June 20, 2012

"World, you is a beautiful dress..."

-Fannie Bell Chapman, Centreville

"The blues are the three Ls, and that would be living, loving, and, hopefully, laughing -- in other words, the regular old E formation on the guitar with the regular three changes.  The blues are really life to me because all my friends, everything around me, the music that I hear, everything leads me back to the feeling of the blues, or the feeling that I get from playing or singing the blues or hearing others singing and playing.  In fact, everything that I'm connected with -- life itself -- is the blues.  If I had to try and play the way I feel about it, it would e something like this (plays guitar).  That tells my feeling.  That's the blues..."

                                                 -B. B. King

"The door here swings on the hinge of good welcome at all time..."

                        -Reverend Issac Thomas, Rose Hill Community

Gentle Reader...

Welcome to a journey that will be filled with music, poetry, history, soulful food, and walking paths in shoes that are impossible to fill...  This is a summer of discovery, as I travel to Cleveland, Mississippi to explore "The Most Southern Place on Earth."  This will be a journey to the Mississippi Delta, which is the focus of the National Endowment for the Humanities Grant I've been awarded for summer study.  Our days will be shaped with poetry and song and food, and we'll travel all over the Delta, learning and discovering.  

My initial impression of The Blues comes from B. B. King's Blues Club in Nashville.  This is music that I hear from the essence of the rhythms that pulse somewhere in the marrow of my bones.  Raw voices.  Agile wonderings and wanderings somewhere between my skin and sinews.  And there is this feeling of being utterly alone and intimately connected at the same time.  That feeling that I know everyone in the room, and that everyone knows me.  This is really the only public place that I have ever felt this kind of intimacy.  I am vulnerable in the presence of these soulful sounds...

To prepare for this seminar, I am reading William Ferris' "Give my Poor Heart Ease," which is about the voices of the Mississippi Blues.  Ferris says, " ...their voices bear intimate witness to a world of beauty, pain, and sadness that defined the blues..."  Of this amazing book of interviews and portraits, Toni Morrison said, " I reveled in these stories."  And so, for the last few days, I , too, have reveled in these stories.  I have gotten to know Mary Gordon, who sings hymns anywhere, who says she "never makes a lot of hollering...when I feel the spirit, it brings tears to my eyes..." I have met Martha Dunbar, who "drove cattle up and down the Gin Place hill there, and men wouldn't do that...."  I met Willie Dixon, who says this about the blues and poetry:  "I always did like poetry.  I always liked to hear people that speak good poetry.  Every time I write a song, I feel like it will make somebody feel good.  It will bring back memories, make high hopes..."

And so I invite you to join me on this journey.  My partner, Scott, and I will travel from Madisonville, Kentucky down to Memphis, Tennessee, where we will spend a little time exploring. We are certain to spend some good time at B. B. King's in Memphis.  We'll move from there to Cleveland...

I hope this summer "gives your poor heart ease... "

Namaste,

Marianne