Topic: Violence in them old blues

[GhostRider]

So unlike everything else. Who other than those old blues cats were singing lyrics like those I mentioned above?

Modern day rappers?  Or at least the rappers from 10 years ago.  I'm afraid I haven't kept up with the genre as much as I should have.

Early Ice-T made the old blues guys look like nuns. Ultraviolence.

Alex

[lindy]

Looking for some violence in music? Check out the ballads that the Brits, Irish, and Scots brought with them from the Isles to Amerikay. Plenty of blood and domestic abuse to pass down to descendants in the New World. Methinks serfs and laborers of any color were more willing than merchants or the middle class to report what was happening in their lives through song, and violence was part of that. The other classes also lived violent lives, but were more likely to cover them up with songs of romance or pious hymns of brotherly love.

Lindy

[orvillej]

looking for other violent images in early to mid 20th century musics? Get a Louvin Bros. record. Or Darby & Tarlton. Check out "Down in the Willow Garden" or "Banks of the Ohio". It certainly isn't just blues in which you'll find this stuff.

[Mr.OMuck]

Wax et al are Absolutely correct in pointing out the orgy of violence that was the twentieth century, by all reckoning the most murderous in history. Also Orville rightly points to the precedence of violent imagery in all the source material that American folk music is drawn from going back to Elizabethan and even earlier times. Having established those facts however, there is a point to be made about how the Blues deals with the specific manifestations and imagery of violence as enacted and experienced in rural Black America during the last decade of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries that provides information and more intangible atmospheric impressions. It must be noted that life for most people consisted of getting up going to work, dealing with the kids and the bills and all the other mundane realities of life that for the most part would make unsuitable material for songs. Being a musician and performer placed the artist out of the world of the mundane and into the realm of the heroic where some exaggeration was expected or even demanded. The external threat of official and semi official violence towards Black people would, i think, also have placed the issue and imagery of violence more to the fore of peoples consciousness.

[Coyote Slim]

And what should pop up on the juke as I read this but Willie McTell's "Southern Can is Mine"?

I think Mr O'muck hit on something in his last post.

I'd also add that American society as a whole -- regardless of the color of the person -- comes from an extremely violent history.  Our history is filled with examples where everyday interpersonal violence was accepted, encouraged, and in many cases legally justifiable.  We all know the story -- America the "free" was built by slaves and this entire continent was stolen by people who thought that "might makes right."   The European peoples who came here often came from countries wreaked  by violence and upheaval.  Their cultures often thought in terms of "might makes right" and that anyone who was weak could justifiably be suppressed because that was how God made the world.  The suppressed often felt the same way and longed to strike back.  I would find it strange if American music didn't have so many references to violence.

[Johnm]

Hi all,
A lot of violence in blues lyrics is posturing, as has been noted already.  The lyrics are heavy on threats (sometimes grisly) but light on actual murderous violence, which is far more common in Old-Time songs.  Just thinking about Blues lyrics in which murder is actually committed this afternoon, I was able to come up with surprisingly few.  There are "Frankie" and "Stack O'Lee", both of which amount to reportage of historical events.  Then there are the humorous ones, like "Rope Stretchin' Blues" and "I'm a Bad, Bad Man".  I still remember the disconnect in seeing John Jackson, just about the nicest man you'll ever meet, singing "I'm A Bad, Bad Man"--"cut enough meet off of that man's head to feed all the dogs in town", and just beaming.  Another murderous one from a seemingly unlikely source is John Hurt's "Got the Blues and Can't Be Satisfied".  Jesse Fuller's "99 Years" is another, as is Sloppy Henry's "Canned Heat Blues"
Most of the violence threatened in Blues lyrics seems designed to establish that the singer is not someone to be trifled with, and centers around jealousy and control in sexual relationships.  This is even more the case with male/female violence short of murder, as per Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues" and Bo Carter's "Get Back Old Devil", or just about anything by Skip James.  A lot of the toughest talk is still that, just talk.
In Old-Time music, though, murders abound, to the point that Murder Ballads are considered a sub-category of song styles.  What's particularly chilling about the murders in most of these songs is that they're quite often sung by the killer in a first person lyric voice, and the facts around the crime are delivered in an affectless way, completely devoid of motive, psychology, back story or anything along those lines.  "Little Sadie", "Wild Bill Jones", "Pretty Polly" and "Knoxville Girl" all have that quality.  The American murder ballads differ from those of the British Isles in that respect.

This is kind of all over the place, but I think one of the primary reasons for the prevalence of violence in blues lyrics is the need of the singer to establish that he is not a person who can be controlled or "managed".  So much of what blues lyrics communicate is  "I am not going to live my life the way you or anyone else wants me to--I'm going to live it the way I want to live it."
All best,
Johnm         

[Mr.OMuck]

is the need of the singer to establish that he is not a person who can be controlled or "managed".

Excellent point. Probably right on the money.

[waxwing]

A song that seems to signify exactly what you are talking about Johnm is one we've discussed in this context before, in a thread about "Songs I Wouldn't Sing in Public" I think, and that would be Willie Brown's M&O Blues.

The 4th verse starts out with "I tried to kill my woman till she laid down across the bed" (or "I threatened to..." as dingwall has it) which puts it off limits for some singers. But the response lyric is "And she looked so ambitious till I took back everything I said" which sure makes it seem like his mode of murder was with words only. And she stopped him with a look! Willie sure seems to be poking fun at the bluster of other blues singers, especially when she agrees to an assignation and then leaves him holding the, er, bag? No wonder he sang in the 3rd verse that all the men who claim they "got" their women should be ashamed.

Wax

[Stuart]

I finally got around to watching the NOVA episode, "The Violence Paradox," last night. The thesis is that violence has declined overall. Perhaps the fact that we no longer are comfortable with songs that mention or are about doing violence to others is evidence that violence is on the decline, even in the acceptability of song lyrics--to most of us here, anyway. Obviously, there are times when songs are performed as originally composed, but usually with an intro that puts them in historical context. It would be difficult to perform "32-20" without significant changes that would make it non-violent and thus make it into a different song altogether.

Here's the link to the NOVA episode if anyone is interested:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/the-violence-paradox/

[DerZauberer]

...and let's not forget some first-hand experience:

Just from memory ... Son House and Bukka White served time at Parchman Farm, Lead Belly spent a lot of time incarcerated, then there's all kinds auf violence and trauma experienced, drunken fights and brawls at barbecues ... those were brutal times to be sure!

[catyron]

Not to be too "political" about this, but violence in song lyrics is not a "blues thing" or a "black thing." As others have pointed out, contemporaneous white Appalachian music is filled with this, and much of it derives from British, Scottish, and Irish antecedents -- "Lie there, lie there, little Henry Lee, til the flesh drops from your bones." and "I stabbed her with my dagger, which was a bloody knife," and "I dug on your grave the best part of last night," and "I took her by her golden curls and I drug her round and around," and "Go in and you will see some dark stains on the floor -- alas! it is the blood of fair Fannie Moore." and all the plunging of silver daggers into snowy-white breasts! Violence in white folk music is quite terrifying and deranged, when you listen to the lyrics -- but i have never heard any ethnomusicologist state that it has something to do with "white culture" or "white boasting of individuality."

The "othering" of blues singers can lead toward an unfortunate blindness to the universality of human violence.

If anyone ever asks me, "Why is there so much violence in the blues?" i just answer by singing a few verses from "Duncan and Brady." LOL!