Alone
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Maya Angelou's "Alone" is a poem that deals with togetherness by placing emphasis on being alone; quite an irony. It is a lyrical "thinking out loud,” a reflection on what it is to be a human and “out here” in the big wide world. The speaker is both certain of her thoughts on loneliness and sad to feel the way she does in her life. As “storm clouds gather,” nobody can make it alone.
Why would people embrace the blues – acknowledge universal suffering and even sing about desperation?
The history of blues music is rich and bittersweet. The genre was originally born as an expression of those suffering as American slaves, mostly in the deep South. Its roots were in various forms of African American slave songs such as field hollers, work songs, spirituals, and country string ballads. Rural music that captured the suffering, anguish-and hopes-of 300 years of slavery and tenant farming,
The blues was typically played by roaming solo musicians on acoustic guitar, piano, or harmonica at weekend parties, picnics, and juke joints. Their audience was primarily made up of agricultural laborers, who danced to the propulsive rhythms, moans, and slide guitar.
That expression is heartbreaking by nature, but healing, too. The brilliance of the blues is that by singing about what’s making you sad, you feel better.
Psychotherapist Will Meyerhofer, JD LCSW explains …
“Sadness is a recognition of impermanence. It is about accepting that life is a brief opportunity for joy. You may lodge a protest, but life remains short, and only rushes by faster the older you get.
“On the other hand, the natural human response to that set-up is to grab what’s there and enjoy it. Sadness – the memory of impermanence – intensifies your hurry to drink deep of good times. In the process, every drop tastes sweeter …
“The blues fight back. This is music that came up from African-American communities in the Deep South. Those people knew oppression – heck, they knew human slavery. But their souls were never dominated, even when their bodies might have been. The blues make good times from bad times. It summons anger from fear and sadness, and in the process defeats depression.
“That’s the true history of the blues, and African-American music, period. It’s subversive – it fights the power, stands up to the pain. It stands up proudly. The blues fights back by refusing to stay silent about the conditions the singer endures – poverty, loneliness and oppression.
(Will Meyerhofer. “Singing the blues.” thepeoplestherapist.com. October 25, 2010.)
“The most cheerful fact in man’s history is that the presentation of sadness in art, the drama, poetry, could please people, and this meant that grief was closer to happiness than people surmised. There are quite a few people listening with satisfaction to music that is sad, and also, tragedy has been enjoyed. The meaning of this is the most hopeful thing in the world.”
– Eli Siegel, Poet and Founder of Aesthetic Realism
Joe Henry, who has earned critical acclaim and three Grammy awards as both a producer and a recording artist says “it feels good when out on the ledge, to turn and dance upon it, give it our full voice.”
Henry relates …
“Contrary to popular short-hand, I don't think 'the blues' to be an expression merely of pain and sorrow, but rather of the shadowy expanse of our entire collective human experience, offered and amplified along a melodic line for easy carrying. The blues are not a mood but a lens through which we might look at anything and everything – even our victories – and thereby see them simultaneously arriving and departing … the approaching parade already gone to torn paper and burst balloons still trailing their string in sad remembrance that our dreams were once round with our breath, and so buoyant that they needed to be tied and held to the ground.”
(Joe Henry. “How to Sing the Blues.” Response. Seattle Pacific University. 2021.)
“It is only in his music [. . .] that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.”
– James Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone” in Collected Essays
Bruce Iglauer, the founder and owner of Alligator Records, one of the country’s most important independent blues labels, says the blues is “secular music that speaks of the here and now, not of heaven to come.”
“Emotionally, blues is healing music. It was designed to make oppressed people feel better. But the magic of the blues is that it isn’t just about African-Americans, but about people everywhere. Its tension-and-release form is designed to wring out the emotions, cleanse the soul, and make the audience feel whole — like gospel music, but without the religon,” Iglauer says.
He continues: “As we say in Chicago, you listen to the blues to get rid of the blues.” And, at an essential level, you need to listen to the blues to really understand the blues. No description, however poetic, can suffice.
(Bruce Iglauer. “Hearing the Blues.” Mother Jones. September/October 2003.)
Research
While the link between sad music and pleasure may seem counterintuitive, research has suggested that we do indeed enjoy experiencing expressions of sadness, likely because we are able to view it from an emotional distance. The researchers' study hints at the some of the reasons that we are driven to create. If expressing emotions, a core component of art, makes us feel good, we will be driven to do it more often. And if expressing certain emotions creates more reward, we would expect to see them represented in art more often. Maybe that’s why it seems like every American Idol contestant ever has sung “Hallelujah.”
The first comprehensive survey of music-evoked sadness, revealed that listening to sad music can lead to beneficial emotional effects such as regulation of negative emotion and mood as well as consolation. Such beneficial emotional effects constitute the prime motivations for engaging with sad music in everyday life.
In another study published in the open-access journal Scientific Reports (2016), a team of researchers from the University of California-San Francisco used fMRI to examine the brains of 11 jazz musicians as they improvised music. The musicians were shown a picture of both a smiling and distressed woman, and asked to play music that matched the feelings in the picture shown. The researchers found that expressing sadness activated the reward center of the brain, while playing happy music did not. Paradoxically, it seems that expressing sadness makes a musician feel good.
Consistent with previous studies, the researchers found that improvising music shut off a region of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is a part of the brain used to control abstract reasoning and executive decision-making. This part of the brain seems to allow a musician to better enter a “flow-state,” or a state of total immersion in the music.
(M. McPherson, F. Barrett, M. Lopez-Gonzalez, M. et al. “Emotional Intent Modulates The Neural Substrates Of Creativity: An fMRI Study of Emotionally Targeted Improvisation in Jazz Musicians.” Sci Rep 6, 18460. 2016.)
Listening To the Blues
No blog entry or essay or description can explain the blues or heal sadness and depression. However, music does undoubtedly have restorative power. In order to experience the healthful benefits of the sounds, you must be exposed to the music. The blues stands up against pain and even let's you stand defiantly on the precipice of depression.
However …
You must listen to the music.
You must play the seminal recordings of Robert Johnson, Son House, and Leadbelly;
Play the classics of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B. King. T-Bone Walker, Buddy Guy, Elmore James, and Sonny Boy Williamson;
Play contemporaries like Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Peter Green, and Paul Butterfield; and
Play the newer artists like Gary Clark Jr., Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Shemekia Copeland, and Joe Bonamassa.
By looking throughout the history of music, we understand the desire in humanity to relate pain and pleasure – both the somber and the celebratory. The philosophy of Aesthetic Realism, founded by the 20th century critic and poet Eli Siegel. explains “the deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.”
Aesthetic Realism states that ethics begins with the human obligation to see everything, living and not living, as well as one can. Where we get away from this obligation or don’t see it, or diminish its meaning, it is rather clear that contempt is showing its strength.
Alan Shapiro – Aesthetic Realism Associate, jazz pianist, and music educator – writes that the blues shows how deep that desire with honesty is. In this music, people have shown that some of their saddest feelings can make for beauty.
Shaprio relates: “Eli Siegel lectured on all the arts and sciences, and wrote as early as 1925 about jazz as having beauty continuous with beauty anywhere. In one lecture, he said, 'The blues style represents . . . a saying of things that are very painful, deep and poignant, with a feeling of ease. In the very best blues the pain changes, because of the music, into something light.'”
(Alan Shapiro. “Why Do the Blues Make Us Feel So Good?” Paper presented at the International Conference on the Blues, Delta State University, Cleveland MS. October 6, 2014.)
By listening to the blues, we take our sadness, pain, and disappointment and use them to see more meaning in things and people. Do we use them to be kinder? Or do we use them to feel the whole world is bad, and to retreat from or lash out at other people?
This, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the central fight in the mind of every person between the desire to like and respect the world, and the desire for contempt, which Eli Siegel defined as the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”
“Every depressed person hates the world that bumps into her on the street, the world and its people that keep coming at her at distasteful angles. Yet an essential in the technique of the blues is good will for the bump and the distasteful angle. …[The] blue note, … an awry sound when one doesn’t expect it, says that the jarring is your friend.”
– Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education
Dear reader, if like the speaker in Maya Angelou's “Alone,” you ever feel forlorn, and you need to “find your soul a home,” I suggest you explore the blues. With modern technology – YouTube, Amazon, and numerous other download sites – the music is at your fingertips. Delta blues, country blues, Chicago blues, and much more – it's all there.
Also, may I suggest watching a great PBS documentary by Martin Scorsese as both a primer and a history lesson. The Blues™ anchors a multi-media celebration that raises awareness of the music and its contribution to American culture and music worldwide.
The seven-part film series includes:
“Feel Like Going
Home” by Martin Scorsese
“The Soul of a Man” by Wim
Wenders
“The Road to Memphis” by Richard Pearce
“Warming
by the Devil's Fire” by Charles Burnett
“Godfathers and Sons”
by Marc Levin
“Red, White & Blues” by Mike Figgis
“Piano
Blues” by Clint Eastwood
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