Listen to B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues.” This time, really listen: his soulful singing, Lucille’s crying. They belie the lyrics.
“When I first got the blues,” King sings, “they brought me over on a ship. Men were standing over me. And a lot more with a whip.” The music masks the words. We tap feet, dance to these words, but we don’t always listen to them. I confess it myself; so many of us enjoy the blues without being students of the blues. Unlike other popular music, the blues demands deeper listening, docility even. But that’s often not what we do.
A hundred years ago, with a tin cup for tips, Blind Lemon Jefferson played guitar on the corner of Elm and Central Track in Dallas. Discovered there, he became famous, but not so much in Dallas. The early history of the blues in Dallas, rivaling Memphis, isn’t as known or celebrated as it should be. Perhaps it’s how we built modern Dallas; we forget how Central Expressway erased so much of Deep Ellum. That part of town simply wasn’t valued, nor its people or music. We didn’t listen.
The early chroniclers of the genre developed by Black musicians and later prized by white rock stars, did a great service, recording sounds and voices we might otherwise have lost. Yet, as Alan Govenar writes in his magisterial Texas Blues, these early white musicologists often “edited the texts they collected to make them ‘better,’ overlooking the integrity of the texts and music as they were actually performed.” John Lomax, the greatest chronicler of them all, whose work is inestimable; even he didn’t fully see or hear what he was listening to. He wondered if the emotion he recorded wasn’t “self-pity…based on feelings of race inferiority.” He was listening, recording; but then again he wasn’t.
When Blind Lemon, for instance, sang, “The law come in…I was fairly choked,” what did listeners, in particular white listeners, hear? Was it simply a bluesman “nursing his gloom a little” as Lomax wrote? Or, should we understand more? Or, when Henry “Ragtime” Thomas sang, “I’m going to build me a heaven of my own,” should we hear merely religious sentiment or the power of Black spirituals, which would later fuel a civil rights movement?
What I’m saying is that to listen to the blues, lyrics included, is to tempt changing the mind. Our mishearing of the blues, for many white people, is a metaphor for our mishearing, or our not hearing, about racism.
And, wrote James Baldwin, “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,” that is, our not hearing. When we refuse to confront the reality of racism, we only add to the rap sheet. The offense, Baldwin writes, is that we “have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” Like not really listening to the blues, we deny the misery that made the music possible. We tap our feet, but we do not hear. We see America but not the still open wounds.
Listening, then, seems the moral task, the first moral obligation. And listening again to Black musicians, really listening, we can relearn how to listen to the varied voices of color that have always sounded a more whole America. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that, for him, it was Chuck D who first gave him “Knowledge” and “Consciousness.” Not that such “Knowledge” is easily had; it isn’t. But it points to the intellectual task of listening well.
To hear well, for instance, Kendrick Lamar rap, “Alls my life I has to fight,” words chanted from the streets of Ferguson to Minneapolis to Atlanta to Dallas, is to be open to an empathy we must possess if we are to be moral people in this urgent, overdue moral revolution.
Closer to home, listen to my new favorite Texas voice, Jackie Venson. She evokes a new Texas, a joyful fusion of beautiful diversity. Listening to her, we can aspire. “Open my eyes and fight the good fight,” she sings. “When we are sick in spirit/ The truth we cannot hear it/ Bowing down to willful ignorance/ To a culture comes destruction.”
There is, I think, a direct spiritual line from Blind Lemon Jefferson to Jackie Venson. It’s music that bears witness to a living moral tradition. Which is why we should listen to it, old and new. Because for life more broadly it offers moral formation. It can help us listen.
For we must listen better, especially about racism. Martin Luther King once preached, “We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country.” He was talking about the myth, still repeated by many, that to better their situations, all Black people must do is to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; “a cruel jest to say to a bootless man,” King said.
One can’t help but think of recent trenchant, violent reactions to the mere suggestion that there is such a thing as systemic racism in America. You can’t help but wonder why we’ve still done so little to preserve and develop Black neighborhoods all over this country. Is it because we’ve not been listening?
Because that’ll be evidence that people in power have finally started to listen: when, for instance, South Dallas looks more like North Dallas. And here we must admit this is precisely where many liberals, and not just those you normally think of, could listen better. As Baldwin wrote long ago of those he called the affluent: “they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes.”
This remains true of many of us, saying the right things but doing little else. The proof that we’ve heard anything at all will come when our politically and socially acceptable words, our virtue signaling, translate into real change. Change in how we treat the poor, who are disproportionally people of color, would be evidence that we are listening. Change will be to see our politicians, our business leaders, and each of us “make of this old world a new world,” as Dr. King said.
But which, of course, we haven’t seen yet. Because we’re still not listening.
This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News.
