Bob Dylan. Photo: From Wikimedia Commons.
Bob up and down, part two: Steve Day returns to Dylan late in his career
‘All this is akin to touching the soul.’
Let me start with an introduction to the blues. Founded in a deep art, born and abused in the weight of the slave trade’s oppression, the blues is a profoundly ‘hard’ music, despite its form and structure being formally simple. ‘Hard’ as in ‘hardship’, its searing sorrow-songs, spirituals and field hollers are the soundtrack of a terrible elegy. And ‘hard’ as in ‘hard to play with any kind of authenticity’. On paper the score reads in a plain twelve-bar format – the irony being, if a musician only ‘plays the structure’ they completely fail to play the blues. One way or another, the blues and its people have suffered grave inadequacies, both in capture and release. Singing the blues without a fever is like meditating on beauty without acknowledging the ugliness of suffering. The blues is not about keys and notes, it’s nearer to pain and hunger.
