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The blues: Powerful music for Black Liberation

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.


Bessie Smith

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.


Billie Holliday

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.

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.