Bluesfest the day before

I’m on my last day of Fringe and getting ready to attend my first bluesfest this weekend. I didn’t really listen to blues until I started university and at the time it didn’t really take. I was mostly a rock and jazz fan at the time. Now having wandered through all the permutations of rock, asides into new classical like Glass, still a little into jazz, consumed by altcountry for a while, blues has now become a staple of my musical universe.

What I like about the blues is that it never seems to say “you aren’t refined enough, you aren’t political enough, you aren’t cool enough, you aren’t fucked up enough, you aren’t young enough”; it just says “c’mon in, the water’s fine.” Its music without attitude. And the simplicity of it, like good food means everybody can get it. I’ve always gotten off on the repetition in the lyrics. Used to think it was because they weren’t complicated ideas but over time I’ve come to realize that complicated often means shallow, and simple is often deep. And the repetition is like a mantra. “She left me and I’m hurtin’” once means what it says. A couple of more times and its saying that the leaving and the hurt are worse than words can say. The words are saying that the words aren’t enough. But they are because you get it. And there’s no other form of music that lets you both wallow in your misery and feel better all at the same time.

The other nice thing about the repetition is that as it gathers meaning it increasingly enfolds the personal specific narrative into the universal story.

Lately my favourite incongruous blues tune, in that the lyrics generate a doubletake, is B.B.King’s All Over Now where he sings “I’m going to give up living and go shopping instead”. Makes me laugh and that’s one thing I don’t usually associate with the blues. There is one other, sort of the ultimate blues, the “I’m old and I’m going to die” blues of Buddy Guy’s Done Got Old, rediculously depressing and funny all at the same time.