Two Things: The Blues and Ethics

The Blues is a musical genre with African American roots. Described emotionally, "the Blues ain't nothin' but a good woman feeling bad." The Blues typically address romance, sex, and unrequited love. Much of the flavor of the Blues stemmed from the need for one singer with an acoustic guitar to create enough sound and rhythm for people to dance at a noisy bar or house party. Described musically, the notes are drawn from the pentatonic scale: tonic, flatted third, fourth, fifth, and flatted seventh. The most common form, the 12 bar blues, consists of three 4-bar lines with a chord progression of  I I I I / IV IV I I / V7 IV I I. Lyrically, the words of the first line are repeated and followed by a rhyming third line. For instance, "I'm sitting and writing this essay. I'm sitting and writing this essay. Trying to find something interesting to say." Historically, the Blues grew out of the music of West Africa, field work songs, street corner buskers, vaudeville, and minstrel shows. The Blues first became popular with records produced in the 1910's. Just a few of the most popular artists were Bessie Smith ("Downhearted Blues" 1923), Ma Rainey ("See See Rider Blues", 1924), Robert Johnson ("Sweet Home Chicago", 1936), Louis Jordan ("Ration Blues", 1943), B. B. King ("3 O'Clock Blues", 1952), and Muddy Waters ("Hoochie Coochie Man", 1954). The Blues were the foundation for Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll.

Ethics addresses questions of right and wrong, i.e. what should I do? We may have ethical beliefs like "murder is wrong" and "I should shelter, clothe, and feed the poor". These may be part of an ethical code. Ethics also deals with ways of thinking about questions of right and wrong. We should be wary of ethical codes imposed without inquiry. These come from various institutional authorities, such as church, state, military, and school. We should also be on guard against hypocrisy and blindness to our own ethical shortcomings. One of Aesop's fables describes us having two bags hanging from our neck: one in front with our neighbor's faults that we can see clearly and one in back with our own that we can't see.

The Blues and Ethics intersect in African American slavery. The enslavement of Africans in America was wrong, but it was the product of a civilization with advanced ethical machinery. European Americans professing to follow the teachings of Christ owned slaves and benefited from their misery. The suffering of slaves surely flowed through the Blues, yet little of the genre that made it into popular music laments slavery, racism, and prejudice. Maybe this was due to external and self-imposed censorship. It would have often been dangerous to sing overt protest songs, and record companies likely saw little commercial value in such work. And consider the Vietnam War and the relatively small fraction of American popular music at the time that directly addressed it, despite the massive cultural upheaval it caused and the eventual widespread opposition. So perhaps also the Blues were apolitical because romance is overwhelmingly the main theme of popular music.