Singing the Blues

A Sermon preached by J. Stuart Taylor III

St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church

February 10, 2008

Today is Blues Sunday, a new Lenten tradition in the life of this congregation. On this Sunday in Lent we join our voices with all those from every time and place who have ever sung the blues. Blues music has deep roots in the historical experience of African American’s and their struggle to deal with enormous pain. From the field hollers and work songs of slaves in the south, to the spirituals lifted up in church services, to blues and jazz and gospel music, much of African American music has arisen from the need of a people to come to terms with the pain in their lives. And what they have done with that pain is not only to survive, but to transcend their suffering and to transform it in bursts of creativity and artistic expression that have enriched all of humankind. But a strong case could be made that the earliest, most original blues music is found in the Bible. In critical moments in the history of God’s people, the catalyst for transformation was the willingness of the people to bring pain to speech. As it is written in the third chapter of the book of Exodus, vs.7:  with Yahweh speaking to Moses “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cries because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians”.  The God of the Exodus is depicted as the God who hears the cries of slaves and is moved with pathos of compassion and anger to enter history and to liberate them.  The same dynamic is found in the Biblical writings of the exile. Psalm 137“By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors mirth, saying sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?  “  In its greatest national crisis of the exile and Babylonian captivity, when Israel reached the nadir in its history the absolute zero point the expression of this grief gave rise to enormous creativity. No longer able to sustain their faith by means of the temple or the Promised Land, the faith of the Israelite exiles expanded to include the God of all creation. But before this new vision of the Creator could emerge, before hope could be reborn, the people needed to grieve.  This is one of the things that I most admire about the people of Israel, their healthy capacity for lamentation.  They believed in a God in whom they could pour out the pain of the heart. They believed in a God who was stirred and moved to action by their cries. . I think that is why I am so drawn to the prayers of the Psalms. Think of Psalm 130.  Out of the Depths I cried to thee. It is the pain of the faithful person that rises up “out of the depths” and is expressed to God as lamentation, anger, grief, loss.   

Like the people of God in the story of the Bible,  African-American music begins with the cry of pain. African -American  music conveys a story that cannot be told in any other way, can hardly be imagined.  African American music is composed of song lines from faraway places on the plains, and mountains, along the rivers, along the coasts of a vast continent, large enough for thousands of civilizations, old enough to be the place of our beginning as the human family. It is the cry of those African men and women and children abducted from their villages by slave traders, never again to see the only world of family and community and culture they have ever known.  It is the cry that arose from the hell of the slave ships as millions of Africans lived, suffered and died in the middle passage crossing the Atlantic.   It is the cry that arose from the auction block as these men and women sick, exhausted, hungry, terrified, physically manacled were sold into slavery, some families loved ones wrenched apart with not even a chance to say good bye. . The cry arises from the back breaking labor on tobacco farms in Virginia. On rice plantations in SC. And in cotton fields in Ga. Alabama.  The cry rose to God, And God heard the cry of the people. Imagine this scene. You are a slave working in a cotton field. Your hands are bleeding, your back is breaking. The sun is hot, your stomach empty. .How does a body keep working past utter exhaustion? Someone three rows down lets out a holler. All of you begin to sing. The cry of pain becomes a song of endurance. Like pick a bale of cotton as recorded by Leadbelly in 1940.  Then this great river of African American music flowed into Negro spirituals. These songs of faith arose not just at Sunday gatherings but throughout the day. The spiritual was like a shield behind which a people could express their sorrow, celebrate their endurance, and reaffirm their humanity as children of God.  The cry arose from the slaves, in its raw and anguished humanity.  And African slaves believed that God heard their cry.  They expressed this faith in new language, ironically the language and images from the culture of their masters. But with deep African intonations. . And they sang to Jesus, not to Jesus of the slaveholders.  They could relate to the Jesus who was crucified, who died on an instrument of death reserved for slaves and revolutionaries. They could relate to the crucified Jesus, who when he finally collapsed under the weight of the cross, was assisted by a black man, Simon of Cyrene. The African slaves were drawn to the heroes and heroines of the Hebrew Scriptures. They sang of Job, of Daniel of Moses and the story of the people of Israel on a freedom Journey. They sang to freedom. (oh Freedom, oh Freedom and before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free”. 

The first three decades of this century the deep river of African American spirituals flowed into new expressions one branch of the river evolved into what we know as the blues, most often defined as a solo voice sung to accompaniment. In the first three decades of the last century, when blues music began here, Black folks were hitting the road looking for better life. They jumped on trains in Miss. and Alabama and went to Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Detroit.  They left Georgia and the Carolinas and went to Wash. DC, Philadelphia. NY and Boston. African American music embraced the great diversities of music in those northern cities and influenced them in return.  Most of all they listened to that train whistle. Their ancestors had sung songs about a great train heading for freedom the underground railway. Now that train was carrying them to the great cities of the northland in the hope of a better life. Singing the blues arose from the aching consciousness of loss, of poverty, of loneliness, of violence. In singing the blues consolation was not always found in faith or in the arms of Jesus. Consolation may be found in the blues tradition in the arms of a lover, or a bottle or a sat. night dance or the prospect of the road, that somewhere else it may be better.  Finally the comfort was found in the song itself.  Blues speaks so universally because it arises from the intense emotional content of everyday struggles, the lost and found of ordinary men and women. Singing the blues means bending the notes to express the deepest feelings of the heart. Whether it is in the deeply personal dimensions of our spiritual journey or in the openly political cries against injustice in our world, when we sing the blues, God’s people bring pain into speech. We bring pain into speech believing in a God who hears our cries. We sing our faith in a God who not only hears our cries but is moved with compassion to enter our world to bring that pain into healing and transformation. And so people of God we join our voices this morning with everyone in every time and place who has ever sung the blues.  Amen.