Now for that other experience that cancels out this strange, “abstract” way of living. The Negro blues songs seem to me to approach most nearly in their inner structure and function the quality of my grandmother’s living. This may seem odd inasmuch as my grandmother was ardently religious and the blues songs were blatantly secular and the singers of the blues would have certainly loathed my grandmother and my grandmother would have certainly detested them. But in most blues songs the verses have little or no relationship to one another—in the sense that there is practically no causal or logical progression—just as the items of my grandmother’s environment were not related. I quote some verses of “Dink’s Blues” from American Ballads and Folk Songs, collected by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax:

Some folks say dat de worry blues ain’ bad,

It’s de wors’ ol’ feelin’ I ever had.

Git you two three men, so one won’t worry you min’;

Don’ they keep you worried and bothered all de time?

I wish to God eas’-boun’ train would wreck,

Kill de engineer, break de fireman’s neck.

I’m gwine to de river, set down on de groun’,

Ef de blues overtake me, I’ll jump overboard and drown.

Ef trouble was money, I’d be a millioneer,

Ef trouble was money, I’d be a millioneer.

My chuck grindin’ every hole but mine,

My chuck grindin’ every hole but mine.

Come de big Kate Adam wid headlight turn down de stream,

An’ her sidewheel knockin’, “Great-God-I-been-redeemed.”

I submit that these verses certainly do not tell a story; they do not progress; in their sequence any one of the verses could be substituted for almost any other and still more verses could be improvised endlessly. Rereading them reveals nothing save an elusive and tenuous strain of melancholy running through them. The items out of which they are built are taken from widely separated sections of the American environment. They are brittle, disjointed; the amount of meaning in any one of them is so slight that one wonders how such verses could have any interest when sung. Yet they have. The meaning, however, does not reside in the verses, but in what is brought to bear upon them.

A black woman, singing the blues, will describe a rainy day, then, suddenly to the same tune and tempo, she will croon of a red pair of shoes; then, without any logical or causal connection, she will sing of how blue and lowdown she feels; the next verse may deal with a horrible murder, the next with a theft, the next with tender love, and so on. This tendency of freely juxtaposing totally unrelated images and symbols and then tying them into some overall concept, mood, feeling, is a trait of Negro thinking and feeling that has always fascinated me. I think it was this part of my grandmother’s personality that fascinated me more than anything else. The ability to tie the many floating items of her environment together into one meaningful whole was the function of her religious attitude. It seemed indicative of a certain strange need on her part.