A Blues Definition of "Cool"

Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from DeSalvo's interviews with blues musicians for her book The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu (Billboard Books, 2006).

Human beings use music to define place, community, and tribe. We secure ourselves in time and within our generation with music. Sometimes we construct a fortress of music so impenetrable to outsiders that they throw up their hands and leave us alone. Sometimes, to our surprise, we create from our pain and alienation something so compelling that people outside our little group are struck in their hearts. They drop what they are doing and stand and listen. Suddenly, they see us. We are less different than they had imagined.

I wrote about this in The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu, my "anecdotal dictionary" of blues terminology. While researching the book I learned that the blues, jazz, rock and hip hop reflect not only African musical and vocal techniques, but also African concepts about consciousness. Enslaved Yoruba from West Africa brought over the idea of coolness (itutu), for example, which they defined as the ability to connect with one's inner divinity. In American culture we express that concept when we say that someone "has got soul." To be cool is to remain generous, calm and confident as a direct result of that soul connection, no matter how dire one's circumstances become.

Africans also brought the verbal jousting that developed into hip hop; the vision of rocking, trembling, shaking divine possession as the ultimate musical experience; and a certain irreverent bawdiness. They made quite a dent in American English, too, which is packed with African retentions from "boo boo" to "zombie."

African slaves in the American colonies needed to stay cool – they had suffered a profound cultural dislocation comparable to being shipped at warp speed to another planet. A cool person is also silent unless he or she has something important to say. "His mouth is cool" (enu è tútù) is one way a Yoruba would say "He fell silent." This form of coolness – silence – became a tool slaves and their descendents used both to avoid trouble with whites and to resist their domination subtly.

The color most often used to symbolize the quality of coolness in African art is blue. Blue, the color of the unchanging sea and sky, is associated with depth and stability, wisdom, confidence and intelligence. Buddhists meditate on blue to transform anger into mirror-like wisdom. In West Africa, blue is the color of the Yoruba goddess Yemoja, "Mother of Fish," who was once the most powerful Orisha of all but lost her sovereignty over the world because of her repeated rages. Her dominion was reduced to the oceans, and over time she transformed her rages into wisdom. She is recognized as the source of life, for without water, there is none.

"I want to deliberate on this," an elder of Ipokia, capital of the Anago Yoruba, told art historian Robert Farris Thompson in Flash of the Spirit. "Beauty is a part of coolness but beauty does not have the force that character has. Beauty comes to an end. Character is forever." Ultimately, such character becomes the mystic coolness of Yemoja, and of the Buddha, Jesus and all the saints and sages who have bridged the gap between their own personalities, neuroses, and egos and their potential for divinity. "This is ashe [divine nature]," the elder said, "This is character."

In Yoruba morality, generosity is a reflection of one's coolness and is the highest quality a person can exhibit. The act of giving embodies character and perfect composure. The gods are "cooled" by libation, and other acts of propitiation. This reverence for generosity is also part of the culture of the Bakongo, who live along the Atlantic coast of Africa. Their proverb kiyaala-mooko kufwa ko means, "He who holds out his hands does not die."

Musicologist William Ferris experienced this commitment to generosity among African Americans living on the Mississippi Delta during his travels there in the 1960s. As he recounts in Blues From The Delta, one musician told him, "Next time you come, come on to my house and walk right in. If I eat a piece of bread, you eat too." Ferris noted: "Black families constantly extended their hospitality by offering to feed and house me as long as I was in their neighborhood."

Considering how African Americans were treated in Mississippi at that time, it's astonishing that this cultural value survived slavery and Jim Crow to be extended to a young white scholar wandering around the Delta looking for blues musicians. Texas blues artist Jimmie Vaughan experienced this, too: "When I was fourteen or fifteen I used to go to a black club called the Empire Ballroom in Dallas in 1965 and '66. The manager would let me stand by the back door and kinda look after me. I knew I was a white guy and they were black people but I wasn't aware of the issues. I was just digging it." That the blues spread beyond the African American community is due in part to this commitment to being cool.

When John Miller Chernoff was studying drumming in West Africa, one of his teachers said of young, inexperienced drummers, "They are not careful when they are playing. They don't cool their bodies and take their time." They had not learned yet to use silence; therefore their playing had no meaning, no power to move the soul. The teacher went on to say that sometimes, if a student overplays to an obnoxious degree, "we just hold his hand and collect his stick so that he won't play again." (From Chernoff's African Rhythm and African Sensibility)
Many flashy young blues musicians have experienced similar admonishments from elder bandleaders. "The blues contains these values," Jimmie Vaughan notes, adding "the space is as important as the notes. Because if you don't leave space, you don't allow time for the listener to feel what has been said."

Guitarist Robben Ford's blues playing is technically dazzling, yet Ford credits his ability to maintain a soulful quality despite his speed and dexterity to his youthful apprenticeship with blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon. "Jimmy Witherspoon was very proud to be a blues singer. He was the epitome of cool," Ford said of his mentor. "He always had this sly smile going on, like he had a secret that you wish you knew. You could feel some kind of vibration in the room, and you would go with his energy and his mood and pretty soon, man, the atmosphere would get thick. Which is a mutually created thing with the audience. Those guys, they understood what it meant to relate to an audience. They didn't have that element of, 'I'm a musician, I'm gonna do my thing, you can like it or not.' That's a very important element in blues. That element of communication. The artist isn't on the bandstand just for himself." That wouldn't be cool.

Coolness was tested in Africa with verbal duels that transferred here as "the dirty dozens," a verbal game in which two-line rhyming insults are shot back and forth in front of an audience. Today on the MTV show "Your Mama" you might hear a dozens battler say something like:

"Iron is iron and steel won't rust
Your mama got pussy like a Greyhound bus"

The dozens is an exhibition of emotional strength and verbal agility. Obscenities are used and opponents slander each other's families because the game is above all a test of one's cool--the first person to get angry automatically forfeits. The audience chooses the winner and spreads the word about who won. The winner can expect to be challenged to another battle before long, either by the one who lost or an up-and-comer.

Blues songs are loaded with similar taunts. In "New Dirty Dozens," Memphis Minnie warned, "Come on all you folks and start to walk. I'm fixing to start my dozens talk." She started by saying:

"Some of you womens ought to be in the can
Out on the corner stopping every man"

But she was just getting warmed up. Her next target was "old man Bill":

"He can't see but he sure can smell
Fish man pass here the other day
I done hear him say, 'Pretty mama I'm going your way"

Hip hop reflects this African tradition of toasting, boasting, woofing, capping, cracking, bagging, dissing, and snapping. The blues, and now hip hop, also reflect African bawdiness. Willie Dixon song "Wang Dang Doodle," which was a minor hit for Howlin' Wolf and a career-making smash for Koko Taylor, was based on raunchy toasts like "Dance of the Motherfucking Freaks."

The word "motherfucker" was used in English before African slaves arrived in the colonies, but much less frequently and casually than it came into use among African Americans. A more relaxed attitude toward colorful language entered American English via the cities and villages of Africa. In Nigerian village squares, for example, oral poets known as ijala still use obscene jokes and stories to get the crowd laughing and cheering.
Certain fierce witches, meanwhile, are known as "the mothers." People who believe that the mothers have cursed them seek help from healers who brandish iron staffs topped with sculpted birds. The bird represents both the mind of the healer and a warning to the mothers that he is wise to the shapes they can assume and the powers that they wield. Perhaps this has something to do with the evolution of the word "motherfucker" to describe someone tough enough to disarm the most dangerous opponent. This usage was already in effect by 1890 in "The Ballad of Stagger Lee":

He said, "Well, bartender, it's plain to see
I'm that bad motherfucker named Stagger Lee"

African Americans also kept the African emphatic use of a negative term. The Mandingo (Bambara) phrase a ka nyi ko-jugu literally translates to "It is good badly!" In Sierra Leone, the Bantu-derived word baad means really good.

Not all blues language came from Africa. Like rappers today, blues musicians adopted lingo from the local hoods. As Dr. John explains in the foreword to The Language of the Blues, "a lot of the terminology of the blues came from the lottery business [illegal gambling]. Musicians picked that shit up--like ‘going on a gig,' ‘coming out of a bag,' and calling a guitar an ‘axe.' A gig was a three-number combo, and an axe was a gun or a piece, which was carried in a bag. You might hear something like, ‘that bitch was coming out of a bag on her.' Well, in the lottery business if they was coming out of a bag, that meant they was pulling a piece on someone.

"This old numbers cat would always shoot ribs at the band about the words we used," Dr. John added. "He'd say, ‘We used all them words, you stupid suckers, and now you're twisting it all up.' Today with hip-hop, it's the same thing. Old cats passed stuff down and a lot of these kids is doing their thing with it--they kinda half ass it with something they heard from somebody in they family. I can tell some of those guys run with old timers, just from certain things they say. They ain't old enough to know that stuff, and it ain't stuff that's popular no more. But it's inspiration to them."

The church was another source of inspiration. Although Vodun, the religion of many African slaves, was forcibly stomped out in the North American colonies, its defining experience – possession by the divine – survived in the Sanctified and Pentecostal African-American churches as the idea that a musician's highest attainment is to connect with the soul's source and be so utterly possessed by this connection that it drives his or her performance.

Vodun posits a supreme creator who is an all-powerful, yet unknowable, creative force. Below this almighty God, spirit-gods called loa rule over such matters as family, love, happiness, justice, health, wealth, work, the harvest and the hunt. One's ancestors also exist in the realm of the loa and, like the loa, may also be called upon for assistance and counsel.

Vodou (the correct Haitian Creole spelling of Voodoo) is the religion that evolved in the Americas from Vodun. Today Vodou is practiced by roughly 60 million people worldwide, in Benin, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Ghana, Togo and U.S. strongholds like New Orleans.

When Vodou practitioners gather to perform a ceremony, the goal is no longer simply to propitiate the loa but to experience possession by a loa, in order to bridge the gap between one's self and the divine force. This is not the demonic possession portrayed in Hollywood voodoo flicks. The chanting, drumming, singing, and dancing of Vodou ceremonies are efforts to reach a heightened state of consciousness akin to becoming "filled with the Holy Ghost" in the Pentacostal Christian tradition.

Ultimately, the Vodou practitioner seeks the holy experience of union with nzambi, or God, just as the Buddhist seeks nirvana and the yogi reaches for samadhi, divine bliss.

The Vodou priest or priestess attempts to invoke the loa to descend the centerpost of the hounfour (temple) and possess or "mount" members of the congregation. A loa will only ride the body of a worshipper who is prepared to attain a state of ecstatic union with the divine. The morality implicit in this is stated in the Haitian proverb, "Great gods cannot ride little horses."

Calling down the spirit morphed in early African-American churches into a high-spirited shuffle dance called a ring shout. Worshippers shuffled around a centerpiece of some kind – usually a table – singing and clapping. This use of "shout" has been traced to the Bambara word saut (the Bambara are from The Republic of Mali in West Africa). Scholars believe the Bambara saut is identical to the Arabic word saut, which describes the circumambulations pilgrims make around the Kaaba, the large granite cube in the center of the Sacred Mosque of Mecca (Al Masjid Al-Haram) that is the most holy site in Islam. When Muslims kneel and face East to pray, they are turning toward the Kaaba.

In church, the deacon's job was to whip the parishioners into a frenzy. When the congregation reached that peak, "when the songs were yelled and sung and the hands were clapped and the sweat was pouring and people were testifying, fainting, speaking in tongues, being at least transported and often saved, which meant to be overwhelmed by the Holy Ghost--that was called rocking the church," as Michael Ventura wrote in his important essay on black culture and rock music, "Hear That Long Snake Moan."

By the 1920s, gospel singers in the South still used "rocking" to mean reaching spiritual rapture, but it had taken on a sexual connotation as well. To rock meant for lovers to keep the rhythmic action of intercourse steady, slow, and under control, so that the man could make love for a long time without ejaculating. As Frank Stokes sang in "Blues in D" in 1927:

"Take me in your arms and rock me good and slow
So I can take my time and do my work everywhere I go"

Meanwhile, blues singers in Kansas City shouted over their bands, bearing down into their diaphragms the way gospel soloists did to be heard over the choir. Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing "first were heard literally screaming over the crashing rhythm sections and blaring brass sections that were characteristic of the southwestern bands," Le Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka) wrote in Blues People. The radio beamed the new shouting blues all over black America. The style was taken up by country blues singers like Muddy Waters and T-Bone Walker, who had moved to Chicago and started electrified bands. Meanwhile, sophisticated shouters like B.B. King and Jimmy Witherspoon emerged to lead the charge toward R&B and rock 'n' roll, ready to take the potent aesthetic and spiritual ideas of their enslaved ancestors worldwide.

Photo of Muddy Waters in 1975 is by Joseph A. Rosen and is used by permission. Joe received the prestigious "Keeping the Blues Alive in Photography and Art Award" in 2002. The award is presented by the Blues Foundation to an artist who has "made a significant contribution to the Blues world." http://www.josepharosen.com