Blue Blue Blue

I’m going to be honest in this blog and admit upfront that the things that give me the blues are pretty shallow and trivial when looking them over in retrospect. I’m a pretty chipper person most of the time, and the fact that I’m pretty thick-skinned so it takes a lot to get me down, in part, contribute to the hollowness of my Blues list. The fact that my life remains pretty “drama-free,” for lack of a better phrase, also accounts for my lack of Blues material. For the most part, I get, what has been categorized by many of the other students in the class as the “everyday blues” – the stuff everyone is down about at point or another. Too little sleep, cold, rainy weather, people who are rude and inconsiderate, feeling stressed – these are all things that each and every one of us gets the Blues about from time to time, myself included. Rarely a day has come where I have felt extremely depressed or down to a point where I have something heartfelt to say like the many African-Americans who sang /played the actual blues. African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century faced some significant racial dilemmas that impacted their self-esteem and self-image. Simply put, African American Blues and jazz singers, as well as poets such as Langston Hughes, really had something to be blue about. A listener can really hear the genuine heartache and suffering in many of these Blues singer’s voices. Likewise, one can get a sense of the strong, Blues-like emotion Hughes must have been feeling when he composed his poem. Basically, what many African-American singers, songwriters, writers, and poets experienced and gave them inspiration was usually a weighty issue, or what Erin M. has deemed a Blues of “humanity.” While we as mostly white students coming from affluent or privileged backgrounds seem to get the Blues most of the time over things that impact us individually, African-Americans for the greater portion of the twentieth century sang the Blues about issues that affected their entire race. In other words, we’re just complaining about trivial stuff most of the time when we get the Blues while African-Americans felt genuine heartache and sorrow for the injustices they were being forced to endure. That, I see as the major difference between our (the students’) Blues and the Blues which African-Americans have experienced throughout history.