Aleksandra Siemieniuk

Mississippi i okolice

O tym dlaczego większość bluesów brzmi tak samo

Muzyka, R. L, 2005, nr 4 (199)

Wszystkie sugerują któryś z poniższych stanów: samotność, borykanie się z problemami albo „pozostawanie w ciemności”. Jeżeli przyjrzymy się zamieszczonym poniżej wypowiedziom wykonawców zaliczanych do spadkobierców bluesowej tradycji, zauważymy, jak dużą wagę przy opisie zjawiska nadają oni sferze emocjonalnej. Okazuje się, że „blues” bliski jest codzienności i ma swoje źródło w uniwersalnych problemach:

Well, your girl friend, yeah, and then you think about the way things is goin’, so difficult. I mean, nothin’ work right, when you work hard all day, always broke. And when you get off the tractor, nowhere to go, nothin’ to do. Just sit up and think, and think about all that has happened how things goin’. That’s real difficult. And so, why every time you feel lonely you gets that strange feelin’ come up here from nowhere… That’s when the blues pops up… The way I feel it’s somethin’ that is just as deep as it can go… Because the blues hurt you so bad. And you get hot and you find you workin’ and ain’t makin’ nothin’. Half of the time hungry, and when you get the blues on top of that and you get to thinkin’ about where can you go, or what can you do for to change. And there is no change. That’s when the blues gets you. When there’s nothin’ else to do but what you doin’… and sing the blues… It’s a feeling that it’s hard to do anything about: it’s hard to know which way to go, what to do, the blues.

(Robert Curtis Smith)

What gives me the blues?… Unlucky in love for one, and hard to make a success in two; and when a man have a family and it’s hard to survive for.

(Little Eddie Kirkland)

It’s somewhere down the line that you have been hurt some place… It’s not only what happened to you – it’s what happened to you fore parents and other people.

(John Lee Hooker)

Blues is a person who went in trouble and feeled depressed, something worrying him, been mistreated by someone in one way or another. And there’s a happy feeling of the blues. Play the blues with a good feeling, it makes you feel good. Blues is an emotion, you see, of many different feelings. So it’s called ‘individual trouble’. So you can’t know how a man feel. Every individual has an own feeling. He tries to bring it out in his songs, some happy or some blues.

(Roosevelt Sykes)

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