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THE HANDSTAND |
NOVEMBER 2003 |
Hood Notes on the blues What Could Not Be Said By John Burl Smithİ2003 For most early blues men and women, the blues was coded lyrics disguised to hide what could not be said. The oppressive slave culture created a whole array of unspoken understandings and coded expressions. Southern life was a series of convenient lies by whites, while life for blacks hung on their capricious whims. Slave masters exercised the power of life and death. After the Civil War, nothing changed, except blacks had to provide for themselves. Moreover, to keep power and land in the hands of whites, black codes were instituted across the South. Courts and the law forced blacks back onto plantations as sharecroppers or into jails as vagrants. Either way, blacks still worked like slaves. Robbed of their pay and freedom, they had to bite their tongues. Those who spoke up and complained were lynched and their families suffered. Blues songs are metaphors and allegories that represent real life. For example, The Joe Turner Blues reflected the fact that the 13th Amendment defines which individuals can legally be held as slaves. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crimes whereof the party shall have been convicted, shall exist within the United States." According to Sonny Boy Williamson, a singer in Memphis whorehouses during the 1920s and 30s, the Joe Turner blues told of the thousands of faceless and nameless black men lured by promises of work or shanghaied out of whorehouses and carried to Mississippi. Once there, they were sentenced to chain gangs all over the delta. The lyrics told their wives, "Joe Turner has come and their men were gone." That would make anyone sing the blues. Blues allowed blacks to express anguish, pain, sorrow, despair, rage and love in veiled statements. An authentic expression arising out of genuine needs, today's generation sing the blues on its terms. Recognizing the blues paradox, conscious hip hop/spoken artists like Yohannes Sharriff (The Cosmic Possibilities of Father Time) embrace their blues connection to Africa. They see no reason to hold back, bite their tongues or speak in code about such real issues as the 3/5 Compromise, Bush v Gore, one-person-one-vote, institutionalized racism, the death penalty, the number of blacks in prison, poverty, the Patriot Act, injustice, unjust wars and AIDS. Up-front and in-your-face-with-the-truth, spoken word artists are using technology to tell the world our story. Their goal is to replace hearsay or word-of-mouth with research driven dialogue. Battling for the hearts and minds of black children, conscious artists are clearly articulating the importance of our ties to the Mississippi delta and African ancestry. History Chain Gang: Convict Labor "Slavery is being practiced by the system under the color of law.... Slavery 400 years ago, slavery today; it's the same thing, but with a new name. They're making millions and millions of dollars enslaving blacks, poor whites, and others--people who don't even know they're being railroaded." --Political Prisoner Ruchell Magee After the Civil War, large numbers of individuals, especially blacks, were subjected to involuntary servitude. Slave Codes that defined black rights prior to the Civil War were replaced with Black Codes, which made living while black a crime. Blacks were rounded up and imprisoned for simple acts from standing on street corners to being out at night. Prisoners were leased to plantation owners and private enterprise. The chain gang was one of the most popular penal practices. Used primarily in the South, inmates that worked outdoors were chained together to prevent escape. Shackled, whipped and routinely subjected to other brutalities, inmate rehabilitation was not a consideration. Much like death penalty advocates today, chain gang proponents paid lip service to the notion that hard labor and harsh treatment deterred crime. Publication of Robert E. Burns' I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and release of the 1932 film based on his book exposed the harsh realities of the chain gang. With rising unemployment of the Great Depression, an era of reform led to the eventual abolition of the chain gang nationwide by the 1950s. Prisoners continued to work primarily for government and non-profit agencies. This trend changed during the 1990s with the "war on crime." Even with reductions in crime, Justice Department statistics show the US has the world's highest incarceration rate. Blacks, poor whites and others are overly represented in US prisons. Even the chain gang and the lucrative practice of exploiting convict labor for private enterprise are back. (Sources: www.trouparchives.org and www.prisonactivist.org) Published on The Dish. Joe
Turner
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