LITMIR.BIZ

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the former masters, to eat in the same restaurants, to drink from the same fountains, and relieve themselves in the same toilets. Even when they gain the right to serve in the armed forces, they may not serve in the same units. They receive rare and minimal promotion, are discouraged from learning to operate more complex equipment, generally on the grounds that their intelligence is unequal to the complexity of such tasks. They are given the most menial tasks away from the battlefield and the most dangerous duties upon it. They are required to fight and die in the nation’s wars, ostensibly to protect the basic principles of freedom and democracy at home and abroad, but they see precious little of either in the nation which is nominally theirs. In their nation’s cities (with very rare exceptions), even those few who could afford to do so are barred from living in the same areas as the master race. In the areas designated for them, they are charged higher rents for worse accommodation. Even when they are permitted access to the same jobs as members of the master race, they receive lower wages and infrequent promotion. It is considered just about permissible for a male of the master race to have sexual relations with a female of the People, provided that he pays for the privilege in cash and does nothing so foolish or self-incriminating as to form any kind of emotional attachment to her. Sexual relationships between males of the People and females of the master race are unacceptable under any circumstances. Even the unsupported allegation that a male of the People has made a sexual approach to a female of the master race is a capital offence: formally in some parts of the country, informally in those regions which are considered to be more enlightened. In this context, eye contact, however brief, is considered adequate evidence of a sexual approach. Any attempt by any former slave, or descendant thereof, to advance his or her circumstances is mocked or blocked. Any expression of anger, discontent or dissatisfaction with their lot is blamed on the activities of ‘outside agitators’; the descendants of the slaves are deemed insufficiently sensitive or intelligent to realise when they are being ill-treated without some form of external prompting.

      Nevertheless, many succeed even against such concerted opposition. Former slaves and the children of former slaves enter the arts and the professions. They migrate from the rural regions, the scene of their centuries-long humiliation, to the bigger cities where discrimination needs to be enforced by law rather than simply occurring as custom. They are mocked and caricatured in the masters’ theatres, in which they are not permitted to perform, and the masters’ newspapers, for which they are never employed to write; they thus have no means of redress and no forum in which to state the case for their defence. Against all the odds, authors and poets, musicians and athletes, philosophers and scientists, dentists and accountants, soldiers and entrepreneurs, activists and leaders all begin to emerge. And all of the People have learned, with their mothers’ milk, how to survive in two worlds. One is the world of the master race, who control the laws and the money; the homes and the jobs; the frames of reference and the rules of the game. The other is their own world, which they themselves have created, and recreate daily, from scraps: the scraps which they managed to retain from their original, faraway homelands, and the scraps tossed them by the master race. The world of the former owners is the one in which they are compelled to exist; their own world is the one in which they actually live. They apply their creative skills, the only bequest from their ancestors which they have ever been allowed to keep, to the task of reinvention. Stripped of their traditional resources, they generate new ones; force-fed another’s culture, they transform it to meet their own needs. Barred from the institutions of the master race, they institute their own. And from the materials and implements of the master race’s music, they create their own. In one place – a comparatively sophisticated and cosmopolitan urban centre – the discarded military-band instruments of one of the now-departed minor occupying powers stimulates the creation of one kind of new music. In another area – harsher, more rural and vastly less tolerant – something else emerges.

      Somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, what we now call the blues began to be heard in the Southern part of mainland America. It was a scion of a whole extended family of musics: the field holler and the ballad, the hymn and the rag, the vaudeville showpiece and the work-song and the chain-gang shanty. In the blues, we hear the raw materials of the master race’s music filtered through the tonalities, textures, rhythms, intonations and agenda which centuries of brainwashing and intimidation had failed to eradicate from the collective consciousness of a People inadvertently brought into being by abduction and slavery. It was sung on back porches and in taverns, in work camps and in urban theatres, in tents and jails. It was played on whatever instruments were available: here on pianos and trumpets, there on drums and mandolins, elsewhere on fiddles and saxophones and, in the South, most of all on the guitar, an instrument which – in a singular and felicitous example of cultural synchronicity – was ready for the blues around the time that the blues was ready for the guitar. Slowly evolving from a series of families of stringed instruments, the guitar had eventually divorced itself from the mandolin family by abandoning the notion of a variable number of ‘courses’ (sets of paired strings) in favour of six single strings, tuned (from low strings to high) E-A-D-G-B-E. This instrument emerged in France and Italy during the last years of the eighteenth century, but revealed its full potential most dramatically in Spain, where gifted luthiers refined and strengthened its structure and, through the medium of flamenco, gypsy musicians began to explore its expressive range.

      By contrast, its earliest years in America recalled the courtly tradition of the instruments which were the guitar’s immediate predecessors, rather than the flamboyant duende of the flamenco guitarists. The typical American guitar of the nineteenth century was a small-bodied, short-necked, gut-stringed instrument: fragile of construction, low in volume, easy on the fingers and essentially delicate in nature. It was therefore considered to be a ladies’ instrument, ideally suited for boudoir and parlour; a very different beast from the ‘special rider’, an itinerant Southern bluesman’s powerful, resilient travelling companion. The transformation of the genteel ‘parlour guitar’ into something that could travel unscathed in a boxcar and still holler like a bird the next night came at the hands of a couple of innovators and a host of popularisers. In the early 1890s, Orville Gibson applied principles derived from violin-building – principally a carved, arched top and specially tooled steel strings – to his guitars; by 1900, the C.F. Martin company (founded in the 1830s by C.F. Martin himself, a recent immigrant from Germany) had combined Gibson’s steel strings with the reinforced necks and bodies which they had been developing for their gut-string models since the 1830s. The result was a flat-top guitar sturdy enough to take steel strings: a template for the majority of acoustic guitars constructed since. Other major luthiers followed, and so did a host of mass-production houses who flooded the nation with cheap but highly serviceable guitars. Thousands of customers who weren’t fortunate enough to live in a town which could support its own music store ordered guitars made by Stella and Harmony from the mail-order catalogues of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward: in 1908, you could pay anything between $1.89 and $28.15, and have yourself an instrument. To be precise, a new instrument: fundamentally related to an older one, but essentially an instrument which had never before existed; exactly what was required in order to conjure into existence a music which had never before existed.

      Were it at all possible to rob a human being of absolutely everything that makes someone human, to transform a human being into nothing more than a dumb beast of burden, the aforementioned treatment would have done it. What the blues tells us is that humanity is indestructible. When everything that can possibly be taken away is indeed taken away, the blues is what’s left: the raw, irreducible core of the human soul.

      The first known account of the music we now call Delta blues is a description, by the pianist, composer and entrepreneur W.C. Handy, of a guitarist whom he encountered while waiting for a train in a Mississippi railroad station in 1903. It has been frequently quoted, and quite rightfully so: it is perhaps the first truly significant American cultural signpost of the new century, so – with your indulgence – here it is again.

      A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags, his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song too, struck me instantly. ‘Goin’ to where the Southern cross the dog.’ The singer repeated

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