It is the extraordinary feature of the blues that this formulaic music, as predictable and stylized an art-form as Italian opera or Kabuki, has proven to be so durable and so elastic. The blues serve nearly as the tribal aesthetic language of American popular music, seen, in fact and in fancy, as its motherlode, its baseline, its bedrock, its endowment. As Gerard Herzhaft states in the preface to his Encyclopedia of the Blues,

Jimmy Rogers and Hank Williams—big names of country—weren't they blues musicians? Don't rockabilly and rock-and-roll come from, for the most part, the black blues, as country singer and guitar player Merle Travis recognized in the mid-fifties? And isn't soul also largely inspired by the blues? Aren't rock artists, from the sixties to the present, from the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds to ZZ Top and Dire Straits, strongly influenced by the blues?

Some of what Herzhaft asserts is questionable: soul music, in good measure, was almost certainly a reaction to the blues, a supersession, not merely a derivation of them. This is not to deny the blues roots of soul, or to say that soul and R&B artists did not perform blues-derived material from time to time. But James Brown, as he stated in his autobiography, disliked the blues and saw his music as a variation of jazz, and rightly so. Younger performers like Smokey Robinson and the Motown crowd or the shapers of the Philly Sound saw blues as old-time music, stuff that represented black people's shameful past or—even worse, perhaps—their grandparents' unsophisticated musical taste. Indeed, many saw soul and R&B, especially as these art forms became entwined with youth culture and with black political aspirations of the 1960s, as a distinct break from the blues.

Nonetheless, despite being something of an overstatement, Herzhaft's assertion about the primacy of the blues in black popular dance music is substantially correct. The blues are a major portion of our great secular music tradition, "the devil's music," as black folk used to call it, in their grand Manichaean, not Christian, understanding of the world.

And the fact that we have something called the Devil's music that constitutes so much of our aesthetic vision, that speaks so deeply to our humanity in this redeemer nation of Puritan origin, says a great deal about our hard-headed Yankee commercial impulse and our acceptance of our sinful nature: one must give the devil his due in the realm where he operates, which is definitely not hell, and especially if he sells. God's will is surely done in heaven, but it can only be hoped or attempted to be done here on earth.

But the blues are not so much about praising the Devil (they have no truck with the "Satanic" posturing that certain white rock bands perform these days in an effort to gain attention by simply being shocking and vulgar) as they are about acknowledging and respecting the Devil's power as an adversary and, in a very non-Western way, as source of life-affirming reality about the nature of this life. For the blues, the problem with human beings is not that they are fundamentally evil (not a surprising view, as blues were invented by a brutally oppressed people who never wanted to exact revenge against their oppressors but wanted simply not to be oppressed), but that they are fundamentally helpless before the limitations of their own nature and the limits of both nature and society. One can rejoice in this helplessness or despair about it, but in neither case can one alter this condition, nor the fact that we are nonetheless accountable for what we do.

This is why blues were rejected by African American political radicals in the 1960s as a music of political resignation and defeat; the blues made black people seem weak. But this is not the only reason that blacks have generally abandoned the blues as an aesthetic form, that the blues have ceased to speak to them in the way they used to. The blues have become, in effect, a world music; and as they have grown to speak for humanity at large, they speak less—for that very reason—to the particular people who invented them.

The blues can be happy or sad, fast or slow, played by jazz musicians, sung with some alterations by pop singers, twanged by country and western stars; the blues can be down-home and rural, with guitar and harmonica, or uptown and urban, with brass and reeds, electrified or acoustic, folkish or hard and loud. Blues can swing, jump, shuffle, or slow-drag. The blues can be about sexual prowess or sexual defeat, about betrayal or commitment, abandonment or return, masculinity or femininity, boasting pride or stoic humility, fortune or debt, aggressive violence against fate or fatalistic resignation to it. No other music is so instantly recognizable, despite its disguises, or so permeates American cultural life in quite the way blues do.

What many who hear the blues these days fail to understand is how basically optimistic this music is, as Albert Murray so rightly points out in Stomping the Blues. "With all its pre occupation with the most disturbing aspects of life, it is something contrived specifically to be performed as entertainment. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance," writes Murray, to good effect. Human beings, the blues tell us, manage to go on despite their helplessness and even, ironically, in moments of courage or insight, forge a certain fortitude and assurance from their helplessness. The blues never challenge standard Christian ethics, and never try to negate them. In fact, blues, despite what church black folk said decades ago, seem to complement the Christian life as they express, from their thick ribaldry to their astringent theme of the existential indifference or the caprice of justice, the only mature form of secular heroism we possess.

The blues have a built-in anti-bourgeois dimension: they are not about merit. Life is not about what you de serve, the blues tell us, or what you've earned, or how you should be rewarded for your efforts. Life is about what you get or what you can get or what you can't get. As Ralph Ellison wrote in his essay on Richard Wright: "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by consolation 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." Bourgeois life is about winning and the triumph of the human spirit; the blues are about losing and the defeat of the human spirit. Bourgeois life is innocence; the blues are experience.

That is why the blues have always stood in counterpoint to the popular song of Tin Pan Alley. Popular songs have always offered a bourgeois vision of life and love, a kind of escapism where domesticity is a blessed end and sexuality and love are romanticized as a poetic sublime. The popular song is the American epithalamium, the lyric tribute to monogamy as the grand design, the nature of things.

This is not to deny that the American popular song is an impressive entity, at its best, astonishing in its accessibility and its universality. Thus, the criticism made against it by S. I. Hayakawa, most famously, and others who have followed in his wake, misses the point. Bourgeois culture is perhaps one of the most stunning products of the Enlightenment, indeed, of all of human history. It has apotheosized merit, the measure of human effort and ambition, of ability and discipline, as a way of distributing society's goods, privileges, and prestige, a way that is far more advanced, despite its obvious flaws, than any previous way we humans have gone about our business of living together.

The American popular song celebrates this, and to condemn it on the grounds of being unrealistic is simply wrong. The American popular song is an intensely realistic depiction of yearning and hope in bourgeois society. To suggest that it is hypocritical is only to level a criticism that the bourgeoisie are only too willing to concede, frankly exposing and parodying its own commercialism. The American popular song's hypocrisy is part of its power, its craft, its very understanding of itself as an expression of a culture driven, obsessed by the marketplace yet wishing desperately to escape it. Bourgeois culture is about the psychodrama of understanding human life as the distance between the legalistic act of making promises (contracts) and the ethical discipline of keeping them (vows).

The blues are an antibourgeois music, having none of the concerns of the American popular song. Domesticity is not bliss in the blues vision; monogamy is not the ultimate moral good; human commitment is never idealized but rather temporized; marketplace values are neither endorsed, denied, nor transcended. The blues do not express either a Puritan, a Catholic, or a hedonistic ethic about the good things in life. From the point of view of the blues, we are not the earth's stewards, nor are we blessed with bounty by virtue of God's goodness or by virtue of being Americans, nor are we here on this earth for any ultimate end except to die and, most importantly, to love, where and when we can, with whom ever is available. The American popular song lyrically expresses marketplace values only in a wish to transcend them, whereas the blues, as Ellison pointed out, are about the transcendence of tragedy and personal catastrophe lyrically expressed.

All of this means that the blues are often romanticized by bourgeois intellectuals because the blues seem to confront life more starkly, in a more spontaneous manner than bourgeois aesthetics and practices do. Blues are a working-class music, and it is entirely this social aspect of the blues that bourgeois intellectuals respond to in their own interpretive appropriation of a more "authentic" aesthetic and life. But blues music is not superior to the American popular song because of this; it is surely a mistake to think of the blues as more authentic than the American popular song. The blues have been as formula-ridden, as cliched, as assembly-line produced, as narrow, often as mediocre even in their heyday as the American popular song. (Indeed, it might be said that a good popular song often displays more cleverness in the lyrics and more sophistication in its chord progressions than a good blues. But a good blues is more pithy and world-weary than a good American popular song.)

What the bourgeois critic often does in praising the blues is confuse an art form, an attitude, with the behavior the art form describes. The blues, as Albert Murray said so compellingly, are about artifice as much as the American popular song. "It is precisely an artful contrivance, designed for entertainment and aesthetic gratification; and its effectiveness depends on the mastery by one means or another of the fundamentals of the craft of music in general; and a special sensitivity to the nuances of the idiom in particular." The blues are as vital as complement to the American popular song as they are to black sacred music.

But, on another level, the bourgeois intellectual who loves blues is instinctively correct: if two profound, nonliterate shifts fundamentally shaped American identity and American mission, they are, first, the African slave's transformation from pre-Christian to Christian codified in the spirituals, and, second, the African's transformation to American codified in the blues. What is valuable in the blues is how they show, through their creation and development, a group—shaped by democratic values but essentially, for so much of its history, outside the circle of democratic institutions—define itself and define democracy. The blues are a music where black folk answer the question, what does it mean to be an American, or to be not quite an American.

Both books under review here are useful, and it is good to have them available. Gerard Herzhaft is a French writer and musician, long smitten by the blues and the southern milieu from which they emerged. His Encyclopedia of the Blues not only provides brief but serviceable biographies of nearly all the major blues artists but also includes entries on geographical locations like California, Chicago, Detroit, and Memphis, as well as other musical genres that the author feels have important connections to the blues, such as soul and boogie woogie. That Herzhaft does not include jazz as one of the entries in his book under this principle is a mystery to me. Further, while he includes bio entries on Chuck Berry and Little Richard, there is no entry for Louis Armstrong, who has far more extensive and deeper connections to the blues than Little Richard and Chuck Berry combined. Similarly, Thelonious Monk, the most blatant blues-playing jazz pianist of the post–World War II era, who did the most innovative work with very traditional sounding blues lines, is not mentioned in the book at all.

The Encyclopedia of the Blues concludes with a list of blues standards as well as a list of selections of various blues artists doing virtuosic instrumental or solo work. There are many good photographs, and it is clear that the book was a labor of love for its author. On the whole, despite its shortcomings, this book is an extraordinarily rich effort of documentation.

Sandra Tooze's biography of Muddy Waters is an equally impressive effort of documentation of the life of an extraordinary musician and, from all accounts, an extraordinary, though certainly not always admirable, man. Born McKinley Morganfield on April 4, 1915, in a two-room shack outside Rolling Fork, Mississippi, the blues singer acquired the nickname Muddy as a child be cause he was always playing in mud. It was expanded by schoolchildren to Muddy Waters, and it stuck. Waters went to school only for about three years and was, in fact, illiterate, something that bothered him later in his career when he began attracting more and more white fans. Mississippi at the time of Waters's youth was not interested in educating black children, and Waters was ticketed for work on the plantation, picking cotton.

From the time he was very young, Waters always wanted attention and felt himself destined for something more than this. This feeling was not generated by anything political or even any particular resentment arising from the restricted nature of black life in Mississippi. Like many other people, of all socioeconomic backgrounds, who have gone into show business, he simply felt compelled to be a performer of some sort. "I had it in my mind," he said many years later, "even [as a child], to either play music or preach or do something that I would be known, that people would know me. I kept that on my mind. I wanted to be a known person. All of my life that's what I worked for. I wanted to be internationally known. And I worked on it, from when I was a kid up."

Waters started out playing the harmonica, then moved to slide guitar. He was influenced by Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, and Big Joe Williams, the first three the primary creators of Delta blues. He could make in a day as a musician what it would have taken him a week to make as a farm laborer. He worked in the bars and taverns and plantations in the area with small bands, and eventually became a fairly successful, if largely unknown, Delta bluesman, by the time he was a young adult.

Muddy Waters would have remained a relatively obscure figure in the history of American music had he not departed from Mississippi for Chicago in May 1943. It was in Chicago that Waters, in either 1944 or 1945, switched from acoustic to electric guitar, and it was in Chicago that he was discovered by Marshall and Phil Chess, Polish Jews who had emigrated to the United States with their parents and grew up on Chicago's South Side. The Chess brothers ran a string of black nightclubs as well as a small record label, first called Aristocrat, then Chess. From the late 1940s through the middle 1950s, Waters was to make some of the finest electric blues records in history for Chess, including "Hoochie Coochie Man," "I'm Ready," "Rolling Stone," and "Mannish Boy," all of them covered by a number of blues and rock artists over the years. Waters shaped the modern blues band as two guitars, a harmonica, piano, bass, and drums. He also introduced and promoted several musicians who became well known in their own right, including Little Walter, Otis Spann, Jimmie Rogers, Junior Wells, Big Walter Horton, and James Cotton.

What cemented Waters's reputation, after he lost his black audience in the early 1960s with the emergence of rock 'n' roll and soul, was his canonization by young British rock musicians, whose sound invaded the United States with the coming of the Beatles in 1964. This, along with the folk revival of the early 1960s, gave Waters a whole new audience, namely whites, especially young whites, and a new lease on his artistic life. He was always disappointed and even a little hurt that blacks abandoned the blues and probably never fully understood why.

Waters was a tough man, prone to carrying a gun and getting into fist-fights with his band members. He was deeply dedicated to his music and to the particular sound he had created; he was proud, neatly dressed, hard-drinking, yet sometimes overly deferential to whites (especially the Chess brothers). He was married to a string of women (whom he did not bother to divorce) and had children by several girlfriends. He was very much looked up to by the people of his profession. When he died in 1983, he was a virtual institution.

Tooze's book provides a good ac count of all of this without undue emphasis on the less savory side of Waters's life. There are several informative interviews here (though I wonder why Tooze did not interview any of Waters's wives or girlfriends). The book suffers from Tooze's inability to quote and discuss the lyrics and actual music of Waters's compositions. Probably the copyright fees were more than she and her Canadian publisher could afford. Thus, a musicological and cultural analysis of Waters's words and music is yet to be done. Nonetheless, Tooze's book is valuable and competently executed.

"It was Bessie Smith," wrote James Baldwin in "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," "through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a picanniny, and to remember the things I had heard and seen and felt. I had buried them very deep. I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that, for years, I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to being a 'nigger.'" When I was recently rereading Baldwin's essay, this passage struck me deeply. It brought to mind a party I attended, perhaps eight or nine years ago, with some of the successful black people in Saint Louis in attendance. There was music in the background the whole night, soft jazz, the latest hits of the day by Luther Vandross, Janet Jackson, and whoever else was on the hit parade at the moment: music that was forgotten as soon as the record stopped playing. During the course of the party, after several drinks had been consumed, one gentleman, a prominent local politician, became quite boisterous and started to parody a number of blues singers.

"You know, Howling Wolf used to get down on all fours and yodel like some old geechee nigger, some old plantation nigger, wailing that old country nigger shit." And he imitated Howling Wolf, then others.

"Muddy Waters come out his ugly-ass self, wearing that old, piled up process. You know, that was back in the day y'all niggers was wearing them greasy head-rags. You know, you let the white folks rename do-rags, but you know you was calling 'em head-rags. And Muddy come out there singing that shit about 'I'm a Hoochie, Coochie Man' and 'I'm a man. I spell M … A … N … ' That was all that old country nigger could spell. Then, white folks be telling you this dumb-ass shit is profound, as if they know the difference between a black man and a hole in the ground or if they give a flying f— if there is any."

Many people found this funny, but I felt uneasy about it. After all, there was something about laughing at the "nigger" that meant that I was, in effect, laughing at myself. I guess the only way to exorcise the nigger is to laugh at it, but was it fair to laugh at these men, to laugh at their art form, our art form? I liked Howling Wolf and Muddy Waters and the other men the politician made fun of, and I did not like them being held up to ridicule. I remember leaving the party right after this episode. It was not in any sort of self-righteous huff but in a sort of despair. Perhaps I was ashamed of those old blues, too, secretly. Perhaps my acceptance of them was a sign of my whiteness, my being, ironically, too assimilated. It was a very long time after that, nearly a year, before I could listen to a blues record again.

It is, alas, not so easy to live with the nigger inside oneself, as difficult as living with the child inside oneself, the demon inside oneself. So you hate what you are or what you think others think you are and you hate that you hate what you are because you have no right to deny yourself life. And what you are, what others have made as your heritage, is your life, for better and for worse. That's the blues, too, and the blues are a harsh mistress.

Gerald Early is Merle S. Kling Professor of Modern Letters and director of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.