The Blues for a Dark Time
We are knee-deep in concern about Covid-19, and understandably so.
We lead the world in confirmed cases and deaths at 1.5 million and 94,729, respectively.[1] Too many of our hospitals are home for overworked professionals, while thousands of family members are unable to kiss the cheek of a mother, father, child, or friend because of a quarantine policy. The elderly in assisted living and skilled nursing facilities experience even greater challenges. Yet, our healthcare systems tell only a portion of the trauma.
Our K-12 school playgrounds are laughter-free because more than 50 million students are absent. Postsecondary institutions from Harvard University to Howard University, and the University of Virginia to the University of California, have closed in-person classroom meetings and sporting events. Online learning is the new normal, although implementation of it is not without seismic challenges. At the same time, college seniors and professional school graduates see bleak job opportunities on the horizon.
Our free market system is challenged as well. Small business owners bury their teary faces in a mountain of piling debt, while more than 38 million people have filed for unemployment insurance. Naturally, the poor and working class bear the heaviest crosses for this economic crisis, but our middle class feels the impact too. And as lawmakers and bankers talk about a recession, the air we breathe is heavy with fear.
So where do we go from here?
In every season of darkness, some people dive deep within for solutions to enduring questions regarding the meaning of life. Some search for answers in the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Followers of faith traditions established during the Axial Age do the same. So do devotees to Wicca and neo-paganism.
In every season of darkness, some people search outside themselves for answers. Literature is one source. The Plague by Albert Camus and The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni are gaining popularity. So are books about the Black Death in Europe, or the role disease played in the decline of Rome.
And while we peek across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in search of the rational, the urbane, or the credentialed medium to reassert our dignity through storytelling in troubling times, let’s not turn our backs on homegrown assets birthed on this soil.
One overlooked source is called the blues.
The inventors of the blues are a stubborn people. They were born during epidemics of cholera, small pox, yellow fever, the influenza flu of 1918–19, and pneumonia from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. They also raised their families during man-made pandemics of their day, including laws that created a social distancing policy called segregation. Although different from our current experiment, blues people utilized the unpleasantness of being quarantined to speak, sing, and write about anxiety, isolation, love and loss, joblessness, death and dying — all eerily at play today. Through it all, a fissure for hopefulness remains ever-present through some of those songs.
Naturally the blues created an aesthetic of Black life, owing its inspiration to the field holler, agricultural work songs, and spirituals in the American South. With the passage of time, people living in the North and West, in Europe and South America, and beyond incorporated the blues into their lives, literature, and social networks — not just their music.
Blues music is important to a moment like this because it provides a trustworthy technology to humanize the trials and tribulations of late modern society. It does so by allowing anyone, anywhere to look beyond the anthropological construction of “human beings” to see the phenomenon of “humans” being — neighborly and nihilistic, free and bound, ecumenical and egotistical, prophetic and pathetic. And the beat goes on. Through a blues-infused reality check, we gain permission to reimagine the meaning of life, and being human in it — today, tomorrow, and in a post-pandemic world to come.
To be clear, blues music is not a cure for Covid-19. Some of us will find this sickness is unto death. Others will survive. Either way, as our hurting humanity stands at the crossroads in this dark time, the blues may be just what we need.[2]
[1] According to the Covid-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University on May 22, 2020: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.
[2] I offer condolences to everyone who has lost someone to Covid-19, and prayers for people sick from it as well as people in recovery. I also offer thanks to public and private sector workers trying to bring sanity to this moment. As for this article, I simply offer my thoughts about the semiotics of the time: nothing more, nothing less.
