The Blues Tradition of Explanation.pdf
are the desires, repressions, investments, and projections circulating within
that culture which weigh upon the imagination and logic of the individual.
This approach allows the combined evaluation of social science, humanities,
and policy studies in terms of their relationship to regional power structures.
Briefly reviewed below are examples of the ways in which some regional
blocs define themselves, the region, its history, and the "other." First, Benedict
Anderson suggests that blocs make investments in creating "imagined communities" which command emotional legitimacy. These communities are not
coterminous with humankind or even with all segments of a region. They are,
however, bound by deep horizontal networks of kinship, fraternity, sorority,
and obligation. These networks and material relations are often explained not
in terms of class or political affiliation or by rational calculation, but in terms
of being sovereign in relation to thefu "gods," national ethnic and regional
destiny, golden pasts and golden futures. Raymond Williams suggests that all
these golden periods are used both to spur memories and to provide intellectual discipline in preparation for future mobilizations.lo
Born in the Delta city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1,915, the late bluesman
Willie Dixon worked tirelessly to get the blues recognized as a social philosophy and to get its performers the respect they have beeu so systematically
denied. In his 1990 autobiography I Am the Blues, he explains how the
working-class African American representational structure, the blues, has
maintained its grip on a constantly shifting reality despite the pressures of
falsification, distortion, romanticism, cynicism, piracy, and commercialization:
All the blues
songs actually related back to Africa or some Alrican heritage things
. By knowing about yesterday, how things came along and are still advancing, it
can give you a greater idea of what the future could be. This is why the blues
represents the past, the present and future ... It's necessary for people to know all
the various parts of the blues and the vgious things that have happened in the blues
so they won't make the mistakes in the future that have been made in the past.
They've got blues books out there that tell a little about everybody-his name
and what songs he sang-but they don't have none of the actual blues experience
involved ... Ninety-nine percent of the people that wrote stories about the blues
gave people phony ideas and this gave the blues a bad reputation. They had people
believing the blues was a low-down type of music and underestimating the blues one
hundred percent. The majority of people have been taught to stay away from the
blues because the world didn't actually want you to understand what the blues want.
The majority of the blues have been documented through time with various people
involved with the blues. All of this is unwritten facts about the blues because these
blues have been documented but not written-documented in the minds of various
men with these various songs since the first black man set foot on the Anerican
shore . . . My old man would explain it all so lve accepted his philosophy more than
we did anybody else's because it made sense.ll
THE BLUES TRADITION OF EXPLANATION
The Blues as Epistemology
Lacking the handicaps of false ambition and property, they have access to a
wide social vision and a deep social consciousness. They display a greafe:'
freedom and initiative in pushing thei¡ claims upon civilization than even the
petty bourgeoisie. Their organizations show greater strergth, adaptability,
and efficiency than any other group or class in society.
The intellectual traditions and social organizations tbrough which workingclass African Americans lived, understood, and changed their reality have
typically emerged in spite of, and in opposition to, plantation powers. This
conflict is one of the defining features of African American social thought.
From the unique experience and position of the enslaved Black Southern
working class there emerged a self-referential classificatory grid. This distinct
and evolving complex of social explanation and social action, this praxis,
provided support for the myriad traditions of resistance, affirmation and
confirmation that were to follow. This pillar of African American identity is
referred to in this work as the blues epistemology.
In the following chapters the historical evolution of two blocs will be traced.
Most familiar to the reader is the plantation bloc and its system of representatiou. This fragment of society can be generally viewed as a Southern ethnoclass grouping engaged in the monopolization of resources, power, historical
explanation, and social action. The plantation classificatory grid has at its
center the planter as the heroic master of a natural ethnic, class, gender, and
environmental hierarchy. African Americans in general, and African American women in particular, aÍe at the bottom of this order. The growth in power
of the fi¡st bloc was directly linked with the growth in potential power of the
second bloi, the blues bloc. The blues bloc consists of working-class African
American communjties in the rural South and their diaspora. The ontology,
or worldview, embedded in these communities has provided a sense of
collective self and a tectonic footing from which to oppose and dismantle the
American intellectual, cultural, and socioeconomic traditions constructed from
the raw material of African American exploitation and denigration.l3
In the African American experience, the plantation bloc set the parameters
of this conflict for several centuries as it attempted to suppress independent
thought, cultural expression, and action. To ensure the autonomy of thought
and action in the midst of constant surveillance and violence, African Americans constructed a highly developed tradition of social interpretation, This
practice fi¡ds its origins in the secret societies prevalent during slavery. During
this period, A-frican, Native American and European intellectual traditions
were forged in the crucible of the plantation South. What emerged was a
highly developed introspective and universalist system of social thought and
practice whose influence upon the modern world can never be unde¡estimated.
The blues epistemology rests on two foundations. The first involves the