Can the blues set you free? It’s hard to say, because, as you have probably heard from a reliable source whose play lists favor classic rock, “writing about music is like singing about architecture.” Meaning that it’s kind of pointless, because there are no words for what music makes you feel — you can explain the immediate physical sensations induced by these sounds in terms of waves and frequencies, but it’s near impossible to provide a verbal transcript of the desires and the memories those sensations become when inscribed on your body.
Turns out that the line is a venerable commonplace first recorded in 1918, and that the original enlists a different set of skills: “it’s like dancing about architecture.” But this old twist makes the admonition all the more prohibitive, because dance music is of course the lowest common denominator in the affective universe we ascribe to music as such (see: American Bandstand, disco, Soul Train). The audiences in opera houses and concert halls know better than to get up and dance.
Their stillness is remarkable. To be sure, music is the most cerebral, most immaterial of media; but it engages the body more easily and effectively than any other medium, mainly because the order and pitch of certain notes (as structured by rhythm) will evoke desire or anxiety, thus expectations of satisfaction, release, or resolution, in listeners. At least they will in the post-Renaissance western world, where tonal-harmonic music became the cultural norm, and where such expectations could, therefore, be sonically produced as the occasion required — typically by treating dissonance as both deviation from and promise of equilibrium, of musical resolution.
So the mind/body problem that has shaped western philosophy from its founding moments is near at hand in the interpretation of music, regardless of how, or whether, listeners are equipped to express and explain their responses. And with that philosophical problem, that dissonance, comes the tentative resolution we call our selves; for these phenomena derive immediately, necessarily, from our everyday enactment of the relation between mind and body, for example in how we respond to inchoate desires, by repressing, deferring, or gratifying them. In reminding us quite forcefully of our bodies, music tends to unsettle this relation, and therefore to disrupt the continuity of our selves. So it makes us reach for memories — the mostly futile search we conduct in words and images — as the means of restoring and maintaining that continuity.
These proximities are what the brilliant musicologist Susan McClary had in mind when she declared that “music is always a political activity, and to inhibit criticism of its effects for any reason is likewise a political act.” This dictum sounds no less extreme (or Aristotelian) than the feminist slogan that made it possible — the personal is political — but it makes perfect sense because political theory and practice are answers to the question of what each of us, our selves, can demand of others, and what they owe us, in view of what we assume these selves are able to do. McClary’s dictum is corroborated, in any case, by reference to the production and reception of “A Complete Unknown” and “Sinners,” two recent movies that tell political stories with music, and vice versa.
Both films are based loosely on non-fiction books about music, which, because they’re about music, read more like literary criticism than conventional historical narratives. James Mangold’s story of Dylan’s departure from the folk scene is a transposition of Elijah Wald, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties (2015) and Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005). Ryan Coogler’s romance of African-American life in the Jim Crow South is a response to the call of Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans (1970), The Hero and the Blues (1972), and Stompin’ the Blues (1976).
I call them political stories because both are “period pieces,” movies that strive to capture the look and feel of a specific historical moment, and do so artfully, by use of cinematic devices that place us fore and aft, in the richness and depth of classic Hollywood film, but from the sonic and scenic distance permitted by digital innovations since then. That simultaneous removal from and recreation of the “original” settings (the 1960s, the 1930s) are what makes these movies political acts — these directors aren’t pretending that their narratives comprehend the past as such, they’re rewriting or restaging parts of it, and thus doing what modern historians have always done, revising the past by retelling it with contemporary questions and methods in mind.
“Dylan” himself makes that purpose his own when the character “Sylvie,” Suzie Rotolo’s screen double, presses him on the details of his origins — he declares that people invent such things as they get along with telling the story of their lives. Consciously or not, film directors are narrators who assume the truth of that declaration. They know that doing history, revising the past, is always a political activity; for by creating origin stories, and by situating us in real or imagined time, where social purposes and cultural consequences can be depicted, the narrator is identifying the sources of human agency (“subjectivity”), individual and collective, while also acknowledging impediments to it.
The intrinsically political nature of treating history as a story is announced in the subtitles of the two books that inform “A Complete Unknown.” The keywords here are “split” and “crossroads,” which suggest divisions of time or in space, sequences or patterns that, once upon a time, permitted choices. Wald conjures a before and after, a temporal movement that made a lasting difference, while Marcus creates an abiding moment, using a resonant spatial metaphor that is both map and territory — the times have changed, or they’re still-a-changin.’ The movie asks us to look at it both ways.
Of course the script and the production design remind us of where we are in time, back then. But Mangold locates us more precisely in the past by discursive, almost unnoticeable devices. The political context of the 60s — the Cuban missile crisis, CORE’s freedom riders, the March on Washington of August 1963, the assassination of JFK three months later — is established obliquely, in passing remarks early on, but mostly by watching television out of the corner of the eyes of the cast, or rather listening with them to Walter Cronkite while their (and our) attention wanders around the set. The past becomes a more palpable, more insistent presence through cutting-edge technical means: the soft, rounded, twilight colors achieved through the deep focus of classical Hollywood movies are modeled here by using a laser to convert digital, then analog stock to a visual artifice that “takes on all the qualities of film,” as Phedon Papamichael, the cinematographer, explains the process. (Autumn Dural Akapaw, the cinematographer of “Sinners,” used comparable techniques to achieve the same classic Hollywood effect.)
These devices work. The movie feels as old as the studied innocence and political piety embodied in the characterization of Pete Seeger, the man who, as Woody Guthrie’s stand-in and consiglieri, represents the folk movement that allowed Bobby Zimmerman, the Little Richard impersonator from Hibbing, Minnesota, to reinvent himself as Bob Dylan the roots musician in Greenwich Village, ca. 1961. That this folk movement was convened by the Old Left as a dimension of the CP’s Popular Front is announced at the outset, in the courtroom scene where Pete answers charges of contempt brought by HUAC with an offer to play a song on his trusty banjo. The new dynastic relation between Seeger and Dylan — and thus the fraught relation between the hierarchical Old and the centrifugal New Lefts — is enunciated in the following scenes, when Bobby shows up in Woody Guthrie’s sanitorium room where Seeger serves as translator, and then on the drive to Pete’s rustic upstate cabin when, with the dashboard radio’s help, Bob summarizes his musical origins and tastes as very mixed bags.
Seeger plays the translator, the mediator, all along, introducing and explaining and excusing Bobby as necessary in a weary, sing-song voice, until that fateful night at the Newport Folk Festival, July 24, 1965, when Pete finally stands up as well as in for the dead language of the folkie past, and threatens to pull the plug on Dylan’s electrified transition — or return — to the blues idiom he knew better than any other. The politics of this movie are compressed in that moment, in that gesture to the blues, the music that keeps time running backward and forward, toward the nation conceived in slavery but dedicated nonetheless to the proposition that, someday, all men and women will know each other as equals.
And the present? How do we know, without thinking about it, that the movie locates us in the here and now even as it immerses us in the world elsewhere that is the past of 60 years ago? How can viewers accredit their simultaneous presence in two time zones? The answer is in the artificiality of the apparatus itself, in the removal from real waking time that you experience and accept as soon as you enter the theater or click “play” on the remote — or open the book. On the page, that removal is accomplished, and your suspension of disbelief begins, as soon as the author gets beyond the archive by adding something, anything, to the assembled evidence; indeed the use of the past tense is usually enough to place the reader in the presence of the author, at a distance from what the author is explaining.
But stories explain without argument. And so the point is that, whether you are watching or reading, and whether you are absorbing fiction or non-fiction, the mere presence of a narrative form, on the screen or on the page, is enough to convince you that you are not there, on the scene as it unfolds according to the narrator, but are rather in the place and time you know as the present.
Wald constantly reaffirms this “stereophonic” principle. He writes from what he perceives (and makes us feel) as a great temporal distance from the quasi-political skirmishes he describes, as if he’s a military historian who specializes in the wars of antiquity. He also turns himself into a Seeger-like figure, becoming a sounding board that compiles but won’t assess the contemporaneous yet incommensurable narratives of the various transitions he meticulously records — from the folk movement to the moment of rock ‘n roll, from the latter to “rock,” a more serious and non-harmonic music, from sound check to Dylan’s set at Newport in 1965, from Newport to Woodstock, etc. — all the while measuring the loss of blood and treasure to the commercial mainstream where the siphons and spigots of pop music are permanent fixtures. Every moment in the book is a before or an after, an either/or.
Marcus violates this principle, as Dylan has consistently tried to, making us experience his music as a “space” that exceeds or ignores any articulation of time, becoming a topological map of American history in its entirety — or, as I would prefer to put it, a geographical eschatology that turns Huck Finn’s territory, the fabled frontier, inside out, importing all the social questions that the uncivilized margin of civilization was supposed to export, once upon a time. “The unmapped country prophesied in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ is still there,” Marcus concludes, “hanging in the air as a territory of danger and flight, abandonment and discovery, truth and lie,” but in 2005 it seemed to him to be coming from another country, because he sensed that “no one has been there in years.” He hears the song as an epic fairy tale that was then and is now in search of lost time, “the thing itself, the past.” [pp. 19, 201, 91]
Notice the phrase, “in the air.” This is a way of saying that music transports us differently than watching and reading, because even though it’s invisible, sound moves through space at a certain speed, then causes eardrums to vibrate, and in doing so it reorganizes the hierarchy of the larger sensorium, subordinating the eye to the ear by mobilizing the rest of the body, forcing the mind to catch up, or just leaving it behind. Under the spell of music, time doesn’t stand still, it dilates, unfolds, expands; for when memory’s archive becomes the body, chronology stops making sense. To paraphrase Jacques Attali, music makes the simultaneity of different times — or different stages of history — audible, sometimes so effectively that you can dance to it.
In this narrative key, we’re always already catching up to Dylan not because his music is timeless but because that six-minute recording of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which hit the charts the day before his electric set at Newport, both recollected the past and predicted the future, and this we know — we can hear and feel it in our bones — because subsequent generations of listeners and performers keep responding to it, transforming it by repetition, rearrangement, or re-composition, according to their own needs and dialects. The extant “translations” of the song observe no linguistic, generic, or geographical limits. They range from reggae (Bob Marley) to Italian hip-hop (the Mystery Tramps). “A Complete Unknown,” the movie, is the latest and most elaborate of the responses to Dylan’s epic fairytale, which lingers or languishes according to the state of the nation it calls to attention.
So the question is not whether but how the music continues to transport us in this way. “A Complete Unknown” offers that the fateful night in Newport was a turning point — an ending and a beginning, a new direction but along an old and beaten path — because Dylan deliberately grounded his music in the blues idiom, a gesture made explicit by the presence of Mike Bloomfield, the guitarist from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Plugging in was more incidental than important.
The blues was and is an American music in the very strong sense that it is a non-European idiom born of the minor pentatonic scale, the root of all Celtic and most African musics, which became the vernacular music of the American South when the Scots-Irish of the Piedmont and the West Africans of the Tidewater encountered each other as citizens and slaves — as people who could hear themselves in the sounds made by the Other. It is essential to understand this encounter if we want to understand the blues, and our American selves. For in the same strong sense that makes the US appear an exception to the rules that regulate the historical development of other nations, the blues idiom both drew and defied the original color line that defined the limits of freedom in America. It came of age in the early 20th century as the most pliable but also most durable of the new dance musics that would erase the “bachelor culture” of the saloons and eclipse the sacrificial sounds coming from houses of worship, even the gospel coming from black churches.
The blues idiom exceeded its regional origins as a result of diaspora — the exodus from the Jim Crow South brought almost a million black people to northern cities between 1910 and 1930, and produced cultural enclaves like Harlem and the South Side almost overnight. Meanwhile, the new electrified means of mechanical reproduction which enabled the second industrial revolution allowed recordings from the Black Belt and the Delta to be distributed nationwide in the late 1920s and 30s. Many of these recordings were “race records,” to be sure, but when played on the phonograph or heard on the radio, they made the accents of race inaudible: when the jug bands start up, it’s hard to tell whether the singers are black or white, and the blues idiom has no obvious color. These records composed the aural tradition that was preserved on late-night radio out of Shreveport, Louisiana, and that was compressed in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). They became the canonical pieces to which the young Bobby Zimmerman listened and from which the mature Bob Dylan kept learning.
In the US, the blues revival of the late 1950s was animated by the folk ideal of authenticity — the white curators who featured Son House at Newport assumed that an old man bent over his acoustic guitar was the real Delta deal. At the same moment, however, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who also performed at Newport in the early 60s, were playing electric guitars backed by bands in Chicago dance clubs, and were recording with studio musicians at Chess. Meanwhile, the urban blues, Chicago-style, was being discovered and revised in the UK, where authenticity also meant ensembles, electricity, and audiences that didn’t sit still or stay quiet as if they had been ushered into concert halls. By the 1960s, in short, the blues idiom was spoken in several distinct dialects that were identifiable by nation as well as region, style, and instrumentation, and that were redrawing the color line even as they continued to build on the black aesthetic specific to the best of American culture.
By “black aesthetic” I don’t mean something invented only or owned exclusively by black folk. The blues idiom as such is anything but monochromatic. Instead I mean the attitude of artists who treat the color line as the malleable relation between black and white — as both a boundary and a portal, something that demands a choice, but not a choice between black and white, and that also requires amplification, but not the mere addition of black to white, or vice versa. The attitude of the black aesthetic is an essentially comedic one that works in two ways. On the one hand, this attitude treats good and evil as moments on a continuum rather than the terms of an either/or choice, and demonstrates accordingly that these attributes of individual character and aspects of social life are evenly distributed, as it were, within individuals and across society. On the other hand, the comedic attitude of the black aesthetic contains the tragedy of American history, in both the inclusive and exclusive senses of that verb. The blues is the epitome of this aesthetic because it acknowledges the ubiquity of evil, and it reckons with tragedy but does not succumb to it.
As Albert Murray insists, the goal of the music is to stomp the blue devils, not to let them prevail. In the lectures entitled The Hero and the Blues, he explains:
The whole point of the blues idiom lyric is to state the facts of life. Not unlike ancient tragedy, it would have the people for whom it is composed and performed confront, acknowledge, and proceed in spite of, and even in terms of, the ugliness and meanness inherent in the human condition. . . . Not by rendering capitulation tolerable, however, and certainly not by consoling those who would compromise their integrity, but — in its orientation to continuity in the face of adversity and absurdity — the blues idiom lyric is entirely consistent with the folklore and wisdom underlying the rugged endurance of the black American.
Just so, I would say. But the music itself is a crucial dimension of a comedic itinerary because it transforms the blues lyric by repetition — the opening statement of the tragic facts isn’t left untouched, it’s revised in and by retrospect. The second verse of the traditional 12-bar blues repeats the first verbatim while simultaneously altering its meaning by changing the pitch, moving from the I chord (the tonic) to the IV (the subdominant), for example from E to A, and the third verse then responds to the call of the first two with new words and another pitch, the V chord (the dominant), B. The basic harmonic structure of the I-IV-V-I chord progression — the sound of post-Renaissance western music — is preserved, but it, too, is transformed by instrumental “fills” or solos that, by drawing on the minor pentatonic and bending the notes of that scale, remind the listener of the dissonant Others who came from the margins of modern European empires.
Ryan Coogler opens “Sinners” with a visual and voice-over reminder of those margins, where Irish fiddlers and West African griots made their music — it’s a swirling tapestry that comes to life in the later juke joint scenes, where it’s fleshed out by figures from both pre- and post-colonial times, playing instruments, wearing costumes, dancing sinuously, joyfully, even subway style, to music that sounds familiar to everyone in the scene, and to us, because it sounds vaguely like the blues. At this moment, the simultaneity of different times or stages of history becomes visible as well as audible. The voice-over makes it explicit, invoking “spirits from the past and the future.”
Except that by that time, October 15, 1932, in the Deep South, those Celtic musicians have been recast as hillbillies, or what is the same thing, vampires who play banjo and guitar. They’re already immortal, but they want — as vampires, they need — to be invited into the musical space where Sammy the preacher’s son has been playing what he thinks is Charlie Patton’s old National Steel guitar, what we in the audience know as the acoustic instrument that was present at the creation of both Delta blues and “country music” (the metallic resonators that amplified this guitar’s sound informed Les Paul’s experiments with solid-body electrification in the 1930s and 40s, and meanwhile led toward the laptop Dobro). These were the miscegenated musics that people heard on the radio and through their phonographs in the late 1920s and into the 30s.
But the white folks want to take possession of what Sammy’s got — “I want your stories, and I want your songs,” says Remmick, the vampire leader, which means he must have the bluesman’s soul — and they’ll kill all the black folk in sight to make their claim to his talent effective. And nobody here does get out alive, except Preacher Boy Sammy, who splits Remmick’s skull with the steel top of that guitar and makes his way to Chicago, there to end his career playing a Stratocaster in a tiny, dingy blues club.
That is where the movie ends, too, on the night of October 16, 1992, with a visit to the club from Stack, one of the twin brothers who, having fought in the Great War, became Chicago gangsters, made (or stole) a fortune, and returned to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to buy an old sawmill from the local Klan leader and open that juke joint. The other brother, Smoke, is long gone, having saved Sammy from Remmick, then died taking methodical, military-style vengeance on the Klansmen who of course gathered on the morning after the slaughter to reclaim the mill by force — this was, after all, the Jim Crow South, where nothing could buy a black man’s freedom, not even cash money. Shades on, Stack strides into the club with Mary the white girl (but her daddy was half black) from Clarksdale, the woman who turned him into a vampire sixty years ago, the same woman whose mother raised the twins once they’d driven their abusive father from home. He tells Sammy that Smoke made him promise to let the bluesman live out his life, to preserve the legacy of the music reborn in the Delta and electrified in the big city.
Now Smoke was the real gangster, the brother who had insisted that the juke joint’s customers pay in hard cash, not the wooden nickels the plantation owners paid the sharecroppers and hired hands who picked the cotton, which were tokens redeemable only at the landlord’s store. Stack was the realistic romantic who knew better than to expect that equivalents would be exchanged in either space — or that equality between black folk and white people could be bought by any means of exchange available in the Jim Crow South. “We was never gon’ be free,” he tells Smoke as he explains why immortality as a vampire is better than life indentured to the legal tender of white supremacy. But it was Smoke who saved Preacher Boy Sammy by delivering him both from evil and to the Devil — from the vampires, then from the law of his father as told in the gospel, and finally to the hometown of urban blues, Chicago, which was, the brothers agreed, just another plantation “with tall buildings,” a place where the jagged edges of racist exploitation had been smoothed and systemized by the law, not adjourned.
Each in his own way, then, both the brothers know there’s no escape from the bondage of life on this earth — except death. You can’t buy your way out, and taking your revenge on the white man is a suicide mission. Religious worship is another dead end, as Preacher Boy’s daddy demonstrates with his choice of insipid church music and his demand that his son “drop the guitar” and turn to God for salvation. At the hour of his certain death at the hands of Remmick, Sammy does reach for that alternative, beginning with “Our Father, who art in heaven,” but the vampire and his minions know the Lord’s Prayer as well as any Christian would — and so it becomes a chorus as the leader explains that it still brings him comfort even though the men who stole his father’s land in Ireland “forced these words upon us.”
Earlier that day, Delta Slim, the blues harp player from Clarksdale, had preached a similar sermon on the same religion in a back room of the juke joint, with Preacher Boy as his only but eager congregant. Like Remmick, he’s trying to explain the lasting, even sacred significance of a music that is proudly profane, made from sounds that are both in and of this world. “The blues wasn’t foist on us like that religion,” Slim says, eyes wide, “We brought this from home. . . . We hear our people, and we be free.”
But can the blues set you free? That is the question both movies ask. The prior question, the one Delta Slim forces on us by using the first person — “us” and “our” — is, who owns the blues? Can white people claim it as theirs, and if so, how so? By the physical violence of the vampires and the Klansmen in the Delta, by the linguistic chicanery of the lawyers in the tall buildings of the urban plantations — or, as Elvis and then Bob Dylan would have it, by “owning” but not possessing the music, by treating it as a common place, where the simultaneity of different times and the similitude of different peoples become audible?
The immortal Stack sounds like Pete Seeger the representative of authentic folk music when he visits Sammy in Chicago on October 16, 1992. “I don’t like that electric shit as much as the real,” he says, after telling Preacher Boy that he and Mary have collected all the bluesman’s records. Stack doesn’t know what the movie has made clear to the audience, that the blues is the connective tissue of a folk tradition that spans oceans and races as well as centuries: “I miss the real,” he says. Then he turns his vampire eyes on Sammy and asks, “Still got the real in you?” The next thing we see is a National Steel guitar nestled in its case. It can’t be the one Sammy used to split Remmick’s skull, but it looks old enough to be Charlie Patton’s, and it sounds just like it did on the road to Clarksdale, when Preacher Boy thought he was finally free of his father’s faith, auditioning for Stack in the passenger seat of that fancy red Model A, singing the blues.
Still, the sight and sound of that guitar also recall Corinthians 1:10-13, the bible verse Sammy had recited from memory at his father’s command right before Stack arrived to whirl him and the National Steel, a family heirloom, away from the church. The King James version goes like this: “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man, but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.”
Preacher Boy hears his way to escape the plantation in the blues. Is that what Dylan heard in Mike Bloomfield’s electric guitar, an escape from the temptation to stay the same, a release from the urge to remain faithful to his origins — did he hear in the blues the kind of freedom he needed to claim the entirety of the American experience as his own? Is that exit from the nightmare of the abiding present what James Mangold and Ryan Coogler have made audible, thus intelligible, in the most visual of media?
If so, if that is what we can hear in “Like a Rolling Stone” and see in these movies, it’s an undiscovered country, a complete unknown that is still hanging in the air, still waiting to be explored, because we haven’t been willing to reckon with the tragedy of American history long enough to hear the blues as the comedic musical form that keeps time running backward and forward, toward the nation conceived in slavery but dedicated nonetheless to the self-evident truth of the proposition that, someday, all men and women will know each other as equals. Instead we — if there is a “we, the people” left in us fractious Americans — have stubbornly indulged the temptation to silence the voices of the strangers in our midst, to close the borders between the disintegrating past and the impending future, to forget that there’s a difference between who we are and what we might become. We aren’t ready to share a dance floor with the Others of our own making.
So conceived, in view of these movies, the blues still figures as the map we need of the borderland once known as the frontier — it’s a portal to the future, but not an escape from the past. For this music would have us dwell on the atrocities carried out in the name of white supremacy, among other lost causes, not evade, ignore, or repress them. And yet it won’t let us rest easy in the repose mourning demands, or seated in a concert hall, as if the past is now dead and gone. The blues would have us redeem this past by making it usable, durable, and significant in the present, something to learn from as well as about. For it’s the music that makes us want to get up and dance with the Devil himself.