The everyday life of the Blues

By Celena E. Kusch

It is not often that scholars “wail out a Blues riff” on guitar or sing a little something from Bessie Smith’s repertoire to illustrate a point in their scholarly arguments, but at Penn State’s International Conference on The Blues Tradition: Memory, Criticism and Pedagogy such easy interplay between performance, criticism, philosophy and art was nothing new. Blues performers and audiences have long recognized the role of Blues as an analytical and educational genre. The international group of scholars and performers who gathered at the conference to exchange ideas about that tradition were just following suit.

The conference offered more than 40 academic presentations by scholars in such areas as history, literature, African American studies, music, anthropology and education, as well as daily performances by such well-known Blues artists as veteran Delta Bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards. The Blues Tradition was one of the first academic conferences held in the newly renovated Hetzel Union Building (HUB)/Robeson Cultural Center. With nearly 100 participants, the program provided an opportunity for distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss their research on central debates within the study of the Blues while integrating the perspectives of the artists themselves.

According to Dr. Clyde Woods, assistant professor of African and African American studies and chair of the Blues Tradition conference, such connections are necessary to bring “the voices” of everyday life into African American studies.

“The Blues itself is a university,” he added. “Blues performers are professors and philosophers who are educating people about the art of survival and the emotions and experiences they face in their everyday lives. It is important to expand our study of the Blues in order to better take the lives of the people seriously.”

In fact, it was his research on economic and social issues facing people in the Mississippi Delta area that led him to develop this conference on the Blues.

“Most people experience the Blues in clubs or on a Saturday radio show, but in the Delta, the Blues is part of the everyday experience down there,” he said. While working on Arrested Development: Race, Power and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta, Woods explained, “I found that there was historical material about slavery and the Reconstruction era on the one hand and literature on the Blues on the other. But the literature on the Blues never mentioned the historical material, and vice versa. I started asking what the relationship is between the Blues and civil rights, and I found that there were not many answers. The Blues needs to be brought into social theory and philosophy. One goal of the conference was to discuss the Blues in a new way.”

Dean Susan Welch of the College of the Liberal Arts praised the conference for bringing participants together across disciplinary boundaries “to celebrate, learn about and learn from one of America’s unique cultural traditions, one that has traveled around the world.” Woods added that many of the participants and speakers at the conference were meeting for the first time.

“People who work on the Blues are often stuck in different disciplines,” he noted. “There hasn’t been this kind of large conference in a long time. There was one in Belgium years ago and one is held in Arkansas every year, but the focus there is on literature. This conference worked to break down the barriers between performers, audiences, critics and scholars in order to discuss and study the impact of the Blues on tradition and history, as well as our current society.”

Conference panels reflected this wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary impact. The first day covered the evolution of the Blues, Blues scholarship and African American communities during the 20th century. The second day revolved around Blues critical debates in the areas of social theory, Blues women, authenticity in the face of multiple audiences and the role of the Blues in nonmusical forms of expression. The final day’s panels addressed Blues education and pedagogy, ethnic considerations and the future of the Blues tradition and criticism.

According to Woods, greater discussion and research into these conference themes will help to recover the Blues “from those who view it as solely a musical form or solely a dead issue.”

Echoing Woods’ call for a new critical view of the Blues, keynote speaker Dr. Daphne Duval Harrison, professor emerita of Africana studies at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, pointed out that a failure to recognize the social and political context of the Blues has historically led to negative criticism.

“Spirituals and the Blues have both been criticized for their repetition, but that criticism comes out of a lack of knowledge of the criteria for evaluating African music,” she said. “In African music, the melody is subordinate to the words, allowing the artist to adapt each performance to the current circumstances. In both Blues and work songs, humor masks drudgery. Double entendre in the lyrics serves as the means of control and subversion of the political order around them.”

In her historical view of the Blues tradition, Harrison called the Blues performer “the people’s representative in exposing injustice, poverty and other forms of oppression.” She offered Blues songs “Give Me My Payback Time” and the children’s game “Way Down Yonder in the Brickyard” as examples of the way the Blues becomes part of everyday life while revealing its harsh realities — here that African Americans were working for no pay.

Other speakers discussed the continued relevance of the Blues in addressing the social and political crises of today and tomorrow. Michael Rauhut of Humboldt University in Berlin, for example, presented evidence of the subversive power of the Blues in Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In a similar vein, Dr. John Bardi, lecturer in philosophy at Penn State Mont Alto, explored the conjunction between the musical structure of the Blues and its political potential. Using the examples of Japanese Blues bands, Green Party rallies in England and contemporary collections of Tibetan Tantric Enlightenment music, Bardi argued that throughout the world, musicians of many different backgrounds “meet in the Blues.” He suggested that the open structure of the Blues — where there is both a predictable structure and space for the entire range of notes to enter the music — should be examined as a positive political metaphor for the future in an increasingly diverse world.

If the diverse backgrounds of conference participants are any indication, the Blues certainly seems to be reaching across national boundaries already. Participants came from such countries as Finland, Germany and France, as well as from all regions of the United States.

Woods commented that the international character of the conference led to a productive re-examination of Blues criticism and scholarship in the United States. In her presentation, Lauri Vakeva of the University of Oulu, Finland, described a Finnish graduate program in music that offers a five-year emphasis on African American music.

“You can’t get that in the United States,” Woods explained.

“It really made us all recognize how far behind we are in appreciating our own music and appreciating not just the musicians but their communities, as well. These musicians are really coming out of communities and showing back to their communities what they learn,” he added.

One important goal of the conference was to explore the role of the Blues in giving back to communities through the schools. Like Vakeva, a number of speakers presented examples of successful outcomes from incorporating the Blues at the high school and college level. Presenters from the Blues in the Schools program also talked about integrating the Blues into education at an early age and about how that early exposure to the Blues had made significant changes in the students’ lives.

For Woods, such positive outcomes of Blues exposure come as no surprise.

“What I learned from my brief conversations with “Honeyboy” Edwards was that he still sees himself as a student,” Woods reflected. “He is still studying people and learning from them at age 85. These artists are concerned about teaching and learning, and they serve as a role model for any student to realize the importance of lifelong learning.”

In order to preserve the scholarly work disseminated through the conference, a number of conference products will be produced, including the publication of conference papers in book form. In addition, the conference was filmed for publication in a CD, along with music, performances and other scholarly texts. Future plans also include cross-genre publications in conjunction with conferences on jazz and hip-hop in Penn State’s African American Tradition conference series, sponsored by the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies. Dr. Bernard Bell, professor of English at Penn State, will direct these projects.

The Blues Tradition conference was sponsored by the College of the Liberal Arts, the Department of African and African American Studies and the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies. Additional support came from Penn State Outreach and Cooperative Extension’s Program Innovation Fund.

Woods credited the efforts and enthusiasm of a number of Penn Staters in making the conference a success, including Dr. Deborah F. Atwater, head of the Department of African and African American Studies; Dr. Robert Edwards, director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies; Melissa Beidler, conference planner, Conferences and Institutes; and Professor Jerry Zolten of Penn State Altoona, who facilitated the appearance by “Honeyboy” Edwards and provided a display of materials related to the Blues in the HUB/Robeson Cultural Center. Woods also emphasized the important role of undergraduate Candace Langley, whose work “shows that Penn State undergrads can make a real contribution to research and to developing conferences.”

An outreach program of the College of the Liberal Arts and the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies

Penn State supporters of the Blues Tradition conference are, from left, Dr. Clyde Woods, assistant professor of African and African American studies and chair of the conference; Dr. Deborah F. Atwater, head of the Department of African and African American Studies; Dr. Robert Edwards, director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies; and Dr. Susan Welch, dean of the College of the Liberal Arts.

Dr. Wayne Goins (left), professor of music at Kansas State University; Dr. Deborah F. Atwater, head of the Department of African and African American Studies at Penn State; and Dr. John Bardi, lecturer in philosophy at Penn State Mont Alto, discuss African American musical traditions at the Blues Tradition conference. Like Bardi and Goins, many of the scholarly presenters are also involved in their communities as artists, performers and producers. For example, Bardi offers a music education program on cable television in the Gettysburg area, and Dr. Thomas Hennessey of Fayetteville State University hosts a weekly Blues program on NPR out of Washington, D.C.

Dr. Daphne Duval Harrison, professor emerita of Africana studies at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, was recognized by Dr. Clyde Woods during the Blues Tradition conference as a hero in Blues criticism. She was one of the first to study Blues women as shapers of history. In “And Out Came the Blues,” her keynote address at the conference, she traced African and African American vocal techniques across continents and times to show the complex cultural heritage of the Blues. “I show these examples so that you can make aural and intellectual connections between what the music has done over time and space.”

Recognizing exemplary outreach teaching, research and service This Penn State faculty member is sharing research with individuals, organizations and communities to make life better:
	Dr. Ann Marie Major   Assistant Professor of Advertising   College of Communications   Penn State University Park Dr. Les E. Lanyon  Professor of Soil Fertility   College of Agricultural Sciences   Penn State University Park
Dr. Les E. Lanyon and Dr. Ann Marie Major worked on an interdisciplinary outreach effort as part of the Keystone 21 Project: The Environmental Quality Initiative, a collaborative project of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, Penn State, Rodale Institute and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. An issue facing Pennsylvania farmers is the runoff from their farmsteads affecting the water quality of streams, rivers, lakes and estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay. Using education and research, Lanyon’s Cooperative Extension work has focused on helping Pennsylvania dairy farmers prevent pollution and protect water quality without compromising farm profitability or milk production. Major and the students enrolled in her senior-level public and community relations course worked to promote and evaluate the new concept of eco-labeling of food products. She and her students, with help from the staff of the Environmental Quality Initiative, designed presentations and educational programs, conducted focus groups and developed in-store surveys in support of the initial test market of an eco-labeled milk carton. Chesapeake Milk is now being test-marketed in grocery stores located in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. The collaboration between the two faculty members has helped encourage farmers to maintain environmentally sound practices without losing profits and provided a means for consumers who value water quality to work with farmers who share their concerns. Major’s students helped support this effort while learning about actual social and environmental issues affecting the region.