The “Sorrow Songs” and the Delta Blues
Mr. Wood’s Juke Joint, Original Art by Jerry Wennstrom
Music has a way of bringing us together, rooting us in the present moment while tapping an ancient history. You know your music because it lives in the body, waiting to hear itself on the wind. And when you find it there is a joining with community, a connection that is visceral.
John Lee Hooker, Photo by Jean-Luc Ourlin
Blues is my music. Maybe because it was born in the South or because of the humanity at its core. But mainly because it makes me want to dance. Sets my foot to tapping, my shoulders to shimmying. It enlivens me, body and soul.
Louise, one of the characters in Faith’s Reckoning, explains “… I feel indebted to the blues. It saved my life when I thought my losses would drown me. And when you think of where the blues came from, the sorrow songs of the slaves…. You begin to understand to whom we are indebted.”
W.E.B. Du Bois starts every chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with an excerpt from the Sorrow Songs. He begins the last chapter about those songs with this:
“They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men.”
Son House by Père Ubu
He writes about how familiar they felt when he first heard them.
Over time these songs evolved into the folktales so carefully chronicled by Zora Neale Hurston, into the gospel music of churches and the Delta blues that filled the juke joints up and down the blues highway. Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Son House, Furry Lewis, Mississipppi John Hurt, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Keb’ Mo’, Rory Block…. The list of such immense talent is too long to include here. The sounds found new expression in Jazz and Country.
This musical legacy is one of the richest cultural gifts our country has to offer to the world. I’ll close with Mr. Du Bois, who says it best.
“Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1903. The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches. Chicago, A. G. McClurg. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.
Credits:
Mr. Woods’ Juke Joint Original Art by Jerry Wennstrom, from A Second Wind: Art Resurrected, 2021, permission from Jerry Wennstrom
John Lee Hooker, Massey Hall, Toronto, Aug. 20, 1978 Photo by Jean-Luc Ourlin, CC BY-SA 2.0 license
Son House Photo by Père Ubu, CC BY-NC 2.0 licens