Willie Dixon made sense ~ Malinda Words

I have heard of the blues. I’ve heard of jazz. I’ve heard of rap. I can recognize rap. I remember someone saying, perhaps in a song, something along the following lines: ‘Rap music is not black music, it is the latest black music.’ And I remember someone else telling me that most music genres in North America were the creations of black artists.

And I remember what an Ethiopian artist in a restaurant in Boston had to say by way of an educational interlude. If I remember right, the name of the restaurant was ‘Asmara’ which is now the capital of Eritrea. Back then, it was part of Ethiopia. There’s politics in the name, but I didn’t know that then. The artist didn’t get into it either. He spoke of his instrument. The krar or krar-harp, a five or six stringed bowl shaped lyre. ‘This is what the guitar evolved from,’ he said. I would later learn about ‘Black Athena’ the three volume treatise on the Afroasiatic roots of the so-called ‘classical civilization’ written by Martin Bernal.

I digress.

I know very little about music. I wouldn’t be able to distinguish jazz from the blues. Naturally, I didn’t know that there was a thing called ‘Chicago Blues.’ I didn’t know of William James Dixon (1915-1992). I didn’t know that quite apart from being a musician, vocalist, arranger and record producer, he is also known as one of the most prolific songwriters of his time who, as Wikipedia has it, ‘next to Muddy Waters, is the most influential person shaping the post World War II sound of the Chicago Blues.’ I didn’t know that he received a Grammy and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

I didn’t know about Huddie Leadbetter either; Huddie, from whom my friend Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta states ‘[he] learned that if we gonna say something, we shouldn't waste people's time.’ Kris posted the following lines from Huddie’s ‘Bourgeois Blues’:

Yes, Washington's a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around
Home of the brave, land of the free
I don't wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Yes, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
I'm gonna spread the news all around

Well, I didn’t know about Willie Dixon and I didn’t know that he was jailed by the US government for refusing to go to war against Korea. In 1983 he released what is probably the most radical song he’s penned. It was titled ‘It don’t make sense if you can’t make peace.’

You have made great planes to span the skies
You gave sight to the blind with other men's eyes
You even made submarines stay submerged for weeks
But it don't make sense you can't make peace
You take one man's heart and make another man live
You even go to the moon and come back thrilled
Why you can crush any country in a matter of weeks
But it don't make sense you can't make peace...

That was 37 years ago. This song is not talked of much. Wikipedia doesn’t mention it. Wikipedia doesn’t mention that he was jailed and as such doesn’t have to say why he was jailed. Useful information source, but then again, it just goes to show that bourgeois town spreads convenient news for the most part and that we got to counter it by telling the other side of the story. The bad news about stuff; for example the fact that the difference between fascism and capitalism is that the latter is dressed better, powdered and frilled. The same monster underneath.

There’s history and there’s ‘hiddenstory.’ Had Kris not mentioned Huddie and Willie (and Elizabeth Cotton: ‘Freight train, freight train, run so fast…Please don't tell what train I'm on…They won't know what route I'm going….'), I wouldn’t have known about Chicago Blues. I wouldn’t have known about the kind of radicalism these artists demonstrated in life choices and words. Indeed, I may have forgotten ‘Black Athena,’ Martin Bernal and that artist in an Eritrean restaurant in Boston.

24 October 2020

Willie Dixon made sense

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