by Gregg Johns

Created on: January 04, 2009   Last Updated: January 08, 2009

The blues are no more doomed than the human experience or the need for antidepressant meds. It transcends time and place and is a part of all us from our unique perspectives. This artform is an expression of loss, disappointment, suffering, and triumph. American Blues, with roots in African folk music and spirituals, pulled together faith, community, and expression of suffering during the Slavery and sharecropper eras of African-Americans. One cannot truly appreciate the sense of desolation and despair expressed in the roots of this artform without driving through the Mississippi Delta on Highways 61, 1, and 84. It is easy to envision solitary figures with acoustic guitars and bottlenecks or Mississippi Saxophones (harmonicas for the uninformed) blowing off steam after a long hot day in the fields. Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King are just a few who took hard times and turned them into triumph.

The driving rhythmic backbeat of the blues, the harmonic progressions, and lyrical phrasings have contributed elements to so many other forms or modern music: Country, Jazz, Rock, Soul and all of their subgenres. These infectious elements have shaped and continue to influence music on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as more exotic areas of the world. Just look at the more recent popularity of jam bands such as Phish, Blues Traveler, Allman Brothers, Derek Trucks Band, Grateful Dead, Widespread Panic, and North Mississippi Allstars, which have taken traditional elements near the close of the 20th century and into the 21st. Look at the continued appeal of artists such as Keb 'Mo, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Bobby Rush, etc. who continue to draw crowds. Blues naysayers should also check out the frequent occurence of incidental music in a plethora of popular dramatic television programs and box office hits.

To truly envision the future of the blues, one must also look back at the dim and distant past. The music of Greek tragedies and ancient ballads contain the emotional expression or loss, despair, growth, and ascension. The requiums of the great composers, not to mention the dramatic expression in operas, are examples of artistic expression of the human condition. The blues are part of our collective unconscious. They will find a creative outlet in the future whether using the elements we now define as blues or new ones. Creative research teaches us that creative products tend to combine multiple existing elements and combine them in a new way. Whether the blues continue to draw from the mediums of its current palette or add new ones, this creative artform is here to stay!

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