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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
February 10, 2019
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Wynton Marsalis, in his book “To A Young Jazz Musician: Letters From The Road”, talks about the philosophy of the Blues, how it both expressed and healed the lives of black people as they lived in a society which was structured to marginalize them. How do we learn from the Blues to express suffering, to face it, and to build and celebrate resilience?
Reading
THE STREET
by Ann Petry
(About Billie Holiday) Her voice had a thin thread of sadness running through it that made the song important. That made it tell a story that wasn’t in the words. A story of dispair, of loneliness, of frustration. It was a story that all of them knew by heart, that they had always known because they learned it soon after they were born and would go on adding to it until the day they died.
Sermon
Ok, what is a white woman doing talking about the blues? That’s my identity, and I put it out there right here at the beginning. I’m not a Blues expert, but I love listening to the blues, and I wanted to learn from the Blues and talk to you about what I’m learning.
It’s a cliche that ‘all blues starts “woke up this morning.” ‘ this meant more than ‘I opened my eyes in bed as the sun came up.’ Here is what the singers and the listeners, at least at the beginning of the Blues in the South, knew was the meaning of the words:
“I woke up this morning knowing that in half an hour I’ll be pushing a massive plow behind a stubborn mule or bending over to hoe weeds, and I’ll be doing that until it’s too dark to see. And tomorrow and the next day and the next day, I’ll do it again, until, most likely, I work until I die, broke, just like my parents and grandparents. But right now I’m dancing.”
The Blues talk about real life. They tell the truth, even if in coded language, and the expression is true. If, as Keats says, truth is beauty, then the Blues are beautiful. The sadness is beautiful when it’s true.
Ralph Ellison said that ‘the blues is an impulse to keep painful details and episodes of brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain.’
The blues are the voice of an oppressed and alienated people. The blues has always provided a unique way to ‘find one’s voice’ and to attest to the hardships of life in a way that draws others in rather than turning them away . Your friend might say to you “My Baby cheated on me. It has changed the way I feel about them. My love has been diminished, and I wonder whether I should break up with them, because if I do, I won’t have anyone.”
OR your friend could sing The thrill is gone
The thrill is gone away
The thrill is gone baby
The thrill is gone away
You know you done me wrong baby
And you’ll be sorry someday
The thrill is gone
It’s gone away from me
The thrill is gone baby
The thrill is gone away from me
Although, I’ll still live on
But so lonely I’ll be
The thrill is gone– BB King
The music can capture the pain of life, and the massive scale of exposure to painful trauma, loss, and adversity associated with enduring the humiliation and brutality of slavery and its transition to sharecropping. After slavery came the way its legacy was built into the culture, with Jim Crow laws, enforced through lynchings beatings and the KKK’s terrorism. Extreme poverty and harsh lives on the streets, and frequent arrest, incarceration, and the experience of prison road gangs, compounded by devastating and uprooting natural disasters (including droughts, floods, and hurricanes) perpetuated the pain.
Its musical expression followed the massive displacement of large populations from the plantations of the South to Northern cities such as Chicago, and later incorporated the experience of black soldiers returning after World War II and the Vietnam War. In this way, the blues served to hold and document memories, create a sense of community, and provide a platform to share their visceral impact with others.
Research done at Mt Sinai Hospital has shown that trauma makes changes in DNA, and this trauma, the PTSD, can be passed on through subsequent generations. These genetic changes can cause depression, differences in ways of regulating emotions, being wired to see threat and tragedy. This is what our government has set in motion by separating children from their parents on the border. The very DNA has been affected, and brains were re-wired.
The blues to create a shared narrative, a story that the system of white culture constantly tries to erase. You hear people say “We’re a nation of immigrants,” and they are lovely people, but they “forget” that 12 million African teachers, mothers, fathers, children, medicine people, farmers and merchants were captured and dragged to the Americas in chains.
About 350,000 were brought to the 13 colonies, and the rest were sold to the sugar plantations in the Carribean and Brazil. You hear politicians even today say “America was built on freedom and enterprise,” erasing the fact that the labor of enslaved men and women was a big engine of the American economy. There was even an article in Forbes Magazine a couple of years ago laying all of this out. To have the story of your people ignored and erased makes you feel crazy and angry, and the retelling of these stories can strengthen solidarity among the people, reminding them that they are being affected by these traumas, and that a lot of what happens has roots in the history that the culture around them is working hard on forgetting.
There are ongoing arguments about whether people who don’t live their lives as Black Americans can authentically sing the blues. The blues have a form, so anyone can technically play. 4/4 time, 12 measures, a blues scale. They are also an expression, though, of trauma and pain. Almost all people have trauma and pain, some say, and you express that through the blues.
“I am not maintaining that only African-Americans should be allowed to perform the blues. The point is only that blues authenticity depends upon group membership. While cultural outsiders can sing the blues, it should be understood that what is being sung in these cases is a variant of a cultural expression derived from a very different kind of experience”.
– Philip Jenkins
I was doing some learning about this last week. In my southern culture, the way we deal with bad things happening is that we ignore it or we refer to it in a vague way. And we move on. Well, there is a big lump under the rug, but we step over it. Sometimes we trip over it. “What’s wrong with Aunt Clara?” Well, she married a Catholic.” Whispered. I heard a whisper that one of my cousins had cancer, but then, when I asked about it, I got just vagueness. I’ve done this myself here, because I got here after the church had a big trauma. They had dismissed the minister, who was a controversial figure from the beginning. (I’m nervous talking about this because there are still folks here whose feelings about that time run high.) Anyway, no one was really talking about it when I got here. Being a family therapist by training, I knew talking about it needed to happen. I started calling it “The Troubles.”
This week, though, I had a couple of conversations about restorative justice, where, when a mistake happens, where damage is done, the thing that caused the damage needs to be named. You may have heard that a year ago we invited a man named Fidel to come do a program about the Water Protectors. He claimed he would bring some Native friends to do a ceremony. We did our due diligence, we checked his references, his social media, all good. Then he came, and brought an insulting and shallow program that lasted too long, and instead of Native friends to lead us through a ritual, he had a white lady who sang what sounded like fake Native songs. When some of our guests from the Indigenous community spoke up, toward the end of the thing, Fidel treated them dismissively. Harm was done to the Indigenous community and to the relationship between this congregation and the Indigenous community in Austin.
“Say the words,” the church member said to me. I told her I would think about that, but it was hard to figure out what she meant. I asked Jules what she thought that meant. She said “saying the words, naming the thing that did damage, is a way of letting everyone in the conversation know that you haven’t forgotten what happened. It lets people trust that you aren’t trying to sweep something under the rug. It is a way of bringing your history with you into conversations with people who may not be “over it” yet, who may not be ready or able to “move on.”
The Blues are about saying the words, repeating the words because repeated telling is how people process trauma. You shout and cry, confess and complain, all to a party dancing beat. You can dance and grieve, shout out your pain, all at the same time, if you want. The shouting comes from the field shouts, back and forth, singing in coded language while doing the back breaking work of hoeing or picking cotton. Talking about a mean woman taking all your money, when you really mean the boss man who is mean and takes all your money. The Blues scale has flatted notes and minor notes which express sadness, and bent notes, quarter tones, which don’t appear in Western classical music, but are all over classical African, Middle Eastern, and Asian music. The note which is not quite the note, and then resolves into what our ear was expecting, creates a tension and then a release of the tension that is part of the healing.
Saying the words, repeating the words, creating tension then relieving tension, all to a dance beat, within a structure that frees you to create within it, those are ways of healing trauma.
People from many cultures can learn from the Blues, and I think sitting at the feet of these artists, this music, can teach us. In the culture in which I was raised, it is shameful to struggle, shameful to be traumatized. We try not to speak of it, or we speak of it in whispers. Speaking your trauma in this midst of a positive life? My people don’t know how to do that.
Speak of the trauma. Speak it as many times as you need to. Put it into a structure that helps contain the sorrow, and tell your truth about it. If you can put it to a beat that lets you know you can be sorrowful and dance at the same time, that is amazing. The healing doesn’t mean the history goes away. It means you have a group of people who can listen to what happened and dance with you because you share the suffering.
What history do we in this church, and as members of the UU denomination, need to speak about and bring with us? How has the Unitarian movement and the Universalist movement attracted and then driven away so many among us who are black and brown over the past 100 years. The mix is a lot whiter now than it was years ago, and there are reasons for that. We have some work to do “Saying the words.”
“Living is a positive experience. That’s what the blues teaches you. That’s why it continues to exist. And that’s why it’s in so much music. Yeah, all of this tragic stuff happened to you, but you’re still here. And you can still express being here with style. Like laughing to keep from crying. And you keep dancing, man….
– Wynton Marsalis
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