The Blues Impulse

Heartaches by the Number is a great book!

The book is musicologists and cultural critics David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren's list of their 500 favorite country records of all time, giving for each record their reasons why that record made their most-exalted list.

For #103, "Oh Lonesome Me," a record that went to #1 on the country charts for Don Gibson in 1958 and reached #7 pop, they say:

... Gibson [who was white] was ... a terrific and highly nuanced singer, one whose phrasing evinces a deep affinity with what [African American author] Ralph Ellison calls "the blues impulse." The "impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism."

OK, that's admittedly a bit on the pompous side of profundity ... except that it's true, so true. There is a deep interpenetration of black and white styles of music in America. And the reason is that the best American music — jazz, blues, black gospel, soul, R&B, rock 'n' roll, white gospel, bluegrass, country & western, etc. — has its roots at one and the same time in not one but two once-suppressed American subcultures.

We all know that the "blacker" styles of music in that list above stem from the African American experience, but we might have to squint a little to recognize that the "whiter" styles all derive from the music of people that have long been derogated as hillbillies and white trash.

The "old-time" and stringband music of Appalachia, itself a descendant of what we now call the "folk" music of the British Isles, was incubated in the mountain areas where the Scots-Irish, despised by more "civilized," more "religiously correct" white colonists, concentrated.

Scots-Irish music and culture spread all over America in post-colonial days, even if the original Appalachian mountain dwellers kept to their own isolated ways. When Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, grew up in Rosine, Kentucky, in the early 20th century, he wasn't strictly speaking a hillbilly. But culturally, he was. When he invented bluegrass music in the late 1930s and 1940s — or helped invent it, as some purists insist — he channeled the old-time fiddle and stringband, not to mention church and gospel, music of his younger days into a higher key, fooled around with its "straight" tonalities, sped it up, and (most importantly, in my view) melded it with the African American blues he had also absorbed as a youth. If you don't believe me, listen to one of his signature tunes, "Muleskinner Blues," #158 in Heartaches by the Number (and Dolly Parton's remake is #159):



(That's from an appearance by Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys at a festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on January 18, 1993. Monroe died September 19, 1996, four days shy of his 86th birthday.)

Now that we have a president who is African American but also white on his mother's side, and now that we face an economic downturn that looks to be heading in the direction of The Great Depression Revisited — with its potential to set group against group — I think it's appropriate that we become a little more aware of the intermingled heritage we all share.