The Blues is a Congregation...

The blues is a congregation of those who belong to Adam, who know what it means to be Adam and Eve's sons and daughters. It is also a congregation for whom the hope of Christ means redemption and freedom, the overturning and overcoming of that inherited curse. It is a congregation that sand and continues to sing of faith, hope, and love, one that tasted and continues to taste the sweetness of mercy. It is a congregation that hurls their words into the darkness, listening for a faint echo in return, a congregation waiting both patiently and actively for justice as they live in this world and as they long for the world to come. The blues is a congregation that sings on Saturday night in expectation of Sunday. - From Getting the Blues, What Blues Music Teaches Us About Suffering and Salvation by Stephen J. Nichols, pg. 171

Stormy Monday

Yeah, its storming here right now but that's not what this post is about. Have you been reading Getting the Blues by Stephen Nichols? He refers to the blues tune Stormy Monday. "....But Sunday I go to church and I kneel down to pray." Here is T-Bone Walker's rendition of Stormy Monday. It just doesn't get any better than this.

More on the Blues

As a follow up to my last post I found, as you may have, that BTW has posted a brief interview with Stephen Nichols on his new book, Getting the Blues. Nichols gets to the heart of it when he states, You don’t have to listen long to hear the notes of suffering, but you do have to listen closely to hear the tune of salvation. Some of these bluesmen were preachers. I actually dedicate the book to Charley Patton. He went back and forth from pulpit to jook joint, the old blues bars dotting the Mississippi Delta. He spent the last few weeks of his life in a virtual non-stop preaching marathon, presumably making up for what he perceived to be lost time. Patton sang a blues called “You’re Gonna Need Somebody When You Die.” The somebody he was talking about was Christ. As he puts it in another song, “Jesus is a dying bed maker.” During that preaching marathon of his, in the days before he died, he often sang a simple little chorus in the midst of preaching:

Jesus is my God,
I know his name.
His name is all my trust.
He would not put my soul to shame,
Or let my hopes be lost.

Some of these blues singers also spoke of Jesus in life and not just at death. Before he was Thomas A. Dorsey, the king of gospel, he cut blues records as Barrelhouse Tom. I argue that without his roots in the blues, without his blues sense of things, we would never have “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”--perhaps the chief of Dorsey’s many fine gifts to the church.

Read the entire interview here.

Around the Web in Sixty Seconds

A few notables from the web in the last few days:

I would dearly love to attend the Desiring God conference this year. As I'm not I'll be looking forward to the mp3's of each speaker. This year the topic is on the Power of Words. In particular, and not just because it is Driscoll delivering it, the power of harsh language. DG has put together several interviews with the speakers and BTW has listed and linked them here.

Speaking of the Desiring God folks, they have put out some fantastic Don't Waste Your Life t-shirts. My birthday is coming up shortly - I'm gonna start dropping hints.

Carl Trueman reports that Stephen Nichols' long awaited work on the blues, Getting the Blues, is now available. I've been looking forward to this for some time. Read a bit more at Brazos Press and Amazon has it a bit cheaper.

The Exiled Preacher reviews Carl Trueman's, John Owen; Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man here. I'm currently reading this and have found it an excellent and intense read.

Guitars, Harmonicas and Worship Music

Since I’ve never blogged about it many of you don’t realize I’m an amateur musician. Perhaps extremely amateur or pathetically amateur would be a better description but at least I’m not a rank beginner. :-) I play guitar and harmonica and love both instruments. For about 4 years or so I played on the worship team of my former church and enjoyed every minute of it. I miss that very much but for the time being I’m not attending a church that allows me the opportunity to play. In the meantime I practice when I can which is usually in between reading all those dusty Puritan works I go on about. I don’t know which instrument I have more of a passion for, guitar or harmonica. I play a bit of the blues, jazz and worship styles on guitar. I have three electric guitars, one acoustic and a bass guitar. I’ve most likely spread myself a little to thin to get really good at one of these or in one genre but I enjoy playing all of them nonetheless. My harmonicas number somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-100; all different brands, keys, tunings & types. For the last several years I've been the moderator of the Christian Harmonica discussion group on Yahoo where currently there is roughly 120 members and several who do at least occasionaly play on their church worship team. I don’t play harmonica as much as I once did as it has become somewhat of a “back-up” instrument to me and playing on one's own after playing with others can get to be a drag. Yet I still love the harp and have been working lately on playing in a rack with guitar.

So, hey, if you're into worship music or like to discuss music, i.e., blues, Celtic, rock or worship music, guitars or harmonicas leave a message. If you like the blues give me a listen on guitar here. The photo here is of one of my guitars which is a solid body, blond Squier '51. Its great for blues and rock.

Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs. - Psalm 150:4

The LORD was ready to save me: therefore we will sing my songs to the stringed instruments all the days of our life in the house of the LORD. - Isaiah 38:20

Lovin' the Blues

Blind Willie Johnson

As a long time lover of the blues, I found this piece at Reformation 21 engaging. Not alot of new information for someone who listens to the blues but possibly for someone who has been under the impression, like many, that the blues is the Devil's music. In The "Spirituals and the Blues," James Cone debunks the thesis that while the spirituals are church music, the blues is the Devil’s music. In some ways, as Cone readily admits, the disjuncture is legitimate. For instance, Son House was confronted with a crossroads decision: Should he take up the guitar and be a bluesman or should he pick up his Bible and be a preacher? He chose the former, but at least he sang about the latter in his song “Preachin’ Blues.” Cone quickly points out, however, how overdrawn the disjuncture is and argues instead for a symbiosis of the two. To put the matter directly, the blues wouldn’t be the blues without the spirituals. Continuing....The spirituals provided the blues artists with the musical experience out of which they could craft their art. The spirituals further provided the blues artists with the content out of which they would craft their lyrics. The spirituals were filled with hope and longing, all the while facing head on the realities of sin and the harshness of life. Faulkner titled his work on the conflicts in the Delta during the exact same decades as the birth of the blues Go Down, Moses (1942). Through the spirituals, the people of the Delta had become one with the grand story of redemption in Exodus. They had appropriated it so often that it had become their story. They also knew all too well the biblical theme of exile, a dynamic sociologists refer to as marginalization, a sterile term for oppression. Blues artists appropriated the themes of exile, bondage, and oppression (sin) against the theme of hope and promise (redemption) throughout their music. “They call it stormy Monday,” but, the song continues, “Tuesday’s just as bad, Wednesday’s even worse, Thursday’s awfully sad.” But then, “Sunday I go to church where I kneel down to pray,” adding, as if taking a line from The Book of Common Prayer, “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy on me.” The blues artists may have left the church, but the church, and especially the spirituals, hadn’t left them. They were developing a distinct theology, a theology, like their music, that was set in a minor key.

Certainly, like many things, there are the blues today that are very far removed from what this article is describing. Yet, the root of all blues (and rock) is a theology set in a minor key. Give this piece a read and listen to some blues because...The blues invites us not only to embrace the curse but also simultaneously to embrace the cross. To see the broken made whole, the lost found. We see the exile and stranger make their way back home. “I was blind, but now I see,” goes the classic. Not through some cheap happy ending, but in the identification and the defeat of all sorrow and sin in the Man of Sorrows on the cross, the most solemn minor key ever sounded in human history. In short, the blues helps us understand what theologians call redemption, all of the realities of life under the cross.