Instead of comments related to the Verse of the Day, we are going to look at the “Color of the Day” for September 25, 2016, which has been designated as “Prostate Cancer Awareness Day,” and in recognition of that observance, supporters are encouraged to wear blue—light blue. In thinking about blue as a color, I recall a multi-media presentation that highlighted various shades of blue, as expressions of “the blues”–the African American musical and poetic form. Here is an excerpt from the presentation that seeks to find an answer to this question: “Just what is the blues?”
As part of the oral tradition, the musical form is composed in a minor chord that is marked by melancholy, sadness, disappointment, disillusionment. They are often sung slowly but not always. The tragic flavor is often laced with humor and irony with an underside of happiness or pleasure. Ralph Ellison offers this penetrating definition of this evocative musical form:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger the jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolations of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.
As we learn more about the Blues, we find a whole range of emotions expressed in musically. Just as the color blue has wide variety of shades, so does the blues in terms of their intensity. Kandinsky, the noted philosopher and artist, comments about the color blue and its various shades:
Blue is the typical heavenly color: deep, inner, supernatural, peaceful. The ultimate feeling it creates is rest. The more intense it is, the more it calls us to the open sky, and demands purity and transcendence. Light blue is like a flute, a darker blue a cello, a still a darker the double bass, and the darkest an organ. When it darkens to black, it evokes a profound grief. Sinking toward black, it has the overtone of a mourning that is not human.
Included in the presentation were a number of poems connected to the subject, including “All Blues,” a poetic expression of my impressions of the blues, as inspired by one of the paintings of the late Terrance Corbett, who painted a massive mural in shades of blue inspired by the music of the blues.
All Blues
pitch-black blue
bluer than
the toothless gums
of a black blues singer
screamin
moanin bout
how his baby
done left him
Mm mmm soon one mornin
blues come fallin down
Mm mmm soon one mornin
blues come fallin down
Said they fell so heavy
Till it caused my heart to moan
can no anodyne soothe
this state of mind
can no elixir elevate
this mood indigo
midnight blue
this thick
blue funk rises
etherizes
swirls, eddies
makes folk giddy
done stunk up
they minds
with stinkin thinkin
suffocatin in self-pity
dazed, crazy from
this haze of blue funk
I got these blues
Reason I’m not satisfied
I got these blues
Reason I’m not satisfied
That’s the reason why
I stole away and cried
freight-train blue
trailin down the track
lonesome echoes blowin
from a steel blue
dark harmonica
navy blue notes
wailin for Miles
from that long gone train
Took my baby to meet the mornin train
Took my baby to meet the mornin train
And the blues come down Baby like showers of rai
pastel blue
lighter, brighter
subtle twinge
of powder blue
like Betty Lou
hop-scotchin
up to sky blue
and back
peacock blue
glimmers, shimmering
like the lining
of Queen Esther’s
royal blue robe,
penetrates this thick
blue upon blueness
in a lighter vein
bright sea-blue
swirling like burgundy blue
new wine
springing from an
inner fountain blue
from the soul of a man
who swapped his low-down blues
for pure turquoise joys
Trouble in mind I’m blue
but I won’t be blue always
Trouble in mind I’m blue
but I won’t be blue always
cause the sun’s gonna shine
in my front door someday
just what is the blues?
is it somethin you get
a show nuff dis ease
like de rheumatiz
or de rockin pneumonia
and de boogie-woogie flu
or is it like Lightnin said
somethin you just borned with
whatsonever it is
somethin gets a holt of you
dis mornin dis evenin soooo blue
just what is the blues?
maybe Lady Day summed it up
when she said,
“The blues is everything.”
The sea, the sky, the blues and I know all colors;
sea and sky, the blues and I know all colors:
all shades all hues all blues
Accompanying the poem is music of the unmistakable Miles Davis, performing “All Blues” from the album “Kind of Blue” recorded in 1959.
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