whole
tribes, raping and pillaging, making African peoples the world’s largest
diaspora.
Arizona youth chain gang.
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Racism, exploitation = the blues
Karl Marx called
the commerce that laid the foundation for the Western European and North
American capitalists the primitive accumulation of capital. It was primitive
because of the cruel, inhumane, barbaric lengths gone to for the foundation of
the countries’ profit systems.
The importation of slaves to North
America was made illegal in 1808. The slave masters were becoming so rich and
were thirsty for slave labor, that if allowed, they would have extended slavery
and hastened their own demise and a Black revolution on the soil that was stolen
from Native peoples. It should not be lost to history that the Haitian
Revolution was victorious four years earlier, beating the Napol eonic army that
was the scourge of Europe and establishing the Western hemisphere’s first
Black republic. And, in addition, the Haiti rebellions threatened to spill over
and inspire poor whites and Native peoples on the U.S. mainland.
After
the Civil War, when the evils of chattel slavery ended, a new form of slavery
began for Blacks. During Recon struc tion it seemed that a genuine
revolutionary pro cess was underway. But the Northern Repub licans joined with
the old Confederates, much as the Allied capitalists joined with former Nazis
after World War II in a bloc against the Soviet Union. Northern troops were
pulled from the South and the promise of Reconstruction was overthrown, and the
rise of the KKK began, with peonage laws and sharecropping that were both a part
of de-facto slavery. Also, Jim Crow, a most despicable child, was born of this
era.
Hence, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” and
the blues music from Black people, of which Alan Lomax wrote, “…But
it was the Black African, highly rhythmic, collective and improvisatory approach
to music-making that clearly sparked most new developments.” He was
talking about musical developments, but culture is a reflection of human
movements and what is happening at that particular time in history.
Lomax
collected many blues traditions—from the hellish conditions in prisons
like Parch man Farm in Missis sippi, and Angola in Louisiana, and in the Delta
region. Prisoners on chain gangs—the brutal work crews of prisoners that
produced huge financial gain and are being seen again today with the booming
prison industrial complex—many of whom, criminalized for being poor, sang
work songs. One of the songs Lomax recorded in 1947 was “The Murderous
Home” at Parchman Farm. The song starts, “I ain’t got long, I
ain’t got long in the murderous home… Lord, I got a long holdover
and I can’t go free.”
It was in a prison where Leadbelly, a
blues great, emerged and later went on to lament “Bourgeois Blues.”
Another famous blues song is Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,”
which tells of seeing a lynching when she was touring down South, where the
terror of the KKK was an everyday occurrence. The realities of Black life in the
racist South led to Willie King and the Liberators to pen and produce the song
“Terrorized” in 2003. In “Terrorized,” King, an older
Black man from Mississippi, shows the hypocrisy of the current so-called
“war on terror.” He laments, “You talk about terror/I say you
talk about terror/I’ve been terrorized all my days/you know they hung me
from a tall oak tree/they castrated me/did anything they wanted to do/I say you
talk about terror/people I’ve been terrorized all my
days.”
Sources: High Tech, Low Pay—Sam Marcy; Market
Elections—Vince Copeland; The Souls of Black Folks—W.E.B. Dubois;
The Debt—Randall Robinson; Peoples History of the United
States—Howard Zinn; signifying, sancifyin, & slam dunking—edited
by Gena Dagel Caponi; The Klan and the Govern ment: Allies or Foes—Sam
Marcy; Wage, Labor and Capitol—Karl Marx; Value, Price and
Profit—Karl Marx; A Musical Journey from the Georgia Sea Islands to the
Mississippi Delta—Alan Lomax.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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