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“Nowadays…the mighty river of the blues uncoils in the ear of the planet.”
Alan Lomax, The Land Where The Blues Began
This book is an anecdotal dictionary of the language of the blues. In it, you can look up such words as “mojo” or “hoosegow” and phrases like “black cat bone” or “cold in hand” to find out what they mean and from where they came. There is some frankly sexual talk in here; there are some tall tales and some funny ones. I interviewed many famous and not-so-famous blues musicians for this book, and they all had something fascinating to contribute.
I’m a rock musician and journalist, not a scholar, so I was a little nervous about tackling such a vast topic. But my first interview, with guitarist Hubert Sumlin, gave me my way in, much like seeing Son Seals play guitar for the first time gave me my way in on the electric guitar. I expected Mr. Sumlin to simply verify the longstanding notion that Howlin’ Wolf’s blues standard “Killing Floor” referred to a slaughterhouse floor. To my surprise, Mr. Sumlin, who was Wolf’s guitarist and close friend from 1954 until Wolf’s death in 1976, disagreed, and backed up his assertion with a detailed (and hilarious!) story about why Wolf wrote “Killing Floor” that I’d never read anywhere.
After our chat, I thought perhaps I could make a unique contribution to the language of the blues: I could ask the artists, directly, what these words mean to them. I did my best with research, too (369 footnotes!), and had the book vetted by two ethnomusicologists, but it was the lengthy, generous interviews given to me by such music legends as Dr. John, Little Milton, Robben Ford, Henry Gray, John Hammond, Robert Jr. Lockwood, Bob Margolin, Bonnie Raitt, Howard “Smiley” Ricks, Hubert Sumlin, Jimmie Vaughan and more that provided fresh insights into the language of the blues.
I love the language of the blues, both musical and verbal. It leads us back, hand over hand, gripping a rough rope, until we find ourselves looking up at a big creaking ship full of misery that has traveled to the Americas all the way from Africa. It tells us how the people transported on that ship dug deep in order to survive enslavement in an utterly strange and different land, further from home than they had ever imagined they could go. The language of the blues tells us how they did it–by singing to themselves and to their children, and by digging joy and sustenance out of rare private moments the way a starving man might dig new potatoes and carrots out of the dirt with his fingers.
These were people who had suffered a profound cultural dislocation comparable to being shipped at warp speed to another planet. In Blues People, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) noted: “To the Romans, slaves were merely vulgar and conquered peoples who had not the rights of Roman citizenship. The Greeks thought of their slaves as unfortunate people who had failed to cultivate their minds and wills…. But these slaves were still human beings. However, the African who was unfortunate enough to find himself on some fast clipper ship to the New World was not even accorded membership in the human race.”2
The first Africans to arrive in the Americas were from bustling towns along the Senegal and Gambia rivers. They were far more urban and sophisticated than their depictions in Hollywood movies would later indicate. The Senegambians lived in highly organized cities full of specialized workers and artisans who “were members of several endogamous castes, which included the smiths, leather workers, butchers, and griots,” according to The African Heritage of American English by Joseph Holloway and Winifred Vass.3 Later arrivals came from urban centers like Abeokuta, the Yoruban metropolis that ran for six miles along the bank of the Ogun River and hummed with the industry of its skilled ironworkers, carpenters, tailors, textile weavers, artists, and farmers.4
Imagine being fully engaged in your work, your religion, family life, art, music, politics, and lively debates with friends one day, and finding yourself some months later, after a horrific journey, the prisoner of an alien culture and masters who demand, on pain of death, that you shut up, worship their God, and plow acre after acre of their endless fields. “Your sorrow,” Jones wrote, “must be indeterminable.”5
The trans-Atlantic slave trade began with some curious Portuguese sailors, who reached the mouth of the Senegal River in 1445 and began trading with the local Wolof people. In 1493 the Pope deeded the region between the Senegal River and the Gambia River to Portugal, allowing the Portuguese to monopolize European trade with Africa. The Portuguese tapped into the existing African slave trade and exported slaves to Brazil, which Portugal began colonizing in 1500.
Unfortunately for Portugal, its fragile inbred king, Sebastian I, got himself killed at twenty-four while leading an ill-advised crusade for Jesus against Morocco in 1578. Since Sebastian had no heir, and King Philip II of Spain was the son of a Portuguese princess, this gave King Philip an opportunity to seize control of Portugal. He grabbed it in 1581, and Portuguese nobles fled for their lives. One prince made it to England, where he began selling trading concessions along the more navigable Gambia River to English traders.
English traders sailed up the Gambia in 1587 and brought hides and ivory back to England. Soon English, Dutch, and French traders were enjoying a thriving business trading iron, firearms, cloth, and gunpowder for ebony, ivory, beeswax, gold, spices, and slaves.
The first enslaved Africans landed at Jamestown in the Virginia colony in 1619.6 They were brought to pick cotton, a plant that had actually originated in western Sudan.7 In all, some 12 million Africans were transported from Africa to the Americas during the slave trade. Roughly 10.5 million survived the journey.8
Slaves arriving in the Americas had nothing but their culture and each other. Luckily, their cultural values were strong. In Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson wrote: “…sheer artlessness may bring a culture down but a civilization like that of the Yoruba [from today’s southwestern Nigeria], and the Yoruba-Americans, pulsing with ceaseless creativity richly stabilized by precision and control, will safeguard the passage of its people through the storms of time.”9 The slaves clung to the one art that left no artifacts for slave owners to destroy–music.
Human beings use music to define place, community, and tribe. We secure ourselves in time and within our generation with music. Sometimes we construct a fortress of music so impenetrable to outsiders that they throw up their hands and leave us alone. Sometimes, to our surprise, we create from our pain and alienation something so compelling that people outside our little group are struck in their hearts. They drop what they are doing and stand and listen. Suddenly, they see us. We are less different than they had imagined.
As the Africans became Americans, they applied their aesthetic values to their circumstances and created the blues, a music so emotive and rich with possibility that it birthed jazz and rock ’n’ roll within decades of its own conception. “In a sense,” blues historian Alan Lomax has said, Africans “made an aesthetic conquest of their environment in the New World.”10
They made quite a dent in English, too. Early scholars assumed that most African American slang derived from efforts to speak English. Linguists have since traced many English words–even many that were assumed to be European in origin–to African origins.
The Wolof people were the first contributors of African words to American English. Their wealthy empire was in western Senegal along the Gambia River. In 1673, however, the Islamic Fulani, who lived just east of the Wolof Empire, waged a jihad, or holy war—raiding Wolof territories in an attempt to convert the Wolof people to the Muslim religion. Over the next few decades, the Wolof were also attacked by their Islamic neighbors to the north, the Mauretanians. During these battles, many Wolof people were captured by Fulani and Mauretanians and sold to British slave traders. Traders taught English to some enslaved Wolof so they could be used as interpreters and mariners during voyages along the African coast.11
This large influx of Wolof arrived in South Carolina between 1670 and 1750. Since some already knew a little English, and most arrived with useful skills such as blacksmithing, leatherworking, and butchery, they were employed primarily as house servants. As a result, many Wolof words passed into English, such as “yam,” “banana,” “bug” (from bugal, to annoy), “chigger” (from jiga, for insect, or sand flea), and the use of “guy” as a personal address (from gay, meaning “fellows” or “persons”).12
By 1730, the slave trade was reaching beyond the Senegambia region into the Central Africa homeland of the Bantu civilization. Large numbers of Bantu people from the Kongo Empire of southwest Africa (now northern Angola, Cabinda, Republic of the Congo, and the western section of the Democractic Republic of the Congo) were sold into slavery and shipped to South Carolina in the mid-to-late 1700s. 13
These people, known as Bakongo or Kongo, were used mostly as field hands. Since they had much less contact with slave-owners than the Wolof, they were able to retain more of their culture intact. Scholars have documented many survivals of Bantu speech, cooking, music, dance, art, and religion in African American culture. One Bantu-speaking tribe, the Kimbundu, called a stringed musical instrument they brought to the Southern colonies the mbanza. In English it became banza, banjar, bangie, and finally “banjo.” We also have “jiffy” from the Bantu tshipi, which means “short” or “in a second,”14 and “booboo” from the Bantu mbubu, which means “blunder”.15
How much African language has seeped into American English becomes apparent when we try to figure out why musicians say things like, “That cat can really play, man.” The Wolof word for “singer” is katt. It refers especially to highly accomplished singers, such as the Wolof griots, who can keep their listeners enthralled over many long verses.14 In addition, the Wolof suffix -kat is agentive, meaning it indicates a person. Adding kat after an adjective creates a compound word. The Wolof adjective hipi describes someone who is open-eyed and hyper-aware. A hipi-kat, therefore, is a person who is on the ball, or a “hepcat.”16
Blues language is packed with such fascinating African retentions, yet it also reflects the freewheeling all-American lingo of the underground economy African Americans developed to survive Jim Crow. Musicians picked up slang from the illegal lottery business, for example, as Dr. John noted in the Foreword. Blues artists–looking to steal from the best, like all songwriters–nicked words and phrases from the numbers runners, hookers, drag queens, thieves, junkies, pimps, moonshiners, hoodoo doctors, dealers, rounders, and con artists who made up the street set.
Today, the language of the blues is beloved worldwide. As Texas blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan exclaims, “I played in Finland near the North Pole and people were singing the words! It’s amazing. You can talk about the influence of black blues and gospel on American music, but it’s not just America, it’s the globe.”17
When I was growing up in the Midwest, however, rock was king and the blues were considered a quaint and–in the African American community—somewhat embarrassing relic. As B.B. King related in his moving autobiography, Blues All Around Me: “The blues represent a painful past; for some, the blues stand for a time when we didn’t have pride and hadn’t made progress. No one likes opening up old wounds. But in my mind, my blues always had dignity.” The blues song, King noted, is “the one form that’s followed our path from slavery to freedom.”18
I didn’t know this when I flew out of my seat and onto the dance floor at the tiny Metropole Theater on Milwaukee’s Oakland Avenue while Koko Taylor growled and shimmied through “Wang Dang Doodle.” I’d never danced in my life and had never heard raw blues, but this beautiful fierce lady, shining with sweat, and Son Seals–her tough, economical guitarist– grabbed me by the gut.
A few weeks later, I drove with my new boyfriend, a hyperactive blues fanatic who was a ringer for a freckled teenage Paul McCartney, to a cornfield about an hour south of Milwaukee. B.B. King was standing on a plywood stage with his guitar, Lucille, resting on his belly and his arms at his sides. It was a muggy summer afternoon and the Wisconsin state bird–the mosquito–was out in full force.
Neither heat nor bugs had prevented King and his band from mounting the makeshift steps to the stage wearing crisp white dinner jackets with snappy black bow ties, black knife-crease trousers, and patent leather shoes polished to a blinding shine. The generator, on the other hand, which had been able to handle the minimal electrical requirements of John Lee Hooker’s solo set of mournful blues, was struggling with the task of powering King and crew. It cut out intermittently, often stranding King mid solo.
There’s no better excuse for a guitarist to throw a fit, but King took it with a coolness that would have made a Yoruba elder proud. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders, gesturing at Lucille as if to say, “I’d be happy to play her but it won’t do a damn bit of good.”
Once the power kicked back on for good, there was no stopping B.B. King. There were maybe sixty people kicking up the dusty dirt in front of the stage–all black except for my boyfriend and me. Two fierce hours later, we looked up from our earnest dancing to find ourselves surrounded by a circle of people clapping and laughing and egging us on as the sun slowly dropped in the sky.
I thought about that magical evening when I went to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem almost twenty years later to see King for the second time in my life. A line of middle-aged African Americans, Japanese tourists, bearded young hipsters, and graying hippies stretched for two blocks down 125th Street, prompting some B-boys to stop and ask “Who be jammin’?” At the answer, “B.B. King,” they nodded knowingly, said “Tha’s all right,” and moved on.
King’s band, led by his nephew, Walter King, was as crisp and tight as the players’ ever-present white dinner jackets and black bow ties. Before the boss took the stage, the band cranked out some blistering jazz that gave each of the three hot horn players a chance to pin back our ears.
Only a giant like B.B. King could step in front of such sophisticated musicians and rivet all attention on himself with a single vibrating note. He strode onstage, resplendent in a pearly tux, and opened “Let The Good Times Roll” with a note so clear, so commanding, and so unmistakably his that ear-to-ear grins broke out across the theater. People were too happy to holler; they just grinned at the stage and at each other. By the second song, “Chains Of Love,” the audience was clapping along as King’s horn section high-stepped it, the stocky trumpet player snapping his neat shaved skull back and forth in time.
Near the end of the show, King quietly remarked, “You know, Apollo, many times in my life people would talk about the blues so bad, that it made me feel like I was black twice.” As the crowd nodded and murmured, he sat down to sing, “I’m a blues man, but I’m a good man, understand.”
By the time King closed his transcendent set with “The Thrill Is Gone,” the aisles were dotted with dancing women and entire rows of arms were swaying in the electric air of the Apollo. “Shake your boogie, son,” King commanded his trumpet player, and James Bolden hit a deep squat and pumped his hips faster than a pile driver. Under the fancy ceiling of the Apollo Theatre, the heart of Africa beat through the blues.
FOOTNOTES
2 Blues People by LeRoi Jones, p. 2 (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963).
3 The African Heritage of American English by Jospeh E. Holloway and Winifred K. Vass, p. xx (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
4 “Hear that Long Snake Moan,” essay from Shadow Dancing in the USA by Michael Ventura (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985).
5 Jones, p. 10.
6 The African Heritage of American English by Joseph E. Holloway and Winifred K. Vass, p. 155, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993).
7 Ibid., p. 153
8 “African Slave Trade,” www.wikipedia.org
9 Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy by Robert Farris Thompson, p. 97 (New York: Random House, 1983).
10 The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax (New York: The New Press, 1993).
11 Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues by Paul Oliver, p. 90 (New York: Stein and Day, 1970).
12 Holloway and Vass, p. 141.
13 Holloway and Vass, p. 143.
14 Holloway and Vass, p. 138.
15 The Roots of the Blues by Samuel Charters, p. 59. (Boston: M. Boyars, 1981).
16 Holloway and Vass, pp. 137, 138.
17 From the author’s interview with Jimmie Vaughan.
18Blues All Around Me by B.B. King and David Ritz (New York: Avon Books, 1996).
Excerpted from The Language of the Blues by Debra Devi. Published by Guitar International. Reprinted with permission.
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