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It is the extraordinary feature of the blues that this formulaic music, as predictable and stylized an art-form as Italian opera or Kabuki, has proven to be so durable and so elastic. The blues serve nearly as the tribal aesthetic language of American popular music, seen, in fact and in fancy, as its motherlode, its baseline, its bedrock, its endowment. As Gerard Herzhaft states in the preface to his Encyclopedia of the Blues,
Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams—big names of country—weren't they blues musicians? Don't rockabilly and rock-and-roll come from, for the most part, the black blues, as country singer and guitar player Merle Travis recognized in the mid-fifties? And isn't soul also largely inspired by the blues? Aren't rock artists, from the sixties to the present, from the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds to ZZ Top and Dire Straits, strongly influenced by the blues?
Some of what Herzhaft asserts is questionable: soul music, in good measure, was almost certainly a reaction to the blues, a supersession, not merely a derivation of them. This is not to deny the blues roots of soul, or to say that soul and R&B artists did not perform blues-derived material from time to time. But James Brown, as he stated in his autobiography, disliked the blues and saw his music as a variation of jazz, and rightly so. Younger performers like Smokey Robinson and the Motown crowd or the shapers of the Philly Sound saw blues as old-time music, stuff that represented black people's shameful past or—even worse, perhaps—their grandparents' unsophisticated musical taste. Indeed, many saw soul and R&B, especially as these art forms became entwined with youth culture and with black political aspirations of the 1960s, as a distinct break from the blues.
Nonetheless, despite being something of an overstatement, Herzhaft's assertion about the primacy of the blues in black popular dance music is substantially correct. The blues are a major portion of our great secular music tradition, "the devil's music," as black folk used to call it, in their grand Manichaean, not Christian, understanding of the world.
And the fact that we have something called the Devil's music that constitutes so much of our aesthetic vision, that speaks so deeply to our humanity in this redeemer nation of Puritan origin, says a great deal about our hard-headed Yankee commercial impulse and our acceptance of our sinful nature: one must give the devil his due in the realm where he operates, which is definitely not hell, and especially if he sells. God's will is surely done in heaven, but it can only be hoped or attempted to be done here on earth.
But the blues are not so much about praising the Devil (they have no truck with the "Satanic" posturing that certain white rock bands perform these days in an effort to gain attention by simply being shocking and vulgar) as they are about acknowledging and respecting the Devil's power as an adversary and, in a very non-Western way, as source of life-affirming reality about the nature of this life. For the blues, the problem with human beings is not that they are fundamentally evil (not a surprising view, as blues were invented by a brutally oppressed people who never wanted to exact revenge against their oppressors but wanted simply not to be oppressed), but that they are fundamentally helpless before the limitations of their own nature and the limits of both nature and society. One can rejoice in this helplessness or despair about it, but in neither case can one alter this condition, nor the fact that we are nonetheless accountable for what we do.
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