The Blues: Evil's Music?

It was the 1880s. And the old South still heard the echo of those field hollers that the American Civil War had carried like the wind. The cotton pickers hummed old tunes. One of them harangued a group of workers singing in chorus.

Already, in 1774, a white owner noted in his diary: "Their poetry is like their music, rough and uneducated." Two years later, a settler, Thomas Jefferson, wrote in his "Notes on the State Virginia": "In music, black people are generally more talented than whites, they even have a very fair ear for melody and rhythm, and some know how to invent small tunes." And that this planter, a little paternalistic but shaken by what he had heard this summer evening, would become, a few years later, president of the United States is nothing trivial.

Nina Simone, a talented singer pianist, was also a hellraiser. A troublemaker. She almost shot down a rec exec one day over some royalties dispute. I think she was aiming at his buttocks.

As an African artist, I always wondered where that violence came from watching my African-American sisters' behaviors. Contemplating over famous blues female singers -Nina is in that section- and reading "The Blues - The Devil's Musicians" by Stephane Koechlin, this thought dawn on me: what was it like to be black AND a woman in the 1880s-1900s?

Surviving chances in the Old South might have been closed to null. I mean, you could get shot on your way to fishing, swimming in the Mississippi Goddamn. Catching bullets while sipping a drink at the bar.

Way before Nina there was Bessie, living in the crazy electric atmosphere, along with the dangerous roads. One of which where Bessie Smith, early Blues' brightest star, lost her arm in a car accident. She used to punch men in cabarets, lead massive brawls and mess around with Ku Klux Klan members. She could have been saved if the hospitals she was rushed to weren't run by white people. Her rescuers lost precious time trying to find the "right" hospital. Poor Bessie died from her injuries, it was a day of September 1937.

How would I paint those women? Would I romanticize their story? Suger coating it. I'm more attracted to the drama: Bessie's demons. They used to say that the Blues was evil's music because, in my opinion, it was pain and sin delivered raw by oppressed men and women.

The story of Black people is painful. Question is: how much of a pain can a soul take before going insane?

One has to listen to the Blues to find answers.