Even Cowgirls Sing The Blues
It could be argued that pop music became a global phenomenon in the sixties through icons like Elvis, with his sexy, swivelling snake-hips broadcast on screens all over the world; breaking into living rooms, and hypnotising millions into questioning taboo and experiencing temptation. But Presley inherited a musical legacy which belongs to the dispossessed, dislocated and disenfranchised, which he never credited or acknowledged in his rise to global fame. This is acknowledged by two of the greatest all-time political rappers;
‘Elvis was a hero to most,
but he never meant shit to me.
Straight up racist the sucker was, simple and plain;
fuck him and John Wayne’.
- Public Enemy, Fight The Power
‘Elvis Presley ain’t got no soul. Jimi Hendrix is rock and roll.’
- Mos’ Def, Rock & Roll
In his call to arms album Black on Both Sides, Mos’ Def tells us that all popular music was stolen by white people and originally derived from the experience of slaves, personified in the blues. Spiritual songs gave birth to the blues, which in turn gave birth to rock and roll, and indeed all Western pop.
The melancholy strains at the heart of blues are also found elsewhere on the musical spectrum. In Indian ragas are longing prayers to dawn and dusk. Sweet, painful renditions of passion, and her twin grief, are characterised by the expression of duende in Flamenco and saudade in Portuguese fado music.
These lilting litanies are made sweeter when they cross the ocean to the Portuguese colony of Brazil. There, melodies are warmed by the Brazilian sun, and made into songs like ‘The Girl From Ipanema’; sexy, sweet, and swaying to sunlit rhythms, yet somehow still embroidered with longing and loss.
We find a different form of melancholy in the berimbau of capoeira. The berimbau is a single-string instrument which is plucked to create a hypnotic pulse. Its song accompanies capoeira, a dance developed by African slaves in Brazil. They used the form to work out in a playful and graceful way (as perhaps only Brazilians can do), but capoiera is also practised as a form of martial art, whose roots lie in developing combat skills in preparation for emancipation from Portuguese colonial overlords. Capoeira is more of a dance than a fight; languid and graceful, capoeiristas swirl like liquid to the rhythmic, staccato song of the berimbau.
Meanwhile, further north in the Americas, the children of African slaves were composing their own songs whilst plucking instruments (guitar and berimbau both share African cousins like the kora). These songs, from Texas to Tennessee, were also melancholy, filled with grief at displacement and loss. They developed into a genre we call the blues. As radio developed, the songs of John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters spread across America like wildfire. These songs of immigrants and experience informed later politics; Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye all invoked a cat-like capoeirista’s grace in the face of inequality. You might argue they all sang the blues, born of African spirituals; ancient songs which spoke of nature, the nature of power, and triumph in the face of adversity.
The history of Western music is underpinned by these blues; these graceful poems of emancipation and struggle. Mos Def and Chuck D angrily attack Elvis for what they see as stealing; cultural appropriation at its purest, further rubbing salt into the deep, unacknowledged humiliation of slavery by stealing a musical form, and turning that form into politically vapid entertainment for the unwashed masses.
Can white Americans ever sing the blues, if the blues was a form of protest against them?
Yes. Leonard Cohen. Captain Beefheart. Tom Waits. Nick Cave. Lou Reed. Dr John. Bob Dylan. John Lennon. Bill Callahan. Billy Eilish. All of them house their pain in musical chords derived directly from the blues, and it sounds good. They are also smart enough to acknowledge and explore the politics of privilege in their songs.
Eminem also explores the same ground in his lyrics. His art form, hip hop, is New York’s greatest invention, and grandchild of the blues. Seeded in the seventies in a destitute city, hip hop flowered globally in the eighties as political protest music, which — like the blues — was a direct product of disenfranchisement.
Hip hop has blossomed ever since in a phenomenon which spans Erykah Badu, Beyonce and Beck; Basquiat, Blondie and Beastie Boys; Busta Rhymes, Biggie Smalls and Britney Spears for starters. All are poets, capable of embodying melancholy within their song writing, alongside songs of protest and celebration; songs of immigrants; songs which articulate the experience of discrimination and dislocation. All of them sing the blues. All of them sing songs which were born in Africa, and became remixed through loss and migration, servitude and colonisation. Yes! Even Britney, in my opinion! Even that cowgirl can sing the blues!
