Rather than go on and on I’m going to post a couple sort of academic links. Yeah, I read this sort of stuff when I’m web surfing. I don’t necessarily take in every word and paragraph my first look.
Elegy - in trying to figure out whether the word “lament” has changed I stumbled on this page.
I certainly didn't follow most of this link.. especially the techical part which was (pun apropo) greek to me indeed. Still I did understand quite a few paragraphs .
http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=Artic...12&mn=3989
My thoughts were:
- The blues seems to be something that has reoccurred in human history.
- The ideas of applying rhythmic conventions seemed a little close to what I was trying to point to in chord resolves.
- Songs of lament/mourning developed a form that was later extended to songs not so clearly about lament even if drawing on those over tones - boy that sounds like the idea of what “blues” is
Quote:At first sight, the two senses of the word elegos and its derivatives seem
unrelated to each other, since many examples of ancient Greek songs or poems composed in
the elegiac couplets of elegy seem to have nothing to do with the singing of sad and
mournful songs. A closer look at the surviving evidence, however, may help undo such an
initial impression. Although there is currently no consensus in the scholarly world of
classical studies about the origins of elegy, an argument can be made that elegy
evolved from traditions of singing songs of lament.
Ok if that link seemed really academic this next one is a step beyond. I don’t expect many people will even look at it. I didn’t read it terribly carefully and can’t speak to the sweep of it but many sentences got to what I was trying to think of. I had a liberal arts education which while some time ago, I have some memory of general approaches the referenced philopshers.
I’m just linking it because it’s sort of associated with the ideas I had about generation’s shifts in social context can also change how people approach the same words. (from the url on the link I'm sure if I got too far into other chapters of the book I'd disagree with a lot they said later)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky...gotsky.htm
If I were to go anywhere with the thoughts that a quick look at that stimulate it’s that when people “don’t get” what I might hear or say about blues, it could very well be that their perception of the world around them makes any “point” or “nuances” meaningless … there is nothing to “get” for them.. not a matter of them not “getting” it. How can you get something that isn’t part of your thinking ? Yet, maybe if they listen to enough old blues long enough their thinking might start wrapping around that viewpoint.
Trying to relate this to Idol and or Haley:
Something struck me wrong about Joshua ledet’s take on so many of the songs he did. Even his gospel influenced numbers seemed to be missing the same thing. I didn’t feel like he was “getting” the songs in the way I “got” them … but who am I to say my perspective is right.
Still there are a great many (but a minority) of artists that can go where I think the music was supposed to go. They seem to be the ones that particularly admire Haley and vice versa.
Thoughts on blues in a kind of anthropological way
