How many readers know that this is “The Year of the Blues”? This may sound like a statement formulated by liberals and progressives to describe the current state of political affairs. But actually it’s a congressional proclamation. “The blues is a national historic treasure,” the proclamation states. In this, the current 108th Congress got at least one thing right, or almost right. For the blues is more than history; it’s a living tradition, still contemporary as a musical form and an emotional expression.

Beginning on Sunday, September 28, PBS is presenting a seven part series on the blues. I’ve not seen any previews, but according to the web site www.pbs.org/theblues, the series will explore the roots of the blues in West Africa and the Mississippi Delta cotton fields and then go into the blues in all its forms: field hollers, country blues, story-telling blues, boogie-woogie and piano blues, electrified urban blues, it’s influence on jazz, rhythm and blues, rock ‘n’ roll, the music of the world.

The blues began as an African-American response to the racial segregation, economic discrimination and political terrorism of American apartheid. In its purist, most primitive folk-art form, the blues is simply three musical phrases: a three-chord harmonic progression in a twelve-bar structure. The blues can be played fast or slow and can express the gamut of human emotions: sadness, joy, hope, despair, love, heartbreak, pain, angst, happiness, pleasure and all the nuanced complications in between.

The blues followed the path of black migration from the Southern cotton fields to the urban North. In Chicago, Louis Armstrong transformed it into a virtuoso art. In Kansas City, Count Basie translated it into big band swing. More musically sophisticated musicians turned it into bebop and modern jazz. Jazz improvisers have always drawn their inspiration from two musical streams: Tin Pan Alley pop standards and the structure and expressiveness of the twelve-bar blues. These streams flow in and out of one another. (Billie Holiday sang standards as if they were the blues). As jazz became an art music, the folk-forms of the blues evolved through rhythm and blues into rock ‘n’ roll.

To talk about the blues is to talk about race. It’s only post-1960s that blues became a respectable music. Except when a white like George Gershwin composed a rhapsody out of it, the blues were considered low-down and dirty, unfit for the ears of upright people. The black middle-class, struggling to assimilate into white society, tended to turn their back on the blues; it reminded them too much of their difficult past. It was white musicologists who rediscovered and revived the careers and reputations of many legendary blues performers of the past.

In Boston in the early 1960s I went with a nerdy blues-loving, record-collecting friend to hear Lightnin’ Hopkins sing his country blues in Dunster House at Harvard. The student audience, all white, was enthralled. After the concert, my friend, Alan Wilson, asked “Mr. Hopkins” if he could play the harmonica for him. Lightnin’ nodded, and Alan began wailing the blues. I was astonished and Lightnin’ was charmed. I then lost track of Alan Wilson. Years later, I picked up an album of Canned Heat, a great white blues band, and there was Alan, its lead singer and harmonica player. The great English rock bands, the Stones and even the Beatles when they put their mind to it, all drew their inspiration from black blues musicians like Hopkins, Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and many others.

There is another aspect of the blues rarely covered. Country music, with its roots in the white redneck culture of the segregated South, is steeped in the black blues tradition (as now acknowledged in Nashville’s Country Music Hall of Fame). The “singing brakeman” Jimmy Rodgers broke the racial barrier by insisting that Louis Armstrong accompany him on his “Blue Yodel #9.” Johnny Cash cut his first record for Sun Records because owner Sam Phillips thought he sounded like bluesman “Howlin’ Wolf.” And Phillips recorded Elvis Presley because Elvis was a white guy who “sounded black”; that is, he sang the blues. Well might it be said that Elvis died of the blues because Colonel Tom Parker, his con-man manager, gave him shlock pop tunes to perform and would not let him develop his genius for singing the blues.

Hank Williams, the poet laureate of country music, learned the blues from a black bluesman named Teetot (Rufe Payne). “All the musical training I ever had came from” Teetot, Williams said. Williams’ music is steeped in the blues, but he isn’t represented in the PBS series. There isn’t a more despairing blues than Williams’ blues waltz, ”I’m So Lonesome I Can Cry,” which begins:

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill.
He sounds too blue to fly.
The midnight train is whining low.
I’m so lonesome I could cry.
-- © Fred Rose Music, 1949

Hank Williams was born with a spinal defect that caused him pain all of his life. He treated it with drugs and alcohol and died at 29 as a result of that mixture. The last word of the above stanza always sounds to my ear as “die.”

Black blues rarely wallow in that kind of self-pity. Black survival, as a people, was dependent on resilience, and that’s reflected in black blues. Life is tough, but it’s going to get better; it can’t get any worse.

There’s a healing, positive, therapeutic power in the blues that helps to explain its timelessness and universality. There’s no room in the blues for emotional denial or macho posturing. Expressing one’s troubles and getting it out in the open is a prerequisite for change, personal and societal.

When I’m down, despairing of the future, I sing the blues.

Trouble in mind, I’m blue,
but I won’t be blue always.
You know, the sun’s gonna shine in my backdoor someday.
---traditional country blues, sung by Lightnin’ Hopkins and others.

Marty Jezer writes from Brattleboro, Vermont and welcomes comments at mjez@sover.net

###