More to the Blues than Emotion
Most of the time, people say they are feeling ‘blue’ and we, thanks to the evolution of language, think the person is feeling sad or upset. That is excatly what people wanted when they read The Blues. The Blues is a music genre that is specifically catered to the call-response origin. The poetic part of the blues does have deep roots with oral performances and musical background tracks. Coming to light in the late-nineteenth century in “southern rural field workers and work songs structured on African musical, verbal, and communal techniques” (Patterson, 188).
The form of Blues would be, traditionally, three lines with an AAa rhyme scheme. “Musically, the traditional blues is a three-line, twelve-bar sequence. The for is a dialogue between music and voice-” (Hass, 69). There are a lot of renditions to this form to make them more unique to the writer but they all seem to have the same subject groups “like unhappy love, difficult times, hard luck, fruitless labor (work gang and prison farm), natural disaster, rootlessness find expression through the concrete particulars of reported circumstance” (Patterson, 189). Much like regular free-verse poetry, these are more concrete subjects through time.
The poem by Sherley Anne Williams entitles Any Woman’s Blues brings the idea of triumph over failed relationships and love; relating to the subjects commonly found in blues like unhappy love. William uses the original form by having the AAa rhyme and the repetition of the first line in a broken up couplet, which is mimicked all throughout the poem. Williams starts her poem by describing the setting, “Soft lamp sinin/ and me alone in the night” (1–4). She then goes on to say that she doesn’t need a man to “set me right” (Williams, 6). She then goes on to tell us how she “Left many a peoples and places/ tryin not to be alone” (Williams, 7–8). This saying that she has many trying relationships and none of them have really worked out the way she wanted them to. Though, towards the ending of the poem, she seems to sing a different tune by saying “My life ain’t done yet./ Naw. My son ain’t through” (Williams, 24–25). Bringing to the light the title of the poem, Any Woman’s Blues. These correlate because she is realizing that just because the speaker hasn’t found ‘the one’, doesn’t mean that they never will.
Patterson, Raymond R. “The Blues.” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. Eds. Annie Finch and Katherine Varnes, U. of Michigan P, 2002. 188–195.
Hass, Robert. “Three.” A Little Book on Form; An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. HarperCollins, 2017. 69.
Williams, Shirley Anne. “Any Woman’s Blues.” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. Eds. Anne Finch and Kathrine Varnes. Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 2002. 194.