I'd like to welcome Alliance members to the August book club discussion of Deep Blues. As a general structure I'll suggest we focus on Chapters 1 (Introduction) and 2 (The Genesis of the Blues) during this week, Chapters 3 and 4 during the 2nd week, Chapter 5 during the 3rd week, Chapter 6 during the 4th week, and Chapters 7 & 8 during the last week of the month. Naturally, this will be a loose guideline and everyone is free to ask questions and offer reflections that don't necessarily fit into the chapter structure outlined above.
The primary focus of the book is the interaction between psyche and the music of the blues. The music itself is about hearing and resonating with the pain, suffering, joy, or sadness in the voice of the blues singer. The understanding of the blues comes through the direct experience of the music rather than through the intellect.
The word “blues” is derived from the term “blue devils” which referred to contrary spirits that hung around and created sadness. I believe it is the capacity of the blues to speak at an archetypal level about universally felt experiences that give power to the blues for both the performer and the audience.
Understanding the blues is similar to a perspective about images offered by Carl Jung - "Image and meaning are identical . . . the pattern needs no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning." In light of this, my aim is to let the musicians speak for themselves as much as possible. To facilitate our experience and discussion I plan to include links to audiovisual excerpts of blues performances to highlight the material being discussed.
To kick off our discussion I'll offer a video, recorded in 1966, of Chicago blues great Howlin Wolf (aka Chester Burnett) who offers his definition of the blues followed by a performance of How Many More Years. Howlin Wolf was a large, intimidating character who stood 6'6" tall, weighed nearly 300 pounds, with a deep growling voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ou-6A3MKow
After viewing the Howlin Wolf video, I'd suggest we begin with our reactions to the Wolf's comments and offer some of our own personal experiences with blues music.
I appreciate your participation in this discussion group and look forward to hearing your comments about blues music and the book Deep Blues during the coming month.
Warm Welcome,
Mark Winborn
Replies
Hi, Mark and everyone!
Here I am, staggering into the group days before it ends. Amazon assures me that I'll receive your book by Thursday, Mark, so with a bit of speed reading, I'll catch up by month's end. (Though the topic seems to demand more than speed reading.) I'm also going to read everyone's comments, which should be easier to accomplish. The Blues facinate me because they are so archetypal and carry one to one's depths. I look forward to this chance to immerse myself, if even for such a short time.
Sandy Nathan
Author of Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money, which was January's Book Club selection.
just received my copy as well! started reading it last night can the discussion continue beyond the month in this spot?
I'm assuming that continuing the discussion depends upon our willingness to keep participating, Mark's availability, and how our continuing into next month meshes with the way the web site works. I'm game. How about it, Mark? Bonnie? Can you add another discussion thread to the website? Have 2 discussions in Sept.?
I've had a great time reading all the comments and working my way through a few of the YouTube offerings. (What did we do before YouTube? It's amazing how such a banal instrument can serve the cause of enlightenment.)
I was charmed and enthralled by the Howlin' Wolf video. "They're ecstatic," I said to my husband. "Look at them." I've seen that type of movement in meditation halls for many years.
I'm going to continue watching the videos. Here is my offering from YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBTy5mmKn2M This is Native American musician/speaker/artist/teacher Bill Miller singing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. He's ecstatic as he sings this. I find this the most exquisitely beautiful, painful rendering possible.
I first came into contact with Bill Miller's music in a western store in Solvang CA in the 1990s. One song made me a fan. He's won 3 Grammies and I don't know what all else. Bill leads a spiritual retreat in Tennessee's wilderness which I went to for three years. I think they just had it last weekend. Amazing experience. He is one of the most powerful spiritual presences I have met. Anything he sings is wonderful. Just get on YouTube and search for Bill Miller. Here are a few:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAxUVOZ3B5E Here's Bill singing Blessing Wind. Any of his spiritual songs, which means all of them, come directly from his inner journey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnktDYOt-zs All Along the Watchtower, which he sings partially in his language, Mohican. He's Mohican/German. "No, they didn't get us all," he said at a concert.
Well, I've gotten carried away. But let me tell you a story and then I'll sign off. I'm working on the sequel to my novel Numenon, which is the story of a great Native shaman meeting the richest man in the world, a Silicon Valley billionaire. I needed a prologue; I needed a message from Grandfather, the shaman, to take people to his state.
And I didn't have it. I hadn't been meditating. I was slacking. But I needed to write that introduction.
I got on Amazon and listened to the free samples of one of Bill's albums. It popped me into such an elevated state that I wrote that initial chapter in minutes. Bingo. That's what I like.
Oh, one more. Here's Bill singing Ghost Dance, one of his big hits. It comes from a visionary experience. It's about Wounded Knee. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdg2sVB0XU8
Hi Sandy and Bob - I'd be happy to keep the discussion going a few more weeks if Bonnie is open to it. The next discussion will open under a different heading - although we would want to be considerate and avoid drawing energy away from Elizabeth Clark-Stern's Soul Stories discussion.
Sandy - amazing stuff from Bill Miller. I became familiar with Bill through his first major label release The Red Road. He's such a wonderful performer but also has such an amalgam of styles. You can really hear the blues influences on Blessing Wind. In some ways he serves the same function as the griot in West African culture - telling the stories of the tribe in song - especially evident in Ghost Dance. It also such a parallel to the emergence of the blues from trauma, enslavement, and oppression - as Bill similarly talks about writing Ghost Dance out of his reaction to seeing photographs of seeing photographs of the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1890. Another instance of the capacity of creativity and expression to transform suffering, grief, and pain - giving us the capacity to bear up under the weight. Obviously, the fact that it became a big hit for Miller suggests that many people - Native Americans and others - felt connected to the experiences Bill is singing about - i.e. the emergence of a unitary reality field, just as the blues does.
In some ways, Bill's approach to songs reminds me somewhat of a contemporary Colorado bluesman - Otis Taylor - who moves back an forth between songs addressing individual concerns (as most blues songs do) and songs which address collective issues/experiences. It's the collective experience of African slavery that Otis sings about in the following song Ten Million Slaves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0w7pLQ-nA8
I thought we might move back to the history of the blues briefly. The early influences of the blues originate in West Africa, transported to America by African slaves. In West Africa there is a term, griot, which is used to refer to a tribal singer but also refers to a tribe's archive of musical stories which preserve the tribe's history and culture. The blues carries on this tradition of musical lore with timeless songs that are continuously remade because of the emotional depth and wisdom that they possess. The griot singer commonly accompanied himself on an instrument referred to as a halam or, in other African dialects, the banjo. In the video excerpt below we can hear the monotone drone of their one stringed instruments which remains an important characteristic of Delta blues. Also present are the call and response patterns between singers that
became a common characteristic of the African-American church.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQMFN-whbEU
Barry - that would be great. A colleague of mine was just recommending your book just this week. I sent you a friend contact this site - where we can exchange addresses.
Authentic, indigenous ritual follows the pattern most familiar to us in Haitian Voodoo rites: the community creates the container, invokes the deities and then gets out of the way. Tribal people know that they cannot control which spirits will enter, or what mood they might be in. If Dionysus arrives, he may want to lie with his female admirers, or he may want to wreck havoc among those who have not offered the proper sacrifices. This is a fundamental difference between Earth-based paganism and centralized, hierarchical religion.
We westerners are absolute novices (hopefully with the best intentions) at these spiritual technologies.
Perhaps the Congolese man perceived that someone other than Jesus had arrived, or perhaps the intensity of the event reminded him of other events where things hadn't gone according to plan. I would have loved to know what he was thinking.
Hi Barry,Thanks for your insightful reply. I suspected that was part of the reason for my friend's reaction. However, he is not educated in a Western style and remains quite close to his roots having only recently emigrated. I felt his reaction was rather one of fear, perhaps based on his actual experiences of voodoo ritual, therefore his desire to distance himself from the trance state.
Ahhhh..... Now THIS is why I LOVE Depth Psychology Alliance! You guys deserve to know each others' work...and so many more of us..... Hope you both follow up.
Hi Muriel - It's possible that your Congolese friend identified as a "modern" person whose values had "evolved" beyond those of his "primitive" ancestors or family members. To such a person, who had jettisoned all connection to his indigenous past, the African-American church experience may well have evoked parts of himself that he'd have preferred not to look at.
In another example, Malidoma Some´, the shaman and teacher of ritual from Burkina Faso (quoted a number of times in my book), has related that when he wears his traditional African costume, his western-educated brother will not speak to him.
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