No More Singing the Job Loss Blues

For a time, life did not move particularly kindly for Rateliff and his friends. When he was 22, Pope was diagnosed with cancer. And another friend moved in, too — we shared a bed. Nobody was getting laid. It was, he recalls, an extremely hard time. But it lies in his demeanour, too, as if there is something kindly, sweetly impassable about him. He talks with a brightness and a lyricism about many things: There have, of course, been tough and disappointing times in his career, too.

When Born in the Flood ended, Rateliff began a solo career, releasing the acclaimed In Memory of Loss in and touring extensively. The songs were a shift away from his earlier sound — gentler, more folk-based and intimate. He laughs at himself, at the rarefied woes of the jaded musician, and reminds himself that he was fortunate enough to be touring the world.

I wanted to come home. I wanted to be able to be next to my wife. A follow-up album, Falling Faster Than You Can Run , took its time to find a label, and eventually Rateliff chose to self-release in the autumn of , by which time he had already begun work on new material that felt tangibly different to the songs he had written before — larger and more soulful. I love to dance and I love the way those songs make me feel. The next thing he knew, he was singing along to what he played. That night, he lay in bed and thought about the new song.

I got up out of bed and I wrote that and recorded it the next day. For a long time, Rateliff loathed singing in public. Even in the early days of Born in the Flood, it was Pope who took lead vocals — Rateliff hanging back, hiding behind his guitar. In his solo material, too, his voice seems restrained, a little mannered; shaped into something suited to the mood of , he performed on those solo shows near-static, standing solid and impenetrable behind the microphone.

So to hear Rateliff now — to see him shake the rafters of the Lexington in London this summer, to stun an unwitting crowd at Latitude , to take to the stage at his neighbourhood bar in downtown Denver and leave the room quaking, delighted and delirious — is to feel as if you are meeting someone new. Bought me a coffee grinder, got the best one I could find Bought me a coffee grinder, got the best one I could find So he could grind my coffee cause he has a new grind.

The origins of signifying lie in the antebellum South, when enslaved African Americans had a pressing need to communicate sensitive information with each other in public spaces on the plantation—an impending escape attempt, for example—in a way that evaded detection by the master.

How Nathaniel Rateliff grew up believing in God and wound up believing in soul

No longer did the slavemaster have the right to select your mate and keep you down on the farm. The blues lyric tradition signifies endlessly on this point. What is the blues ethos and why does it matter? Like blues expressiveness, the blues ethos is several related things, not just one thing. When most people offer definitions of the blues, they tend to neglect the blues ethos. My first exposure to the blues ethos came long before I had encountered the concept by name.

In , shortly after I began playing harmonica on the streets of Harlem with a Mississippi-born guitarist known as Mr. Satan, one of his sidewalk fans told me that his real name was Sterling Magee. When I expressed curiosity about the name-change, a story soon emerged. He stayed right by her bedside, nursing her. When she died, he fell off the deep end. He dragged himself back home to Mississippi, drunk and inconsolable; months later, when he returned to Harlem, he was calling himself by the new name and demanding that everybody else do the same.

That was five years before I had come along. Satan I knew was the opposite of despairing: How—knowing what I knew of his own encounter not just with romantic tragedy but with death—could I not put aside my self-pity and get back to the business of living? That was my baptism into the blues ethos: I had not yet encountered the writings of Albert Murray or Kalamu ya Salaam, but the experience helped me appreciate their insights when I finally did. And a certain kind of reality-based, fantasy-assisted humor, according to Salaam, is a tool with which blues people have managed to enable such persistence.

This grace includes, but is not overcome by, a profound recognition of the economic inequality and political racism of America. Thus, we laugh loud and heartily when every rational expectation suggests we should be crying in despair. The combination of exaggeration and conscious recognition of the brutal facts of life is the basis for the humor of blues people, which is real black humor.

How should you deal with bad news? They complain, to be sure, but they do so in a context that facilitates a spirit of creative resistance. The blues ethos acknowledges the power generated when emotional pain is annealed with a self-mockery that wards off descent into outright, immobilizing depression. Spiritual toughness is part of the blues ethos.

Even when you give up, do so only as long as you need to.

Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos

Then pick yourself up and get cracking. To do so bespeaks spiritual immaturity: The long arc of black history, bringing African slaves to Jamestown in and an African American President to the White House in , energizes both poles of the dialectic. When all else fails, insists the blues ethos, look down that road. Take the long view. Give your luck a chance to change.

50 greatest traditional blues songs

Several months earlier, Bill had had a minor stroke and lost ninety percent of his vision. Yet his spirits were undimmed, even ebullient. I stayed there for a week, played a few pickup gigs, and made enough money to get back to Chicago. Bill could have retreated his hotel room in shock.

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• locations not for the faint hearted?

He could have drowned in his own fury and self-pity, flailing helplessly. But his response to the sudden appearance of blues conditions—loss of a job and housing, incipient poverty, sudden stranding a long way from home—was to remain loose and forward-looking rather than giving in to shame, fear, and despair. He got out on the road and started walking.

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He gave the world a chance to rectify the situation. That sort of quick reversal rarely happens, of course. But it is guaranteed not to happen unless you put yourself in a position where it can happen. The blues ethos knows all this. Those who embody the blues ethos have the wisdom and resilience, the strength of character, to respond to bad luck by setting transformative possibilities in motion.

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• Shemekia Copeland: The Joy Of Singing Blues;
• Blues Expressiveness and the Blues Ethos.
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I came to a deeper understanding of the blues ethos after Mr. Satan and I left the streets of Harlem in the early s and began to tour, putting in some serious road-miles. He was a feelingful man, but an unsentimental one, disinclined to coddle or be coddled. One night when I picked him up at his apartment for a downtown gig, he had a bloody bandage wrapped around his hand. Any other guitar player would have canceled the gig. He played the five-hour gig, wincing occasionally but never complaining.

The blues ethos in action. It put things in perspective. It reframed them in a useful way. Several summers ago I drew on the blues ethos in a way that showed me the practical efficacy of the concept. With the help of some friends, I had organized a weeklong one-man-band tour that was going to take me from Oxford, Mississippi, up through Columbia, Missouri, to Mankato and St. Paul, Minnesota, back through Chicago, and then home. Two club dates, a festival, and a guest slot in a blues harmonica workshop.

Decent money and some professional recognition on my own terms, not as part of a duo. Two thousand miles, there and back. The night before I was supposed to take off, I came down with a fever. I sat there on the sofa at 7: I thought about the young harp guys who had helped set up those two gigs, each of whom was opening for me, and asked myself whether my fever could justify disappointing them. Then I thought back, suddenly, to a tour that Mr. Satan and I had taken in —a trip to Australia, our first. You want to play this music? I sat on the sofa, thinking about all this. Then, for no good reason, something inside me reached down and anchored itself in a layer of cussedness lurking just below the feverish negativity.

If you have to, you can cancel the rest of the tour first thing tomorrow and drive home. Too many people worked too hard to let that happen. Thinking about others, reorienting myself toward the blues community, was a part of the cure. But sheer toughness of spirit, a decision to move forward anyway , regardless of how I felt, was also required. As it turned out, everything worked out.

I bought the new tires and rolled north; the fever gradually subsided. By the time I hung a left past St. Louis, late that afternoon, I was fine. The tour went off as planned. Buddhists talk about the difference between pain and suffering. Pain, they teach, is an inevitable part of embodied life.

Suffering, however, is a mental construct—all the feelings of disappointment, negativity, apprehension, and despair with which we routinely surround, and heighten, pain. Blues songs traffic in suffering. See it, say it, sing it, share it. Get it out, by all means. Use harsh humor—near-tragic, near-comic—to kick it away. Use stoic persistence to get past it. A member of the University of Mississippi faculty since , his teaching and research interests include American and African American literature; blues, country, and other southern musics; the pastoral South; Freedom Summer; and the shaping role of race on southern culture.

He has published five books: The Devil and the Blues Tradition. The repetition-with-variation-as-intensification dynamic, so crucial to the language and formal structure of the blues, is one that feels uncannily familiar to those who have suffered on the field of battle that is failed love: Jitterbugging in a juke joint on a Saturday afternoon, Clarksdale, Mississippi, Johnson, Bessie Smith sings of being deserted by a new lover, celebrating with vivid suggestiveness his hip-powered prowess and endurance: Jitterbugging in a juke joint on a Saturday evening, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, He was grinning now.

Posted March 22, Vintage Classics, , Signet Books, , Skip James and the Blues Chicago: Chicago Review Press, , 34— Gerhard Kubik, Africa and the Blues Jackson: Handy, Father of the Blues ; repr. Da Capo, , Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: Harvard University Press, Temple University Press, Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues ; repr.

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men ; repr.