The Blues, as Relevant as Ever
I love Blues music. I listen to it for hours a day, and since the genre has been around for over a century, I will never manage to run out of new songs to listen to. And all things honest, I’m actually a bit of a nerd when it comes to genre. I read books about the history of The Blues, learning about the regional variations that cropped up, how thematic elements were woven into the music in nuanced ways, and the less subtle but powerful cries of righteous indignation regarding the racial issues of the day.
Take this song from Lead Belly for example. It starts with a personal story and a call for people to finally come together, then goes on to call for an end to discriminatory laws and the saturation of segregational ideas of the day. Sadly, Lead Belly wouldn’t live to see the Civil Rights Movement bring the kind of legal upheaval he dreamt of.
Despite the strides made in the 60's with the Civil Rights Movement, the racist policies that had been in law for decades did a kind of damage that couldn’t be fixed overnight and sadly still exist today. Demographic lines on the map look like scars from our past as many neighborhoods maintain invisible lines of division based on skin color. Statistics continue to show these fractures.
The 2009 census reports still show the wage gap places those identifying as black at 65–70% the pay of whites. We can see here, Big Bill Broonzy lamenting the racism he experienced, the disparity in treatment and recognition, and the inequality in pay.
The cultural zeitgeist of White America somehow thinks the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent laws solved enough of the racial issues we face that we can turn our back to the systemic issues that have been in place for centuries which made the Civil Rights Movement necessary. This doesn’t even touch on the personal and racially biased ideas that people hold and espouse today and the intrinsic bias against people of color that can be found affecting things from daily interactions to the institutional level.
With cities like Ferguson, where the police unequally fine Black Americans, it creates sense of institutional oppression. Furthermore, our prison populations do not mirror our national population. And lately, when you turn on the news you hear even more reports about another person of color being shot down.
This is the current state of affairs in our country, and as much as we’d like to think of it as progress, we have these kinds of songs to remind us we’ve not come far enough, and we need to remember Black Lives Matter.
