Blue Music / Blue Songs / Blues

September 28, 2017 10:26 AM

This may be the most circular exposition on The Blues I've ever read. This two-part essay is entitled The Curses, which may give you pause in re The Blues, but eventually it will begin to make sense. The first part of Part I is some discussion of when the descriptor "blue" began to be attached to a certain type of music, and traces it back to the 1870s. The rest of Part I uses a colorful character by the name of Rev. Columbus Sylvester Clifton Bragg, an early music critic, to be the linchpin for the history of the Blues.

Part II of The Curses 2 begins to focus on Paul Dresser, who has a connection to Bragg, and who wrote an influential Blues song called "The Curse."

The saga is just chock-a-block full of drama, betrayal, meanness, death, and catharsis. The author keeps us circling and circling until it resolves it.

And there's a side story about Bragg's monumental Ahjah, a theatrical presentation about the Ethiopes and the Bible, which has nothing to do with the Blues.

posted by MovableBookLady (6 comments total)

Bookmarked for later. Thanks, this looks great!
posted by rocket88 at 10:50 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

I saw "most circular exposition" and "the blues" and I knew this would be something by John Jeremiah Sullivan.
posted by neroli at 12:27 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

There's also a recording of the song here, by the author and a friend.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:48 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

There's also a recording of the song here, by the author and a friend.

Oh! Thank you. A heart-rending performance.
posted by ovvl at 6:16 PM on September 28, 2017

I thought I would add the short text around the song The Curse that nebulawindphone found above: The Experience of the Curse. Thanks.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:27 PM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Thank you for such a rich, almost overwhelming post, I am a better person in numerous ways for your having brought this to MeFi. I just loved loved everything about this, the layers, the detective work, the song itself, the history, the writing, the humanity.
posted by riverlife at 8:56 AM on September 29, 2017 [3 favorites]